The Israeli government is slated to meet today to ratify the recently-announced cease-fire deal with Hamas, despite mixed messages from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on implementation and resistance from some of his most extreme ministers. For its part, Hamas remains committed to the cease-fire agreement, and has reportedly urged president-elect Donald Trump to pressure Israel to honor its initial commitment. Pressure is what had been missing from Joe Biden’s approach.

The framework of the deal is nearly identical to the cease-fire agreement Biden presented from May. At the time, Biden stated that Israel had initiated the proposal, but Netanyahu dismissed it as a “nonstarter” the next day. Netanyahu then derailed negotiations by introducing new demands, such as the permanent occupation of Gaza’s border with Egypt, which appeared to be aimed solely at undermining the deal. Negotiations over a cease-fire and hostage release stalled thereafter. The fact that the agreement announced Wednesday is nearly identical to the one proposed in May suggests that Israel has since abandoned some of the key demands that previously sabotaged the deal.

What changed? As far as U.S. actions are concerned, Biden and Trump both credited themselves for the diplomatic breakthrough, and are now jockeying for the greater share of it. “I laid out the precise contours of this plan on May 31, 2024,” Biden declared in a statement. “My diplomacy never ceased… to get this done.” That’s true, but Netanyahu publicly rebuffed the plan, embarrassing the administration. Yet, when presented with a nearly identical proposal seven months later by Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, Netanyahu agreed to it.

Achieving the current breakthrough did not require Trump’s election but rather a change in course from the policy Biden enacted and Vice President Kamala Harris endorsed on the campaign trail.

The difference was Trump’s willingness to pressure Netanyahu—pressure Netayahu knows he is better off not to resist. Arab officials reportedly told The Times of Israel that Trump’s envoy “swayed Netanyahu more in one meeting than Biden did all year.” While Netanyahu brushed off Biden, Trump “bulldozed” him into accepting the deal, according to Haaretz. A diplomat familiar with the negotiations told The Washington Post that Trump’s intervention was “the first time there has been real pressure on the Israeli side to accept a deal.” Former Democratic Congressman Tom Malinowski acknowledged this dynamic, writing, “This was Biden’s deal… but he couldn’t have done it without Trump.” Malinowski credited the breakthrough to Trump’s blunt warning that the war must end by January 20, contrasting this with Biden’s reluctance to exercise similar leverage.

The Biden administration pretended it was powerless to shape Israel’s behavior over the last year. For instance, in February, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller claimed, “There is a mistaken belief that the United States is able to dictate other countries’ sovereign decisions.” Meanwhile, the administration was sending Israel new weapons shipments every 36 hours, on average. These shipments empowered Netanyahu’s government to reject cease-fire agreements and pursue its preferred course of action instead, namely, continuing its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

Without the unprecedented levels of military aid approved by Biden, Israel’s war machine would have ground to a halt. Retired Israeli General Yitzhak Brik underscored this, stating, “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs—it’s all from the U.S. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.” Instead of forcing Israel to accept a cease-fire, the Biden administration spent tens of billions in U.S. taxpayer dollars incentivizing Netanyahu not to. Achieving the current breakthrough did not require Trump’s election but rather a change in course from the policy Biden enacted and Vice President Kamala Harris endorsed on the campaign trail.

The path forward is clear: Trump must sustain pressure on Israel. Without it, the massacres that have continued even after the cease-fire announcement are likely to persist. If Trump’s administration fails to maintain this pressure, Netanyahu’s statement from last month may become a grim reality: “If there is a deal—and I hope there will be—Israel will return to fighting afterward. There is no point in pretending otherwise because returning to fighting is needed to complete the goals of the war.”

Fortunately, the United States holds immense leverage over Israel. It is crucial to question whether the Trump administration will use it effectively to ensure the cease-fire progresses past its initial stages and leads to a lasting cease-fire, one that involves the unconditional release of hostages and political prisoners, a total Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, and implementation of security and reconstruction efforts needed to allow Gazans to return home.

This piece was co-published with the International Policy Journal.

Today, the Supreme Court upheld Congress’s wrongheaded decision to ban TikTok in a unanimous decision. The ban on TikTok is set to take effect on Sunday January 19, 2025.

Ahead of this misguided ruling, 15 racial justice nonprofits submitted an emergency filing to the Supreme Court, explaining how the TikTok ban violates the rights of 170 million U.S. users and echoes a disgraceful history of anti-Asian racism.

It is no secret that our government wrongfully uses “national security” as a weapon against Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. Stop AAPI Hate’s research highlights how the government routinely scapegoats our communities for economic downturns, public health crises, and national security threats—often without any evidence.

When our government engages in anti-Asian racial profiling and biased enforcement, it encourages everyday people to do the same.

In the case of TikTok, the government claims that a ban is necessary to protect U.S. national security against China. However, the government also filed an affidavit in open court, signed by a senior U.S. national security official, stating there is “no information” that China had ever tried to use TikTok for nefarious purposes in the United States.

In other words, what Congress is telling the world is that being a person or company that simply has origins in Asia is enough to be labeled a national security threat—no evidence required.

That is racial profiling, plain and simple. And it is an affront to the Constitution.

It is disappointing, though unsurprising, that our government is targeting Asian American communities solely because of our race and national origins. Since our nation’s founding, our government has repeatedly trampled on the rights of Asians, Asian Americans, and other minority groups by relying on so-called “national security” concerns as a basis for outright racial discrimination.

Take, for example, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Japanese American incarceration during World War II, and government-sanctioned racial profiling and surveillance of innocent Muslim communities following the 9/11 attacks. More recently, we saw the China Initiative, a Department of Justice operation from 2018 to 2022 that unjustly targeted Chinese and Chinese American academics, ruined careers and livelihoods, and chilled scientific research.

Every time the government insisted that such laws or programs targeting Asian Americans were necessary, it reinforced the pernicious “perpetual foreigner” stereotype or the idea that all Asian people in America are inherently suspicious and disloyal to the United States based on our ancestry, skin color, or religious faith.

Those laws and programs were based on fearmongering and scapegoating. All three branches of government—the president, Congress, and the Supreme Court—eventually admitted that Japanese American incarceration violated the Constitution. Both the House and the Senate officially apologized for the Chinese Exclusion Act and other discriminatory laws. And the DOJ eventually shut down the China Initiative, acknowledging it perpetuated a discriminatory double standard against people with any ties to China, though President-elect Donald Trump wants to revive it.

Our government never seems to learn and instead continues to pass laws motivated by anti-Asian prejudice, like this TikTok ban.

The TikTok ban has real human costs. The ban will silence 170 million U.S. users, including communities like ours that rely on TikTok to build solidarity, share valuable information, practice their faith, and engage in free expression.

But what worries us even more is how the TikTok ban fuels hateful rhetoric and actions against Asian Americans. It is clear that Congress targeted TikTok because the company is Chinese. Other social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube collect vast amounts of user data and have had major privacy and security issues—yet the government is not applying the same level of scrutiny on those companies.

When our government engages in anti-Asian racial profiling and biased enforcement, it encourages everyday people to do the same. We saw this exact ripple effect of hate during the Covid-19 pandemic.

At the start of the pandemic, then-President Trump spewed racist, anti-Asian rhetoric blaming Chinese people for the virus, fueling a torrent of hate against AAPI communities. In fact, from 2020 to 2022, Stop AAPI Hate received over 2,000 reports of hate acts in which offenders mimicked Trump’s language. His rhetoric emboldened people to spit racist vitriol at our community members as we shopped for groceries, dropped our kids off at school, and took the bus to work. They shouted that we were diseased and told us to go back to our country. Since our founding in March 2020, we have received over 12,000 reports of anti-AAPI hate acts from across the country—and we know racism and discrimination increase when politicians target our communities.

That’s why AAPI communities must tell our leaders that we disagree with the TikTok ban. This decision is not only an affront to our civil liberties and free speech, it is also an affront to our safety. We need leaders who will defend our rights and safety—not strip it away.

It’s the beginning of the end for corporate control of health care. The tsunami of outrage against the health insurance industry in the wake of the shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, can propel an urgent, unyielding demand for the removal of profit from healthcare and the enactment of a universal, national single payer system. That is, if the single payer, Medicare for All, national health service movement can summon the vision and audacity to rise to the occasion.

The myth, promoted by health care think tanks and policy experts, that people in the United States are satisfied with their health insurance was exploded in the social media rage unleashed in the aftermath of the killing of the United Healthcare CEO.

Fifteen years after the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), our failing health care system is exposed with all its cruel denials, debt, disease, despair and death at the hands of the investor-owned companies for whom patients are merely pawns for the extraction of profit.

Health care in the United States comes in dead last when rated against comparable countries. The U. S. is at the bottom in overall performance, health outcomes, equity, access to care, and efficiency. As the Commonwealth Fund states: “In fulfilling this fundamental obligation [the ability to keep people healthy], the U. S. continues to fail.”

Health care in the United States comes in dead last when rated against comparable countries.

People in the United States aren’t living to their full potential. Already, the U.S. is 55th in life expectancy, behind Panama, Albania, and Czechia, and will fall in its global rankings by 2050 if the country continues the same trajectory. Years of life are lost to a health care system that serves profit over the value of life.

Our maternal mortality rate would be the shame of many of the poorest nations. In 2020, U.S. maternal mortality rate was higher than in Gaza. In 2022, there were 22 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in the U.S. This is easily double, and often triple, the mortality rate in peer nations, which can be as low as 5 per 100,000 live births. Black mortality rate is criminally worse: 49.5 per 100,000 live births.

Over one million in the U.S. died in the pandemic, a rate much higher than other nations. Over 330,000 of the pandemic deaths in the U.S. were avoidable. Those lives could have been saved had we had a healthcare system that left no one with inadequate coverage.

Cancer patients must not only fight for their lives but also for the economic survival of their families. The newest treatments with so much hope are beyond the means of those who have insurance policies but no great wealth. About 30% of cancer survivors report lasting financial hardship.

Cancer patients are nearly 5 times more likely to experience bankruptcy, and the medical burden forces many to forego care.

Those who have employer-based insurance were assumed to have the gold standard in health care. Now even the highest paid workers are subjected to premiums, deductibles, and co-pays that impede their care despite the family plans that average $32,000 per year. More have insurance that covers less than a hospital gown. Gold has turned to scrap metal.

As people struggle to pay for the premiums, deductibles, and co-pays, revenues of the seven largest health insurance companies in 2022 reached $1.25 trillion and profits soared to $69.3 billion. That’s a 287% increase in profits in just one decade, when profits were $24 billion.

The toxicity of the health care profit makers that spread unnecessary suffering and death generates the hatred that is poisoning the land.

Medicare, our best health care program, publicly funded and open to all, is now strangled in the grip of the privatized Medicare Advantage plans and the Accountable Care Organizations facilitated by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI). Medicare Advantage now controls a majority of recipients, not because it is better, but because the law that established it and the regulators that control it have allowed it to charge less in monthly premiums—plans that are also allowed to delay and deny care yet are overpaid by billions every year. CMMI issues waivers to the private plans exempting them from fraud and abuse laws and allowing kickbacks, self-referral, and illegal benefit inducement.

Millions on fixed incomes cannot afford the alternative of traditional Medicare plus a prescription drug plan and a supplementary Medigap plan. Those who have managed to escape the clutches of Medicare Advantage can still find themselves assigned, without their knowledge, to “value-based” payment schemes such as ACO REACH and other Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) which privatize traditional Medicare. “Value-based” payment models are touted, without evidence, as reducing costs for Medicare, yet encompass a multitude of for-profit entities and subject patients to physicians incentivized to deny care. There is ample evidence that “value-based” payment schemes do not lower costs for Medicare. Nevertheless, the privatization of Medicare, through Medicare Advantage or ACOs, is now official policy.

The hoax of “value-based” payments, promoted by CMMI, is exposed by the fact that, despite all the assertions of promoting equity, the inequities of health care are expanding.

Medicaid, the program for children and adults with low income, is almost completely privatized, subjecting the recipients to delays, denials and restrictions imposed by the private managed care organizations that control it.

The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is hurtling down the wrong track. They invite venture capital and health care investors into the Health Care Payment Learning and Action Network (LAN) that they created. CMS holds conferences, seeking advice and collaboration from the very profiteers that are the cause of high cost, low-quality care. The “value-based” payment scheme promoted by CMS has advanced the power of the profit makers, raising costs, cutting care, and pretending to promote equity for minorities and low-income patients.

It’s time to end the chaos. No more foxes in the hen house, no more poison in the system, no more profit in health care.

The toxicity of the health care profit makers that spread unnecessary suffering and death generates the hatred that is poisoning the land.

It’s time to end the chaos. No more foxes in the hen house, no more poison in the system, no more profit in health care. The nation has rejected the insurance company health care model that delays and denies care, demands skin in the game, asserts that there is massive unnecessary care, throws up barriers against care, and walks away with billions. A system that collects money from patients and employers then profits by withholding the promised care is not a business but a fraudulent, diabolical scam.

This system built on profit cannot be tweaked or regulated into better performance. Runaway trains are not deterred by guardrails.

There is one way to heal the nation. Put single payer on the nation’s table and focus the steaming rage to move the engine of change. Raise the demand for removal of profit and enactment of an Improved Medicare for All free from profit to a level commensurate with the damage that our current failing system is causing the patients’ and the country’s goodwill.

Some look at the current Congress, make the assessment that it’s not possible to pass single payer, then change their demand to a lesser proposal. But incremental changes are at the root of the privatization and profit schemes we are locked into now. Fifteen years after the ACA we have a failing health care system. We have witnessed that more incrementalism does more harm than good. Power concedes nothing without a demand, and the demand must be equal to the solution needed.

There is one way to heal the nation. Put single payer on the nation’s table and focus the steaming rage to move the engine of change.

As Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, taught us, in our current private profit-based system, proposals that lower costs also decrease care, and proposals that increase care, raise costs. To improve care and control costs, we must turn to national single payer, free from profit or a national health service.

The status quo is deadly, and people are demanding a stronger more effective fight. We must organize and educate, locally and nationally with a new determination. In every town hall, classroom, union, organization, and neighborhood, people must hear the message and join the fight. Redirect the rage into a positive force for change.

The new anger in the nation makes possible what we could not do before. Many are now discussing the possibility of setting a National Day of Action in 2025 to demand freeing health care from corporate profit and covering everyone under a national single payer plan. That’s a great idea. Actions across the country lifting up that demand could inspire the movement we need.

National Single Payer—an Improved Medicare for All free from profit with everybody in and nobody out. Nothing less can heal the nation.

There is little doubt that President-elect Donald Trump’s posture vis-a-vis Israel is a key reason why a cease-fire in Gaza has finally been achieved. According to a diplomat briefed on the matter, this was “the first time there has been real pressure on the Israeli side to accept a deal.”

This means that for 15 months, Israel has dropped American bombs on children in tents, on refugees sheltering in schools, and on patients seeking help in hospitals without President Joe Biden exerting any “real pressure” on Israel to stop.

And once the mere posture of pressure was exerted on Israel by an envoy representing a man who isn’t even president yet, lo and behold, a cease-fire was secured.

By willingly making America complicit, Biden’s decisions will have profound and long-lasting strategic repercussions for the American people on par with the damage George W. Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq inflicted on America’s standing, credibility, and security, as well as on the region’s stability.

All these senseless deaths, all the American credibility lost, all the Biden voters who stayed home in protest on November 5 could have been avoided.

The truth of the matter is that every day for the past year, Biden could have secured a cease-fire by using America’s vast leverage.

And every day for the past year, from all the evidence we have today, Biden chose not to.

That is the crux of the matter. It is precisely the fact that Biden chose this path that will damage America for years to come. It wasn’t that he lacked the ability or strength to stop the carnage. It’s not that he really wanted to stop it but sadly couldn’t. It wasn’t that his hands were tied. It wasn’t that Congress forced him. Or that polls showed that he or Kamala Harris would lose the elections if they pressed Israel. It wasn’t any of that.

Biden was simply in on it. He was on board with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war plans. He even attended the war cabinet where the plans were adopted.

In an exit interview with The Times of Israel, Biden’s outgoing ambassador to Israel even bragged about the Biden administration never exerting pressure on Netanyahu to halt the killing. “Nothing that we ever said was, Just stop the war,” Ambassador Jack Lew proudly declared.

By willingly making America complicit, Biden’s decisions will have profound and long-lasting strategic repercussions for the American people on par with the damage George W. Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq inflicted on America’s standing, credibility, and security, as well as on the region’s stability.

Biden’s own acting Director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), Brett Holmgren, told CBS that "anti-American sentiment fueled by the war in Gaza is at a level not seen since the Iraq war." Terrorist groups such as al Qaeda and ISIS are recruiting on these sentiments and issuing the most specific calls for America in years, according to Holmgren.

So every bomb Biden provided Israel to drop on children in Gaza was not only morally monstrous; it also made Americans less safe.

It will take years for America to recuperate from the damage Biden has inflicted on our standing, our moral compass, our credibility, and on our security. America is still recovering from the sins of the Iraq invasion.

But there will be no healing at all, no bouncing back, unless we admit the errors, hold those responsible accountable, and learn to do better. Just as Bush’s Iraq invasion and Global War on Terror gave birth to the strongest anti-war sentiments among Americans seen in decades, made war-mongering bad politics, and the epithet “neocon” an insult, Biden’s bearhug strategy on and blind deference to Israel must forever be remembered as the original sin that led America down the path of complicity in what most likely amounts to genocide.

Welcome to the age of Oil-Garchy, where the concentrated wealth and power of the fossil fuel industry dominates our political system. After donating heavily to Trump’s campaign, the industry has already begun to reap return on their investments.

Trump has nominated some of the most vociferous climate deniers and advocates for the oil, gas, and coal industries for key positions overseeing the environment, energy, and public lands. Former Congressman Lee Zeldin has been nominated to run the Environmental Protection Agency and Chris Wright, CEO of fracking company Liberty Energy, is poised to oversee the Energy Department.

In addition to putting drillers in charge of the watershed, the financial returns are beginning to flow in likely anticipation of pro-oil and gas policies. The top 15 fossil fuel industry billionaires have already seen their personal combined wealth rise from $267.6 billion to $307.9 billion, a gain of over $40 billion, or 15.2 percent since April 2024.

The Climate Accountability Research Project (CARP) released its first monthly tracking report, Pipeline to Power: Trump and the “Oil-garch” Wealth Surge, that will monitor wealth gains and losses by top billionaires in the sector over the coming year. According to the report, the first wave of big wealth gainers include:

• Richard Kinder, Chairman and CEO of Kinder Morgan who saw his wealth increase from $8.1 billion to $11 billion, a gain of 35 percent. Pipeline magnate Kinder may be realizing speculative gains in anticipation of new liquified natural gas (LNG) infrastructure and export capacity.
  
• Lyndal Stephens Greth, chair of Endeavor Energy Resources, saw her wealth increase from $24.3 billion to $29.9 billion, a gain of 23 percent. Greth family wealth is probably surging in anticipation of the resumption of “drill baby drill” policies under the Trump administration. Endeavor Energy Resources, one of the largest private oil producers in the U.S. and owner of more than 500,000 acres of Texas oil country, was sold to Diamondback Energy in September for $26 million in stock and cash.
  
• Koch Industries billionaires, Julia Flesher-Koch (wife of the late David Koch) and Charles Koch, saw their wealth increase from $58.5 billion and $64.3 billion, respectively, to $67.5 and $74.2 billion.

Return on Investment

On April 11, 2024, the CEOs and leaders of the oil and gas industries gathered at Mar-A-Lago for a meeting with candidate Trump about energy policy. Trump used the occasion, according to witnesses present, to make a brazen transactional pitch: raise $1 billion for his campaign and he would do their bidding. Trump told the assembled that the amount of money they would save in taxes and legal expenses after he repealed regulations would more than cover their billion-dollar contribution. Trump implied that if elected, he would expand offshore drilling, weaken environmental rules, and scrap electric vehicle and wind policies and other regulations opposed by the industry groups. Trump vowed to reverse President Biden’s pause on new LNG exports.

Present at the Mar-a-Lago Club on that April day were industry leaders such as Harold Hamm, the wildcat fracker and chairman of Continental Resources, who played an influential role in Trump’s first administration, pushing for Scott Pruitt to serve as Trump’s head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Also present was Doug Burgum, governor of North Dakota and Trump’s nominee to Interior Secretary, a position overseeing gas leases on public lands. Other attendees included leaders from the American Petroleum Institute and executives from Chevron, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, along with fracking producers Cheniere Energy and EQT.

Harold Hamm and Vicki Hollub, CEO of Occidental Petroleum, organized donors within the fossil fuel sector to support Trump and funnel money to his campaign. They didn’t raise a billion dollars, but they helped move hundreds of millions to PACs supporting Trump and directly to the candidate.

According to Climate Connections at Yale University, the fossil fuel industry spent $219 million to influence the new U.S. government. This included $26 million in direct oil and gas industry contributions to the campaigns of policymakers taking office in 2025, with 88 percent going to Republican lawmakers. The analysis found an additional $151 million in outside spending, including donations to political action committees (PACs), and $67 million to PACs supporting candidates. Nearly $23 million in oil and gas industry funds went directly to candidate Trump and his PACs.

Trump’s mega-donors included banking and oil scion Timothy Mellon and Timothy Dunn, CEO billionaire of CrownQuest, a major oil and fracking company based in Texas. George Bishop, the CEO of oil and gas company GeoSouthern Energy, donated $1 million to Trump’s campaign, with his wife forking over an additional $500,000. Fossil fuel billionaires Kelcy Warren and Harold Hamm donated $5 million and $1 million respectively to Trump's 2024 presidential campaign.

This is what “Oil-garchy” looks like. See the whole report, Pipeline to Power: Trump and the “Oil-garch” Wealth Surge, at www.climatecriminals.org.

You’re reading the words of a formerly undocumented immigrant.

When I fled El Salvador four decades ago, I was 12 years old and alone. I wanted to escape the country’s civil war, where U.S.-backed death squads had made murders and rape our daily reality.

I reunited with my sisters, my only surviving family, in Wichita, Kansas. Once there, I helped open churches, started businesses, and raised three daughters. There were times I wasn’t sure we’d make it to the end of the month, but I was grateful for the sense of peace and security we were able to create here.

We all have a stake in stopping private prison corporations from becoming more powerful, regardless of our language, race, gender, or community.

That’s why I’m so alarmed that the new Republican-led Congress has chosen to open with a bill, H.R. 29, that strikes fear in the hearts of immigrant families all across the country. This bill would strip judges of discretion and require immigrants to be detained and subject to deportation if they’re accused—not even convicted—of even minor offenses like shoplifting.

This major assault on due process won’t keep anyone safer. It would terrorize all immigrants in this country, who studies show are much less likely to commit crimes of any kind than native-born Americans.

So who benefits from H.R. 29? Private prison corporations like CoreCivic and GEO Group, who made a fortune during the last Trump administration by running private prisons for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

CoreCivic and GEO kept immigrants and asylum seekers in inhumane and toxic conditions with poor hygiene and exposed women and children to sexual predators. Under this new law, cynical executives will siphon off more public dollars, and wealthy investors will reap more rewards, from abusing and demonizing people seeking refuge from violence or poverty.

When President-elect Donald Trump won, private prison stocks soared. Why? Because investors anticipated making a fortune detaining immigrants. More than 90% of migrants detained by ICE end up in for-profit facilities.

GEO Group, which maxed out its campaign contributions to Trump, told its investors they could make almost $400 million per year supporting “future needs for ICE and the federal government” in a second Trump term. Their stock price nearly doubled in November.

Whether those detained are guilty or not, CoreCivic and GEO get paid. That’s what H.R. 29 is for: advancing corporate greed, not protecting Americans.

We all have a stake in stopping private prison corporations from becoming more powerful, regardless of our language, race, gender, or community. In addition to jailing immigrants, for-profit prison companies also look for ways to put citizens in prison more often—and for longer—so they can make more money.

Whenever we allow fundamental rights to be taken away, we erode our shared humanity and diminish all of our rights and freedoms.

The people behind H.R. 29 want us to be afraid of each other so we won’t stand together. They want to be able to barge into our homes, schools, and churches to take our neighbors and loved ones away. They want workers to be too scared to stand up to their bosses’ abuse. All so their donors in the private prison industry can make more money.

Democrats will need to find their way in this new Congress. Falling in line behind nativist fear-mongers who take millions in campaign contributions from the private-prison industry is not the right way to do it.

Americans demand better. We want true leadership with an affirmative vision for the future of this country and dignity for all people, including immigrants.

H.R. 29 targets whole communities because of the language we speak and the color of our skin. Instead, our elected leaders, regardless of party, must work to address people’s needs through building an economy that works for all of us, not just the wealthy few.

In her Tuesday confirmation hearing, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Attorney General, Pamela Bondi, had a contentious exchange with Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) about 2020 election denialism and the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. Bondi was evasive and tried to waste time through rambling answers instead of directly answering Padilla’s questions. However, it was her non-answer to the question about the 14th Amendment that spoke loudest.

Padilla asked the following question, “Now when we met yesterday, you did not seem to be familiar with the citizenship clause [of] the 14th Amendment of the United States of America, which was deeply disappointing. And I’m hoping you are more familiar with it today after I gave an opportunity to study it overnight. So can you tell me at this committee what the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment says?”

This is an extremely straightforward question. Although I wouldn’t expect anyone to be able to recite all of the text of all of the Amendments of the Constitution verbatim from memory, Bondi gave a stonewalling non-answer that was very telling. “Senator, I’m here to answer your questions. I’m not here to do your homework and study for you. If I’m confirmed as Attorney General,” at which point the senator repeated his question and tried to press her for an answer. The only answer that she ended up giving on this topic was a pathetic, “Senator, the 14th Amendment we all know addresses birthright citizenship…. I didn’t take your homework assignment: I’m sorry I was preparing for today.”

Although Bondi’s answer made her sound like a student who is giving a book report on a book they didn’t read, I am certain that she knows exactly what the 14th Amendment says. Padilla, to his credit, did not fall for Bondi’s attempted dodge. He asked point blank, “So now on the 14th Amendment, you’ve testified repeatedly to this committee that you will uphold the laws of this country and defend the Constitution of the United States. Do you believe birthright citizenship is the law of the land and will you defend it regardless of a…child born in the United States, regardless of their parents’ immigration status?”

Again, Bondi’s lack of a direct response tells you everything you need to know. “Senator, I will study birthright citizenship. I would love to meet with you regarding birthright citizenship.” Bondi does not have the courage to own up to the fact that she and the administration that she is applying to work for will put into practice an illegal set of policies designed to contravene the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause and deny U.S. citizenship to children born in the U.S. to undocumented parents. She does not want to say the text of the 14th Amendment out loud because it’s really quite unambiguous.

For reference, the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment says, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” Children who are born in the U.S. to undocumented parents are subject to the jurisdiction of U.S. laws. Therefore, they are citizens. It couldn’t be any more straightforward. As I wrote about previously, the conservative legal “theory” that these children are not subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. and are therefore not citizens is completely ludicrous and incoherent. I also recently wrote about the dystopian nightmare that would be created if Donald Trump is allowed to bring this incoherent theory into practice. With Trump’s inauguration looming next week, it is important that we understand what Bondi’s role would be in the push to end birthright citizenship in the U.S.

As Attorney General, Bondi would be a key player in Trump’s Push to end birthright citizenship and shred the 14th Amendment

There are three key roles Bondi would play as Attorney General in Donald Trump’s plan to destroy the 14th Amendment. First, the Attorney General is the head of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel. The OLC is a critical part of any administration that many Americans may not be aware of. As the OLC’s website says, “The Office drafts legal opinions of the Attorney General and provides its own written opinions and other advice in response to requests from the Counsel to the President, the various agencies of the Executive Branch, and other components of the Department of Justice…. All executive orders and substantive proclamations proposed to be issued by the President are reviewed by the Office of Legal Counsel for form and legality, as are various other matters that require the President’s formal approval.” (emphasis added).

As Attorney General, Bondi will be responsible for issuing OLC legal memos and reviewing the legality (or illegality) of Trump’s executive orders. Although OLC legal memos are only advisory in nature, they can have powerful effects. We are still living under the shadow of the 1973 OLC memo that concludes that a sitting President is immune from criminal prosecution. OLC memos create legal cover and justification for agencies to take action. Further, Bondi would be theoretically responsible for signing off on the constitutionality of any Trump executive orders that contravene the 14th Amendment. Her statement that she has to “study” the 14th Amendment is hard to believe because I would not be surprised to find out that they have a legal memo and executive orders already drafted and ready to go that will start the attack on birthright citizenship as soon as Trump takes office. We can assume that behind closed doors, she has already signed off on Trump’s illegal plan to deny citizenship to children of undocumented parents.

Second, the Attorney General sits at the top of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which is commonly referred to as “Immigration Court.” The EOIR is the arm of the government that carries out removal proceedings, i.e., deportation proceedings. In a previous piece for Common Dreams, I wrote about a nightmare scenario where the federal government would begin to detain and deport people born in the U.S. with undocumented parents. As Attorney General, Bondi would be instrumental in this as her office would be carrying out these proceedings under the flagrantly incorrect notion that these people born in the U.S. are not citizens.

Third, the AG controls the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG). The OSG is the arm of the Executive Branch that will defend Trump’s policies in court against the inevitable legal challenges that they will draw. Of course, as I previously wrote, these policies are intentionally designed to draw legal challenges and make their way to the corrupt U.S. Supreme Court. If the Supreme Court overturns birthright citizenship despite the incredibly clear language of the 14th Amendment, it will be because of the arguments put forward by Bondi’s attorneys who are part of the Office of the Solicitor General and the Department of Justice. If birthright citizenship in the U.S. is erased, it will be because of Pam Bondi.

Bondi’s response that she would have to “study” the 14th Amendment is a lie. She is lying to cover up the fact that she will be a key player in Trump’s plans to shred the 14th Amendment and abrogate his oath of office. Just let that sink in. She is lying at her confirmation hearing because she knows that she will be a major part of the incoming administration’s effort to break the law by ignoring the plain text of the U.S. Constitution. Her nomination should be opposed unanimously, but of course, we cannot count on any Republicans in the Senate to do the right thing, ever. We need to keep a clear moral perspective and never let them forget what they have done if they are successful in confirming Bondi and destroying the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship in the U.S.

“Democratic laws and institutions can only function effectively when they are based on a culture of democracy.” —Thorbjørn Jagland, Secretary General of the Council of Europe (2018)

If political rage propels authoritarianism, what supports democratic governance? If a culture of democracy is required, is it attainable? Or has the slide into authoritarian rule crossed the point of no return? The time of cultural reckoning has arrived.

U.S. democracy, historically thin, is susceptible to demagoguery and oligarchy. As political philosopher Benjamin Barber observed decades ago, “the survival of democracy remains an open question.” It will endure “only as strong democracy,” secured by a competent, responsible, politically engaged, and well-informed citizenry; a lasting commitment to self-governance requires a civically educated public.

Strong democracy presupposes a culture of democracy.

What is a culture of democracy?

This question is so important that in 2018 the Council of Europe—an intergovernmental human rights organization representing 46 European member states—published a three-volume report dedicated to answering it. According to the report, a civic culture strong enough to sustain democratic institutions, laws, and practices consists of a full set of values, attitudes, and knowledge acted upon by the citizenry in public spaces. This is a high standard, especially for a markedly diverse country of over 300 million. It presumes adherence to key values, command of relevant knowledge, and proficiency in corresponding competencies.

Democratic values include a commitment to human dignity and rights, cultural diversity, equality, fairness, justice, the rule of law, and democratic procedures. Human rights apply universally, are safeguarded without distinction, and are exercised short of violating the rights of others. Respect for cultural diversity enables the contribution of diverse perspectives to public deliberation and decision-making. Decisions by majority or plurality vote are made without resort to coercion and with continuing respect for civil liberties.

Among democratic attitudes, openness to cultural diversity entails a suspension of prejudice and a willingness to cooperate with citizens of different cultural identities in a relationship of equality. An attitude of tolerance and respect presumes the intrinsic dignity and equality of others regardless of their differences. An attitude of civic mindedness and self-sufficiency involves a sense of interconnectedness among citizens, a concern for one another’s welfare, a willingness to serve the common good, an expectation of personal accountability, and a belief that one’s contribution can make a positive difference. Civic mindedness extends to dealing creatively and constructively with complexities, ambiguities, and uncertainties.

A functioning democracy requires a substantial investment in cultural knowledge, not just technical competency.

Implementing these values and attitudes requires various democratic competencies. Analytical thinking consists of logical and systematic analysis of issues and arguments together with critical thinking to make evaluative judgments about options and to sort out political propaganda, while recognizing that one’s own judgments are contingent on a working perspective. Active listening and close observation are required to appreciate subtleties, identify inconsistencies and omissions, and understand cultural differences. Empathy is requisite to apprehending the cognitive and affective orientation of people with dissimilar cultural backgrounds. Flexibility and adaptation to changing circumstances and experiences are necessary to reconsider fixed habits of thought. Competency in communication is needed to express opinions, ideas, and wants, to request and provide clarifications, to persuade and negotiate constructively, to compromise, cooperate, manage conflict, and build consensus.

The democratic knowledge expected of citizens is familiarity with the complexities of the larger world. It encompasses an understanding of political and legal concepts such as rights, equality, and justice as well as an awareness of how democratic institutions operate; knowledge of current affairs and the political views of others; knowledge of the history, texts, doctrines, practices, and diversity of religious traditions; understanding how history is constructed and shapes contemporary perceptions; knowing how media select, interpret, and edit information for various purposes, and their impact on the public’s judgment and behavior; understanding economic processes, their consequences for profit and employment, and their intersection with social, political, and environmental issues.

Is a culture of democracy attainable?

Even more than the above synopsis, the full text of democratic values, attitudes, knowledge, and competencies conveys an expectation that is well above the present capacity of publics in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere. This disjunction between aspiration and reality raises a question of feasibility. Can the public’s competencies be raised to a closer approximation of the ideal, to a level close enough for civic culture to support democratic politics?

The decline of liberal arts and civic education is indicative of the difficulty of answering the feasibility question affirmatively. Democratic culture is undermined rather than advanced by a commitment to technical and applied training at the expense of teaching the humanities, arts, and social sciences. A functioning democracy requires a substantial investment in cultural knowledge, not just technical competency. Nor can a balanced education be restricted to elites if the aim is to develop an able, well-informed public.

Beyond the deficit in formal education, lifelong civic learning is hampered by economic struggle, health crises, life’s everyday demands, violence riddled entertainment, sensationalized news media, and polarized politics. The country is caught in a downward political spiral exacerbated by its diminishing influence in the world, the economic disruption of globalization, inequity of wealth distribution, ongoing demographic shifts and migration, and imminent climate change, culminating in the election of a rightwing authoritarian regime. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to foresee a rise of civic culture above even the minimum needed to sustain thin democracy.

The value of an aspirational model as a gauge of the democratic deficit is that it can provide a goal and sense of direction for rectifying present deficiencies. The problem with an aspirational model is that the ideal can be too far removed from exigent circumstances, frustrated expectations, and fragmented politics to inspire commitment to a democratic future. It takes strong faith to bridge the gap and to move forward in an imperfect world.

Has faith in the democratic ideal expired?

Perhaps the spirit of democracy is most immediately in need of revival, if that is possible. An analytical ideal of democratic culture is abstract, literal, even antiseptic, and thus stripped of narrative texture and figurative transcendence. Absent a binding mythos, a people’s shared sentiment fades, and collective faith in democracy diminishes. The people are deprived of a political north star.

Just as Trumpism mobilizes the country’s dark impulses, historian Jon Meacham argues, the people must call upon their better angels and reach within the nation’s soul for a noble guiding vision. That “ancient and perennial” soul is an “immanent collection of convictions, dispositions, and sensitivities that shape character and inform conduct.” It is “the vital center, the core, the heart, the essence of life.”

Historian Heather Cox Richardson documents how the country’s antidemocratic leaders have rewritten the nation’s story to abandon the principle of equality. She also observes that Americans have managed, despite several close calls, to hold on to democratic principles for over three centuries, “however imperfectly they lived them.” In her view, “the true nature of American democracy … is, and has always been, a work in progress.” The task at hand in this “time of testing,” she writes, is one of “keeping the dream of equality alive.”

By these accounts, reawakening the spirit of democracy is a plausible undertaking. An imperfect citizenry might draw sustenance from its centuries-long, checkered quest for liberty and equality, and it might reasonably hope to muddle through dark times.

When robust democratic deliberation is rendered inherently destabilizing, the modes of responsible and active citizenship by a competent public are diminished.

That said, rhetorical scholar Jennifer Mercieca observes that the capacity of the citizenry to act democratically is “ambiguous.” American citizenship, depending on “whoever ‘the people’ are thought to be,” is a “conflicted, paradoxical, and complex” phenomenon that does not ensure the kind of national stability the Constitution was designed to protect. By representing active citizenship as a danger to stability, the country’s Constitutional founders strayed from the revolutionary conception of citizens actively watching and critiquing government, resisting corruption and oppression, and working for the common good. Over the course of time, a pseudo-democratic conception of citizenship, informed by an infantilizing discourse of a distempered public, a public that must be contained and constrained by political parties, has demoted citizens from decisionmakers to bystanders and relegated them to consumer status. When robust democratic deliberation is rendered inherently destabilizing, the modes of responsible and active citizenship by a competent public are diminished.

While the slide into authoritarianism has perhaps reached the point of no return, which we cannot know for certain, now might instead be regarded as an exigent moment for revitalizing the spirit of democracy. Reconstituting civic will would take a fugitive act in the Jeffersonian sense of instigating a little rebellion now and again—a rebellious interval of deliberative dissent with sufficient intensity and duration to jump start the democratic dream. There can be no guarantee, only a conviction that an effort to prevent the demise of democracy might succeed.

Donald Trump is about to return to the White House, but it's clear who's really running the show: Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world and the chair of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

Musk will do anything to avoid paying his fair share of taxes. That's why he wants to use DOGE to cut $2 trillion in government spending—which is mathematically impossible without slashing Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Last month, Musk amplified a thread from Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) that used zombie lies about Social Security to call for cutting and privatizing it.

Nobody voted to cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid. Despite his past history of supporting cuts to these programs, Trump blanketed millions of households in swing states with flyers promising to protect them.

Our job is to remind voters of that promise, and demand that Republicans keep it. Trump won't be on the ballot again, but every member of the House of Representatives (and one-third of the U.S. Senate) is up for reelection in less than two years. That's why they want to slash our benefits behind closed doors.

I went to the first meeting of the DOGE Caucus, and stood outside those closed doors to confront members as they entered and exited the room. I handed them copies of Trump's campaign flyers promising to protect Social Security and Medicare, and asked if DOGE intended to keep that promise.

One Republican told me that "there will be some cuts" to Social Security and Medicare. Another said that "everything is on the table." Most of the rest refused to answer—except for DOGE Caucus co-chair Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). When I handed her Trump's flyers, she said, "We don't care" and tossed them to the ground.

That's what Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks of Trump's campaign promise to protect earned benefits—and we're going to make sure her constituents know it. My organization, Social Security Works, just sent a billboard truck to drive to every large senior center in her district, reading "Marjorie Taylor Greene is helping the richest man in the world cut YOUR Social Security" and urging voters to call her office.

We are also planning to send a billboard truck to the district of Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.). Van Orden is a member of the DOGE Caucus and refused to pledge to protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. He is one of the most vulnerable Republican incumbents, winning his most recent race by fewer than 11,256 votes.

These two billboard trucks are just the beginning. We are demanding that every member of Congress, starting with the members of the DOGE Caucus, pledge to protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. If they refuse, our trucks will be driving through their districts in the very near future.

Join our campaign to protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid at https://socialsecurityworks.org/pledge.

In late November, President-elect Donald Trump announced Pam Bondi—former Florida attorney general, current partner at Ballard Partners, and long-time Trump-world regular—as his nominee for attorney general. Bondi perfectly exemplifies Trump’s approach to staffing the executive branch: prioritizing loyalists with a history of defending him personally and actively creating opportunities for revolver-induced corruption.

Going into the second Trump administration, the Department of Justice (DOJ) faces a broad array of issues, from counter-intelligence to civil rights enforcement. But in many respects the Justice Department is most central and critical as the enforcer of laws that limit corporate misbehavior. From monopolistic collusion and tax evasion to wage theft and polluting the air, the DOJ is constantly deciding whether to pursue potential civil and criminal actions against a wide array of corporations.

Is someone whose (virtual) rolodex is full of contacts at large tech companies likely to be enthusiastic about supporting antitrust enforcement against the very tech executives she has a warm working relationship with?

If confirmed, Bondi will be a classic corporate revolver. While at Ballard, she’s worked with a slate of corporate clients, prominently including Amazon, which has pending cases before the DOJ and Federal Trade Commission. As attorney general, Bondi would stand to oversee cases against a number of her former clients and their ilk, creating at the very least the appearance of a conflict of interest.

Bondi would also have the power to influence resource allocation decisions, determining how much effort the federal government puts toward enforcing the law against corporate actors and individuals alike. With many of Bondi and her Ballard peers’ clients and former clients number among those who stand to face federal enforcement, there are clear reasons to worry she might de-emphasize corporate misconduct and prioritize Trump’s political enemies.

Is someone whose (virtual) rolodex is full of contacts at large tech companies likely to be enthusiastic about supporting antitrust enforcement against the very tech executives she has a warm working relationship with? Questions like this seem to answer themselves, and the outlook isn’t good for those of us who see the role of government as protecting most of us from the greed and abuses of wealthy and powerful corporations and executives.

Beyond concerns about corporate revolver dynamics that could undercut DOJ’s efficacy in cracking down on corporate wrongdoing, Bondi herself has a worrying history of receiving support from corporate actors before seemingly using her power to shield them from legal action.

In 2011, newly inaugurated Florida Attorney General Bondi led the charge to fire two attorneys who had been investigating Lender Processing Services (LPS)—a mortgage services company that later pled guilty to having forged documents to illegally repossess borrowers’ homes—after Bondi received substantial campaign contributions from LPS. In 2013, Bondi directly solicited a reelection campaign donation from the Donald J. Trump Foundation. Shortly after Bondi received the $25,000 donation, her office declined to continue investigating complaints against Trump University. Also during Bondi’s first term as Florida attorney general, she had an extended relationship with lawyers from firm Dickstein Shapiro who met with Bondi to represent an array of corporate clients. In several documented cases, Bondi declined to use her AG powers to pursue action against these companies, as The New York Times reported in a Pulitzer-winning 2014 series. (As the Miami Herald reports, a brochure from the firm even boasts that “we persuaded AGs not to sue Accretive Health.”)

These corruption concerns don’t even scratch the surface of Bondi’s broad network of financial and personal relationships with conservative interest groups and influential corporate actors, not to mention her lobbying work for the nation of Qatar. As such, Bondi's confirmation would likely become quite difficult, as every issue from how to deal with Foreign Agents Registration Act enforcement to antitrust policy is implicated by her time at Ballard.

These blatant concerns with Bondi’s fitness for the role were drawn out to some extent in her first confirmation hearing on Wednesday. Bondi repeatedly took a combative tone in response to questions. She dodged or evaded numerous questions about how her loyalty to Trump might influence her decision-making as attorney general, even making the blanket statement, “I’ll never speak on a hypothetical, especially one saying that the president would do something illegal”—a concerning hard line for her to take, given Trump's multiple, non-hypothetical, criminal convictions.

Bondi’s second hearing, scheduled for on Thursday, promises to produce more eventful and contentious testimony, as hearings for Trump nominees continue this week.

After years of advocacy from the disabled community, the Department of Labor is proposing a rule that would end the issuance of 14(c) certificates, which enable businesses to pay subminimum wages to disabled workers.

If you’re unfamiliar with Section 14(c) of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, you might be shocked to learn that it is, in fact, legal to pay disabled workers below the minimum wage. Companies across the country can request 14(c) certificates that give them license to pay disabled workers far below poverty wages. It’s a practice that has been present for decades, but there is once again movement toward making 14(c) a thing of the past.

Ending this practice is long overdue, and is desperately needed to keep disabled people out of poverty. In the South, where my organization New Disabled South works, poverty is higher than anywhere else in the country. And there are more 14(c) certificates in the South than any other region in the nation. We know that disabled people live in poverty at twice the rate of nondisabled people—which means that there is simply no reason to keep disabled people in poverty by paying them poverty wages. It is unconscionable.

Calling this a “special” wage is an insult to the disability community, which deserves to thrive and live with dignity.

Proponents of 14(c) certificates have emphasized the supposed merits of these certificates, saying that they provide people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) the opportunities to work that they otherwise wouldn’t have. One argument that gets perpetuated often is that it’s better to pay folks with IDD something rather than nothing at all. This is perhaps the most disturbing justification imaginable—implying that sheltered workshops are sufficient options for people who “wouldn’t otherwise be employable.” In truth, segregated, subminimum wage jobs deprive disabled people of the chance to know what we’re capable of when our needs are valued and met. We rise to the occasion when employers, family advocates, caregivers, regulatory agencies, and legislators meet their responsibilities to us. Many more disabled people would be capable of competitive integrated employment—and more generally, would be better able to reach our highest potential—if we are first provided with fair wages, in addition to wrap-around support that allows us to improve our skills and do our jobs in an accessible environment.

Decades of research demonstrate that segregated, subminimum wage jobs generate higher costs for employers and worse outcomes for disabled people. Plus, employment rates for disabled people improve in states that end 14(c). What is truly needed is Competitive Integrated Employment (CIE), which ensures that disabled people get paid fairly and have opportunities for employment in their community, as opposed to being segregated from it. Many more of us would be capable of CIE if we were provided with the integrated opportunities afforded under Olmstead and the reasonable accommodations protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), including those that teach and allow us to communicate via augmentative and alternative communication (AAC).

Arguments favoring the continued use of 14(c) certificates are primarily based on fear or misunderstanding of the current policy and programmatic landscape. The biggest misconception is that payments above subminimum wage will disqualify disabled employees from receiving the public benefits they require. However, two existing options for mitigating that possibility are ABLE Accounts and Medicaid “buy-in” programs.

ABLE accounts are savings accounts that allow disabled people to save money without it counting toward the asset limits associated with eligibility for SSI, Medicaid, SNAP, and other government assistance programs. Medicaid “buy-in” programs allow disabled workers to access, sometimes in exchange for a premium, the home- and community-based services that are not provided under employer-sponsored or other private health insurance plans. Forty-seven states and D.C. have Medicaid “buy-in” programs. No one should have to choose between keeping a job and keeping their healthcare, and this program makes it possible for disabled people to have both.

ABLE accounts and Medicaid “buy-in” programs must be expanded to eliminate disincentives to work. Income and asset limits associated with eligibility for government assistance programs must also be raised to align with the rising cost of living across the country, particularly for disabled people. But even in the absence of those policy changes, the finalization of DOL’s proposed 14(c) rule will still be beneficial.

This is what equity and inclusion looks like, not continuing the standard set by Section 14(c) for low quality of life, inequality, and economic suffering. Proponents of the 14(c) program refer to subminimum wages as the “Special Minimum Wage,” a stunningly offensive term aimed at diminishing the harm that paying these wages does to disabled workers. As of 2019, the majority of 14(c) employees were earning less than $3.40 an hour, or $213.76 per month, while—as I highlighted two years ago—the executive directors of many of these workplaces made five- and six-figure salaries. Calling this a “special” wage is an insult to the disability community, which deserves to thrive and live with dignity.

The Department of Labor is accepting public comment through January 17, meaning there is still time to encourage them to finalize the proposed rule and finally end the 14(c) program once and for all. To learn more about DOL’s proposed rule and how to submit comments by January 17, check out this Plain Language explainer and action alert from the Autistic Self Advocacy Network.

Until recently, the American-funded Israeli genocide of Palestinians unsurprisingly continued without a stop in sight. On January 13, 2025, Israeli attacks assassinated at least 45 Gazans. Shortly after these attacks, however, a cease-fire and hostage deal (reportedly split into three phases) was confirmed on January 15, 2025. Importantly, Steven Witkoff, selected by U.S. President-elect Donald Trump to be his special envoy in the Middle East, has forced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a cease-fire and hostage plan in two months, existing in stark contrast with the Biden administration’s incompetent (and frankly cruel) inability to pressure Netanyahu into accepting a plan over the past year.

Nevertheless, even though the incoming Trump administration secured a cease-fire and hostage deal, it’s impossible to truly know what will come next. Trump is notoriously unpredictable. According to recent estimates from Gaza’s Health Ministry, at least 45,000 Palestinians have been slaughtered since October 7, 2023. In the days leading up to his presidential inauguration, many around the United States and the world at large are uncertain about how Trump will treat Israel’s ongoing genocide and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a whole. To help answer these questions, I interviewed a variety of scholars.

First, it’s important to assess Trump’s impact on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during his first term. On the one hand, Trump perpetually enabled Israeli expansionism. “Trump recognized Israel’s illegal annexation of Jerusalem, [and] he recognized Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan Heights,” political scientist Norman Finkelstein told me. Further, the two-state proposal that Trump disclosed in 2020 radically reversed the policy of his predecessors by allowing Israel to annex the Jordan Valley and the vast majority of illegal settlements in the West Bank, while merely allotting 15% of historic Palestine toward a Palestinian state. Trump’s first administration simply didn’t value Palestinian sovereignty, a sentiment shared by the Biden administration. “Biden could have reversed [Trump’s] decisions, but elected not to,” Finkelstein further explained to me. The Biden administration’s encouragement of Israel’s genocide are simply an outgrowth of Trump’s previous policies, which approved of Israeli expansionism.

Although criticizing Liz Cheney and other members of Washington’s war machine, Trump remains perpetually ignorant of his own hawkish behavior.

On the other hand, Trump partly abandoned the Palestinian issue during his first term. “Trump (or more precisely, Kushner and others) tried to sideline the Palestinian issue completely and to focus on promoting normalization between Israel, the Gulf States, and Saudi Arabia instead,” international relations scholar Stephen Walt told me. After feeling deserted by the Trump administration, many Palestinians, according to Walt, came to believe that they “had no options other than violence.” Since the Biden administration continued Trump’s policies of abandonment, “October 7 was the result.”

While Finkelstein and Walt highlight the negative consequences of Trump’s policies toward Israel, famed Israeli revisionist historian Benny Morris views Trump’s previous actions differently. “[Trump] recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, which previous U.S. presidents should have done, but apart from giving Israelis a good feeling, it had no impact on the conflict,” Morris told me. Nevertheless, by arguing that Trump was right to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and that previous American presidents “should have,” Morris explicitly acknowledges and approves of the Israeli expansionism that Trump fomented, undermining Morris’ credibility to speak on behalf of whether or not the Palestinians perceived Trump’s actions to be escalatory.

Early signs already indicate that the second Trump administration will, at the very least, further enable illegal Israeli expansion, especially upon the occupied West Bank. Two of Trump’s key appointees, Pete Hegseth (Defense Department) and Mike Huckabee (ambassador to Israel), dismiss a two-state solution. Further, Huckabee habitually denies Palestinian existence itself, identifies the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” and believes that the entirety of the West Bank belongs to Israel. David Friedman, who remains a close associate with Trump and was U.S. ambassador to Israel under his first administration, recently wrote a book arguing for a single Jewish state, which would include the West Bank and likely Gaza. Understanding that a second Trump presidency enables further Israeli expansionism, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich stated that “now is the time” to seek sovereignty over the settlements in the West Bank.

It’s entirely likely that the second Trump administration will encourage Israeli expansion over the West Bank to a degree that would guarantee the prevention of an independent Palestinian state from emerging. Former Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) representative Sari Nusseibeh, previously one of the most visible Palestinian peace activists advocating for a two-state solution, maintains, “Under Trump, Israel’s policy will be the geographic and political dismemberment of the embryonic Palestinian state, bringing all this under a hegemonic Israeli authority, with total disregard to international opinion.”

Although a cease-fire and hostage deal has been achieved, Trump promised Netanyahu that his administration would maintain support for Israel even if it violated the agreement, according to a recent report. While a cease-fire was previously reached between Israel and Lebanon, Israel has continued air striking southern and eastern Lebanon. Neither the Trump nor Biden administration has punished Israel, and it’s unlikely that they will. Recently, Hegseth expressed his support for Israel to kill “every last member of Hamas.” In practicality, this entails that high-ranking members of the Trump administration approve of Israel intensifying its indiscriminate assault on Gaza. In addition to the possibility of “the elimination of Gaza as a Palestinian entity and the continuing [encroachment] on the West Bank and its absorption into the state of Israel,” it’s very likely that there will be “more killing and ethnic cleansing” under the second Trump administration, cultural studies scholar Iain Chambers told me. Such wariness regarding the possible perpetuation of genocide and Israeli expansionism under a second Trump administration is also shared by Walt: “The genocide/ethnic cleansing will continue, and I think it is likely that Israel will annex the West Bank (and perhaps portions of Syria and Lebanon).”

Although the future is never entirely given, it’s possible to gauge how the second Trump administration will treat Israel. Based on Trump’s disastrous actions toward Palestinians (during his first term and now), it’s plausible to assume that the second Trump administration will sharply enable Israeli expansionism at the very least, although the simultaneous escalation of Israel’s genocide is also a likely option. Although criticizing Liz Cheney and other members of Washington’s war machine, Trump remains perpetually ignorant of his own hawkish behavior. While hopelessness may ensue upon the realization that the second Trump administration will have disastrous consequences for Palestinian livelihood, one must resist feeling discouraged. Perpetual, collective political action still remains the only viable form of resistance to Washington’s endless support of oppression.

As the MAGA troops dine, dance and saunter into the White House, we have to ask how one of the most unpopular presidents in U.S. history triumphed yet again. Yes, Trump is a gifted entertainer with an incredibly loyal base. But he could not have won without Democratic Party malfeasance. Let us count the ways:

1. Biden’s Ego

You don’t get to be president without an enormous ego, so large that it’s very hard to imagine not getting exactly what you think is your due. Even though Biden told his advisors in 2019 that he would serve only one term, he changed his mind, or rather his ego demanded four more years. Biden liked the job he had spent his life pining for, and damn anyone who thought he wasn’t up to it.

The combination of ego and power meant that those around Biden were loathe to suggest that maybe, just maybe, he shouldn’t start a second term at age 82. The closer his advisors were to power, the less likely they were to risk losing their access by pointing out that Biden looked his age and then some, and that an overwhelming majority of voters thought he was too old to serve again. That Biden was having difficulty putting forth coherent sentences in public was studiously ignored. Biden was told exactly what he wanted to hear. Run, Joe, Run!

2. Liberal-Left Complicity

Everyone who was awake, except Biden and those dependent upon him, knew that he was too old to run again. On November 20, 2023, Biden’s 81st birthday, I wrote , “Happy Birthday Joe: Please Don’t Run!” I took a good deal of criticism, even from close colleagues. Didn’t I know that there was no way he would agree to step down? Didn’t I realize that if someone challenged him the Democrats would lose, just as in 1968 when Lyndon Johnson was forced out? Didn’t I realize that Biden was the best president for workers since FDR, maybe even better, and had therefore earned a second term?

I was stunned especially by the FDR claim. That one only works if you live in the Washinton bubble and are blind as a bat (without a bat’s stunning radar.)

• FDR, through his fireside chats, was an enormously gifted communicator. Biden during his presidency has been one of the worst.
• FDR’s massive public works programs engaged millions of people in highly visible ways each day. Biden’s infrastructure programs were nearly invisible, and severely hampered by his inability to promote them.
• FDR’s changes in labor law legalized unions and led to an explosion of successful organizing, full of posters with FDR saying, “If I went to work in a factory, the first thing I’d do is join a union.” While Biden did go on a picket line and put pro-labor appointees into key regulatory offices, union density barely budged on his watch.

The voters of Mingo County, West Virginia could tell the difference. FDR in 1936 got 66.1 percent of their vote. Biden received only 13.9 percent in 2020. (See Wall Street’s War on Workers for a closer look at Mingo County and the collapse of the Democrats.)

By 2024, the rise of inflation and Biden’s feeble demeanor, during the rare times he was let out in public, augured for a sizable Trump triumph. Democrats who feared a second Trump term should have demanded that Biden step down long before he fell flat on his face during the June 2024 debate.

Where were AOC and Sanders? In Biden’s pocket. As late as the middle of June 2024, AOC said:

Joe Biden is our nominee. He is not leaving this race. He is in this race, and I support him.

Even after the worst debate performance in presidential history, Bernie Sanders chastised Biden’s critics:

Enough! Mr. Biden may not be the ideal candidate, but he will be the candidate and should be the candidate.

No doubt AOC and Sanders saw what I saw a year earlier--- that Biden really was too old to serve a second term. But they kept silent. They were not about to give up their influence over Biden’s agenda, an agenda they can kiss good-by during the coming four years of Trump.

3. The legal cases

If you’re going to put a former president on trial, one who desperately wants to run again, you had better do it long before the next election. Instead, Attorney General Merrick Garland fumbled around for two years before appointing a special counsel to investigate Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and his hiding classified documents in his bathroom. The delay allowed Trump to run out the clock and avoid any punishment, despite 34 felony convictions in the New York State business records case involving the adult film star Stormy Daniels and campaign finance laws.

Clearly, Trump’s legal woes didn’t wound his election chances and may even have helped to solidify his base. While progressives were titillated (me included) by each new legal revelation about Trump’s malfeasance, the public at large cared much more about leadership, change, inflation, and the economy.

4. Anointing Kamala Harris

Kamala Harris was a very poor candidate in 2020. She withdrew after polls showed her at 3 percent. Yet, by waiting until after the 2024 debate debacle, Biden ensured that the Democrats had no choice but to rally around Harris. She was the incumbent vice-president and not doing so would have been viewed as a slap in the face to women and people of color.

But they had a choice if they had acted sooner. Had party leaders forced Biden out in early 2024, later than they should have, there was time to hold at least two primaries that would have put Harris to the test—primaries that would have let voters register their preferences, perhaps finding the best candidate and giving more legitimacy to whomever was selected.

Taking away that vital phase of the democratic process, the Democrats neutered their own claim that Trump was an enemy of democracy. Whether or not those acts are parallel in anti-democratic gravity is irrelevant. More than a few voters thought that Democrats did not have the high moral ground on democracy issues.

And blaming the Harris loss on racism and sexism is a poor excuse for a party desperate to prevent Trump from stomping all over democracy. If the Democrats really believed that racism and sexism would defeat Harris, why nominate her?

In the end she could not compete with Trump on two key issues—leadership and change. On the exit poll question of the candidate's "ability to lead,” Trump received 66 percent to Harris’s 33 percent. On “Can bring needed change,” it was 74 percent for Trump to 24 percent for Harris.

5. Anti-working-class campaign

Nevertheless, Harris was a much stronger campaigner in 2024 than in 2020. She exuded energy and certainly was far more coherent than Biden. The spark needed to attract support was there. But by that point the problem was substance, not style. Harris is a corporate Democrat, and she wanted to gain the support of Wall Street as much if not more than she wanted to be the party of the working class.

While independent polls, like those from the Center for Working Class Politics, showed that the Democrats needed to campaign on a strong anti-corporate populist message, especially in Pennsylvania, Harris chose to emphasize her opponent’s threat to democracy. Further, she went out of her way to raise money from Wall Street, to campaign with Republicans, and to make her campaign palatable to them both.

For me, the defining moment came in the response to the John Deere and Company’s announcement moving 1,000 jobs from the Midwest to Mexico. In June 2024, right here on the pages of Common Dreams, I repeatedly begged the Biden administration to stop the carnage. Deere was the poster child of a greedy corporation that was using job cuts to move money to Wall Street through stock buybacks, an artificial means of boosting the share price to enrich a company’s richest investors. In 2023, Deere logged $10 billion in profits, paid its CEO $26.7 million, and conducted $12.2 billion in stock buybacks. As I pleaded then: “Come on Joe, go to bat for these workers and show the working class that you’re tougher than Trump when it comes to saving American jobs.”

The greatest president for labor since FDR did nothing. When more layoffs were announced in the fall, Trump jumped on it, calling for a 200 percent tariff on John Deere imports from Mexico.

Here was the chance for Harris to strut her pro-working-class stuff. Instead, her campaign committed political malpractice. They recruited Mark Cuban, the TV star billionaire, former principal owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, to attack Trump’s plan. He called the proposed Deere tariffs, “insanity.” He criticized Trump’s worker-friendly proposal rather than Deere’s attempt to kill workers’ jobs. Cuban is on record saying stock buybacks are bad for employees, but he said not a word about Deere’s abuse of them. And most importantly, neither he, nor Harris, nor anyone else in the campaign said a word about the 1,000 jobs that would be lost.

That’s because they are corporate Democrats who refuse to interfere with corporate decision making. Job loss is inevitable and necessary, they believe, and only can be confronted by the vague promise that new jobs will be created elsewhere within the prosperous “opportunity society.” Instead of stopping needless mass layoffs, the Democrats prefer to shower corporations with public money to “encourage” them to create jobs, which are nearly always for someone other than those who are losing theirs. It’s not hard to see why workers like those at Deere might think Trump would fight harder for them.

6. Inflation

The rise in prices negatively affected the vast majority of voters and it happened on Biden’s watch. To say it was not as bad as in the rest of the world was a feeble response, as was blaming Covid supply chain transformations. Whatever truth there was to these claims, what voters wanted to see were actions to stop prices from rising and attempts made to lower as many as possible.

This would prove to be a heavy lift for Harris. She needed to attack the major corporate cartels that jacked up prices, which would mean breaking with the Biden administration (something she pointedly refused to do). She would have to call for investigations about price gouging, and even demanding price controls to prevent the food and drug producers form profiteering. It would also mean proposing new laws to prevent Wall Street and private equity firms from buying up millions of homes, a practice that was putting upward pressure on home prices and hurting even workers with decent-paying jobs. In short, it would mean breaking from Wall Streeters and turning public ire against them. She early on made some noise about price controls, but as the campaign proceeded, a populist message didn’t happen and realistically could not have happened given the Democrats’ immense entanglement with their Wall Street financiers.

Of the voters who said inflation has caused their family “severe hardship,” 76 percent voted for Trump according to exit polls. Of those who said inflation caused “no hardship,” 78 percent voted for Harris. So why would you do anything serious about inflation if your real base of support, upper income voters, don’t feel any pain?

Chuck Schmer enthusiastically summarized the new class politics in 2016:

For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.

Now, didn’t that turn out to be the perfect strategy for four more years of Trump?

The tent is quiet, save for the whistle of the wind slicing through the thin walls and the occasional patter of raindrops. My nights in the tent in Nuseirat refugee camp are endless. They feel heavy, with a cold that seeps into my bones despite my five mismatched layers of clothes, all the clothes I own.

How did I fall asleep before the war that uprooted our lives? Effortlessly, cradled by the warmth of my bed and the comfort of familiar walls. Now each attempt to close my eyes feels like a battle against the biting chill and the relentless ghosts of a life I once knew.

I live in a tent with my mother, and it is all we have got. Each night, we pull our old worn-out mattresses close together, huddling for warmth. The next day, our breath creates tiny clouds in the icy air as we whisper “good morning,” showing only our faces from beneath our blankets to greet each other. Moving feels impossible until the sun rises, its faint warmth coaxing us out of the cocoon we’ve created against the cold.

The day doesn’t bring much relief because the tent offers no privacy. I hear my cousin in the tent next to ours complaining she hasn’t slept all night because of the freezing weather. Her voice sounds weary: our struggles are shared yet solitary. This cold doesn’t just invade my body, it steals the simplest joys of life.

Studying in the early morning before the chaos of the day begins is another challenge. My fingers stiffen, and my hands feel so fragile that holding a pen tightly enough to write becomes an impossible task. I feel that my frozen fingers will break with the slightest movement.

This cold doesn’t just invade my body, it steals the simplest joys of life.

But my studies are more than routine; they’re a lifeline, a defiance against the war that has stripped me of almost everything I cherished. The cold bites at my resolve, but I force myself to read, to hold the pen.

Before this war winter meant something entirely different. It was the season to sit around the fire with mama, sipping Sahlab (milk pudding), listening to the elders’ stories. Rain wasn’t a threat; it was replenishment for the earth, a sound that lulled me into peace and happiness. Now, the first drop of rain sends me hurrying to inspect the tent’s fragile seams, fearing leaks that could soak our few possessions. Another unbearable loss.

I miss my friends, too—the warmth of our shared laughter, the way we used to run from a downpour to watch it from some safe place together. That circle of joy feels shattered now. There is no safe place in Gaza.

Some of those friends are in Egypt, some have remained in northern Gaza, while others are scattered across the south. Visiting those who are nearby is no longer a simple matter. It would take hours to travel what used to be a half-hour journey and cost more money than I can spare and risk the wartime dangers of being robbed, raped, or killed.

The physical toll of this refugee life weighs on me as well. Ever since the temperature began to plummet, the cold of the tent has left me in a constant state of illness. The flu lingers, seemingly permanent, and I’ve been suffering from persistent backache for weeks now. Recovery from even such minor sickness takes far longer than it should because I cannot find the medicines I need. My body, worn down by 14 months of war, feels more vulnerable with each passing day.

In the scratch of my pen against paper—despite my frozen fingers—I mumble to myself that this knowledge I am gaining is a form of power, that the act of writing itself is resistance.

The psychological weight of these days and sleepless nights is as heavy as the biting cold. The tent, though it offers minimal shelter, feels like a prison that traps me with impossibly distant memories. Ghosts of my past creep into my mind: a heated home, the security of being surrounded by four solid walls, and the simplicity of closing my eyes without worry. Each memory is a double-edged sword, bringing both comfort and pain.

Yet even here there are moments that give me courage. Every morning, as my mother and I exchange smiles from beneath the blankets, I feel a spark of defiance against the bleakness around us. In the scratch of my pen against paper—despite my frozen fingers—I mumble to myself that this knowledge I am gaining is a form of power, that the act of writing itself is resistance. In those moments there is hope that even the longest winters end.

A primary responsibility of the government is, of course, to keep us safe. Given that obligation, you might think that the Washington establishment would be hard at work trying to prevent the ultimate catastrophe—a nuclear war. But you would be wrong.

A small, hardworking contingent of elected officials is indeed trying to roll back the nuclear arms race and make it harder for such world-ending weaponry ever to be used again, including stalwarts like Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.), and other members of the Congressional Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control Working Group. But they face ever stiffer headwinds from a resurgent network of nuclear hawks who want to build more kinds of nuclear weapons and ever more of them. And mind you, that would all be in addition to the Pentagon’s current plans for spending up to $2 trillion over the next three decades to create a whole new generation of nuclear weapons, stoking a dangerous new nuclear arms race.

There are many drivers of this push for a larger, more dangerous arsenal—from the misguided notion that more nuclear weapons will make us safer to an entrenched network of companies, governmental institutions, members of Congress, and policy pundits who will profit (directly or indirectly) from an accelerated nuclear arms race. One indicator of the current state of affairs is the resurgence of former Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl, who spent 18 years in Congress opposing even the most modest efforts to control nuclear weapons before he went on to work as a lobbyist and policy advocate for the nuclear weapons complex.

His continuing prominence in debates over nuclear policy—evidenced most recently by his position as vice chair of a congressionally appointed commission that sought to legitimize an across-the-board nuclear buildup—is a testament to our historical amnesia about the risks posed by nuclear weapons.

Senator Strangelove

Republican Jon Kyl was elected to the Senate from Arizona in 1995 and served in that body until 2013, plus a brief stint in late 2018 to fill out the term of the late Sen. John McCain.

One of Kyl’s signature accomplishments in his early years in office was his role in lobbying fellow Republican senators to vote against ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which went down to a 51 to 48 Senate defeat in October 1999. That treaty banned explosive nuclear testing and included monitoring and verification procedures meant to ensure that its members met their obligations. Had it been widely adopted, it might have slowed the spread of nuclear weapons, now possessed by nine countries, and prevented a return to the days when aboveground testing spread cancer-causing radiation to downwind communities.

The defeat of the CTBT marked the beginning of a decades-long process of dismantling the global nuclear arms control system, launched by the December 2001 withdrawal of President George W. Bush’s administration from the Nixon-era Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty. That treaty was designed to prevent a “defense-offense” nuclear arms race in which one side’s pursuit of anti-missile defenses sparks the other side to build more—and ever more capable—nuclear-armed missiles. James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace called the withdrawal from the ABM Treaty an “epic mistake” that fueled a new nuclear arms race. Kyl argued otherwise, claiming the withdrawal removed “a straitjacket from our national security.”

The truly naive ones are the nuclear hawks who insist on clinging to the dubious notion that vast (and still spreading) stores of nuclear weaponry can be kept around indefinitely without ever being used again, by accident or design.

The end of the ABM treaty created the worst of both worlds—an incentive for adversaries to build up their nuclear arsenals coupled with an abject failure to develop weaponry that could actually defend the United States in the event of a real-world nuclear attack.

Then, in August 2019, during the first Trump administration, the U.S. withdrew from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which prohibited the deployment of medium-range missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers. That treaty had been particularly important because it eliminated the danger of having missiles in Europe that could reach their targets in a very brief time frame, a situation that could shorten the trigger on a possible nuclear confrontation.

Then-Sen. Kyl also used the eventual pullout from the INF treaty as a reason to exit yet another nuclear agreement, the New START treaty, co-signing a letter with 24 of his colleagues urging the Trump administration to reject New START. He was basically suggesting that lifting one set of safeguards against a possible nuclear confrontation was somehow a reason to junk a separate treaty that had ensured some stability in the U.S.-Russian strategic nuclear balance.

Finally, in November 2023, NATO suspended its observance of a treaty that had limited the number of troops the Western alliance and Russia could deploy in Europe after the government of Vladimir Putin withdrew from the treaty earlier that year in the midst of his ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

The last U.S.-Russian arms control agreement, New START, caps the strategic nuclear warheads of the two countries at 1,550 each and has monitoring mechanisms to make sure each side is holding up its obligations. That treaty is currently hanging by a thread. It expires in 2026, and there is no indication that Russia is inclined to negotiate an extension in the context of its current state of relations with Washington.

As early as December 2020, Kyl was angling to get the government to abandon any plans to extend New START, coauthoring an op-ed on the subject for the Fox News website. He naturally ignored the benefits of an agreement aimed at reducing the chance of an accidental nuclear conflict, even as he made misleading statements about it being unbalanced in favor of Russia.

Back in 2010, when New START was first under consideration in the Senate, Kyl played a key role in extracting a pledge from the Obama administration to throw an extra $80 billion at the nuclear warhead complex in exchange for Republican support of the treaty. Even after that concession was made, Kyl continued to work tirelessly to build opposition to the treaty. If, in the end, he failed to block its Senate ratification, he did help steer billions in additional funding to the nuclear weapons complex.

Our Man from Northrop Grumman

In 2017, between stints in the Senate, Kyl worked as a lobbyist with the law firm Covington and Burling, where one of his clients was Northrop Grumman, the largest beneficiary of the Pentagon’s nuclear weapons spending binge. That company is the lead contractor on both the future B-21 nuclear bomber and Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). The Sentinel program drew widespread attention recently when it was revealed that, in just a few years, its estimated cost had jumped by an astonishing 81%, pushing the price for building those future missiles to more than $140 billion (with tens of billions more needed to operate them in their years of “service” to come).

That stunning cost spike for the Sentinel triggered a Pentagon review that could have led to a cancellation or major restructuring of the program. Instead, the Pentagon opted to stay the course despite the enormous price tag, asserting that the missile is “essential to U.S. national security and is the best option to meet the needs of our warfighters.”

Independent experts disagree. Former Secretary of Defense William Perry, for instance, has pointed out that such ICBMs are “some of the most dangerous weapons we have” because a president, warned of a possible nuclear attack by an enemy power, would have only minutes to decide whether to launch them, greatly increasing the risk of an accidental nuclear war triggered by a false alarm. Perry is hardly alone. In July 2024, 716 scientists, including 10 Nobel laureates and 23 members of the National Academies, called for the Sentinel to be canceled, describing the system as “expensive, dangerous, and unnecessary.”

Meanwhile, as vice chair of a congressionally mandated commission on the future of U.S. nuclear weapons policy, Kyl has been pushing a worst-case scenario regarding the current nuclear balance that could set the stage for producing even larger numbers of (Northrop Grumman-built) nuclear bombers, putting multiple warheads on (Northrop Grumman-built) Sentinel missiles, expanding the size of the nuclear warhead complex, and emplacing yet more tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. His is a call, in other words, to return to the days of the Cold War nuclear arms race at a moment when the lack of regular communication between Washington and Moscow can only increase the risk of a nuclear confrontation.

Kyl does seem to truly believe that building yet more nuclear weapons will indeed bolster this country’s security, and he’s hardly alone when it comes to Congress or, for that matter, the next Trump administration. Consider that a clear sign that reining in the nuclear arms race will involve not only making the construction of nuclear weapons far less lucrative, but also confronting the distinctly outmoded and unbearably dangerous arguments about their alleged strategic value.

The Advocate

In October 2023, when the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on a report from the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission, it had an opportunity for a serious discussion of nuclear strategy and spending, and how best to prevent a nuclear war. Given the stakes for all of us should a nuclear war between the United States and Russia break out—up to an estimated 90 million of us dead within the first few days of such a conflict and up to five billion lives lost once radiation sickness and reduced food production from the resulting planetary “nuclear winter” kick in—you might have hoped for a wide-ranging debate on the implications of the commission’s proposals.

Unfortunately, much of the discussion during the hearing involved senators touting weapons systems or facilities producing them located in their states, with little or no analysis of what would best protect Americans and our allies. For example, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) stressed the importance of Raytheon’s SM-6 missile—produced in Arizona, of course—and commended the commission for proposing to spend more on that program. Sen. Jackie Rosen (R-Nev.) praised the role of the Nevada National Security Site, formerly known as the Nevada Test Site, for making sure such warheads were reliable and would explode as intended in a nuclear conflict. You undoubtedly won’t be shocked to learn that she then called for more funding to address what she described as “significant delays” in upgrading that Nevada facility. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) proudly pointed to the billions in military work being done in his state: “In Alabama we build submarines, ships, airplanes, missiles. You name it, we build it.” Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) requested that witnesses confirm how absolutely essential the Kansas City Plant, which makes non-nuclear parts for nuclear weapons, remains for American security.

The next few years will be crucial in determining whether ever growing numbers of nuclear weapons remain entrenched in this country’s budgets and its global strategy for decades to come or whether common sense can carry the day and spark the reduction and eventual elimination of such instruments of mass devastation.

And so it went until Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) asked what the nuclear buildup recommended by the commission would cost. She suggested that, if past history is any guide, much of the funding proposed by the commission would be wasted: “I’m willing to spend what it takes to keep America safe, but I’m certainly not comfortable with a blank check for programs that already have a history of gross mismanagement.”

The answer from Kyl and his co-chair Marilyn Creedon was that the commission had not even bothered to estimate the costs of any of what it was suggesting and that its recommendations should be considered regardless of the price. This, of course, was good news for nuclear weapons contractors like Northrop Grumman, but bad news for taxpayers.

The Brink of Armageddon?

Nuclear hardliners frequently suggest that anyone advocating the reduction or elimination of nuclear arsenals is outrageously naive and thoroughly out of touch with the realities of great power politics. As it happens though, the truly naive ones are the nuclear hawks who insist on clinging to the dubious notion that vast (and still spreading) stores of nuclear weaponry can be kept around indefinitely without ever being used again, by accident or design.

There is another way. Even as Washington, Moscow, and Beijing continue the production of a new generation of nuclear weapons—such weaponry is also possessed by France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom—a growing number of nations have gone on record against any further nuclear arms race and in favor of eliminating such weapons altogether. In fact, the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has now been ratified by 73 countries.

As Beatrice Fihn, former director of the Nobel-prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, or ICAN, pointed out in a recent essay in The New York Times, there are numerous examples of how collective action has transformed “seemingly impossible situations.” She cited the impact of the antinuclear movement of the 1980s in reversing a superpower nuclear arms race and setting the stage for sharp reductions in the numbers of such weapons, as well as a successful international effort to bring the nuclear ban treaty into existence. She noted that a crucial first step in bringing the potentially catastrophic nuclear arms race under control would involve changing the way we talk about such weapons, especially debunking the myth that they are somehow “magical tools” that make us all more secure. She also emphasized the importance of driving home that this planet’s growing nuclear arsenals are evidence that all too many of those in power are acquiescing in a reckless strategy “based on threatening to commit global collective suicide.”

The next few years will be crucial in determining whether ever growing numbers of nuclear weapons remain entrenched in this country’s budgets and its global strategy for decades to come or whether common sense can carry the day and spark the reduction and eventual elimination of such instruments of mass devastation. A vigorous public debate on the risks of an accelerated nuclear arms race would be a necessary first step toward pulling the world back from the brink of Armageddon.

A few days before the end of 2024, the independent magazine +972 reported that “Israeli army forces stormed the Kamal Adwan Hospital compound in Beit Lahiya, culminating a nearly week-long siege of the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza.” While fire spread through the hospital, its staff issued a statement saying that “surgical departments, laboratory, maintenance, and emergency units have been completely burned,” and patients were “at risk of dying at any moment.”

The magazine explained that “the assault on medical facilities in Beit Lahiya is the latest escalation in Israel’s brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, which over the last three months forcibly displaced the vast majority of Palestinians living in the area.” The journalism from +972—in sharp contrast to the dominant coverage of the Gaza war from U.S. media—has provided clarity about real-time events, putting them in overall context rather than episodic snippets.

+972 Magazine is the work of Palestinian and Israeli journalists who describe their core values as “a commitment to equity, justice, and freedom of information”—which necessarily means “accurate and fair journalism that spotlights the people and communities working to oppose occupation and apartheid.” But the operative values of mainstream U.S. news outlets have been very different.

What was sinister about proclaiming “Israel’s 9/11” was what happened after America’s 9/11.

Key aspects of how the U.S. establishment has narrated the “war on terror” for more than two decades were standard in American media and politics from the beginning of the Gaza war in October 2023. For instance:

• Routine discourse avoided voices condemning the U.S. government for its role in the slaughter of civilians.
• The U.S. ally usually eluded accountability for its high-tech atrocities committed from the air.
• Civilian deaths in Gaza were habitually portrayed as unintended.
• Claims that Israel was aiming to minimize civilian casualties were normally taken at face value.
• Media coverage and political rhetoric stayed away from acknowledging that Israel’s actions might fit into such categories as “mass murder” or “terrorism.”
• Overall, news media and U.S. government officials emitted a mindset that Israeli lives really mattered a lot more than Palestinian lives.

The Gaza war has received a vast amount of U.S. media attention, but how much it actually communicated about the human realities was a whole other matter. The belief or unconscious notion that news media were conveying war’s realities ended up obscuring those realities all the more. And journalism’s inherent limitations were compounded by media biases.

During the first five months of the war, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post applied the word “brutal” or its variants far more often to Palestinians (77%) than to Israelis (23%). The findings, in a study by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), pointed to an imbalance that occurred “even though Israeli violence was responsible for more than 20 times as much loss of life.” News articles and opinion pieces were remarkably in the same groove; “the lopsided rate at which ‘brutal’ was used in op-eds to characterize Palestinians over Israelis was exactly the same as the supposedly straight news stories.”

Despite exceptional coverage at times, what was most profoundly important about war in Gaza—what it was like to be terrorized, massacred, maimed, and traumatized—remained almost entirely out of view. Gradually, surface accounts reaching the American public came to seem repetitious and normal. As death numbers kept rising and months went by, the Gaza war diminished as a news topic, while most talk shows seldom discussed it.

As with the slaughter via bombardment, the Israeli-U.S. alliance treated the increasing onset of starvation, dehydration, and fatal disease as a public-relations problem. Along the way, official pronouncements—and the policies they tried to justify—were deeply anchored in the unspoken premise that some lives really matter and some really don’t.

The propaganda approach was foreshadowed on October 8, 2023, with Israel in shock from the atrocities that Hamas had committed the previous day. “This is Israel’s 9/11,” the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations told reporters in New York, and he repeated: “This is Israel’s 9/11.” Meanwhile, in a PBS News Weekend interview, Israel’s ambassador to the United States declared: “This is, as someone said, our 9/11.”

What was sinister about proclaiming “Israel’s 9/11” was what happened after America’s 9/11. Wearing the cloak of victim, the United States proceeded to use the horrible tragedy that occurred inside its borders as an open-ended reason to kill in the name of retaliation, self-protection, and, of course, the “war on terror.”

As Israel’s war on Gaza persisted, the explanations often echoed the post-9/11 rationales for the “war on terror” from the U.S. government: authorizing future crimes against humanity as necessary in the light of certain prior events. Reverberation was in the air from late 2001, when the Pentagon’s leader Donald Rumsfeld asserted that “responsibility for every single casualty in this war, whether they’re innocent Afghans or innocent Americans, rests at the feet of the al Qaeda and the Taliban.” After five weeks of massacring Palestinian people, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “any civilian loss is a tragedy”—and quickly added that “the blame should be placed squarely on Hamas.”

The licenses to kill were self-justifying. And they had no expiration date.

This piece was originally published by MediaNorth. It is adapted from the afterword in the paperback edition of Norman Solomon’s latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine (The New Press).

The first official reference to Gaza becoming increasingly uninhabitable was made by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, or UNCTAD, in 2012, when the population of the Gaza Strip was estimated at 1.8 million inhabitants.

The intention of the report, The Gaza Strip: The Economic Situation and the Prospects for Development, was not merely to prophesize, but to warn that if the world continued to stand idle in the face of the ongoing blockade on Gaza, a humanitarian catastrophe was imminent.

Yet, little was done, though the U.N. continued with its countdown, increasing the frequency and urgency of its warnings, especially following major wars.

Even after the devastating war on Gaza ends and the rebuilding of the strip concludes, the ecological and environmental harm that Israel has caused will remain for many years to come.

Another report in 2015 from UNCTAD stated that the Gaza crisis had intensified following the most destructive war to that date, the year before. The war had destroyed hundreds of factories, thousands of homes, and displaced tens of thousands of people.

By 2020, though, based on the criteria set by the U.N., Gaza should have become "uninhabitable." Yet, little was done to remedy the crisis. The population grew rapidly, while resources, including Gaza's land mass, shrank due to the ever-expanding Israeli "buffer zone." The prospects for the "world's largest open-air prison" became even dimmer.

Yet, the international community did little to heed the call of UNCTAD and other U.N. and international institutions. The humanitarian crisis—situated within a prolonged political crisis, a siege, repeated wars, and daily violence—worsened, reaching, on October 7, 2023, the point of implosion.

One wonders if the world had paid even the slightest attention to Gaza and the cries of people trapped behind walls, barbed wire, and electric fences, whether the current war and genocide could have been avoided.

It is all moot now. The worst-case scenario has actualized in a way that even the most pessimistic estimates by Palestinian, Arab, or international groups could not have foreseen.

Not only is Gaza now beyond "uninhabitable," but, according to Greenpeace, it will be "uninhabitable for generations to come." This does not hinge on the resilience of Palestinians in Gaza, whose legendary steadfastness is hardly disputed. However, there are essential survival needs that even the strongest people cannot replace with their mere desire to survive.

In just the first 120 days of war, "staggering" carbon emissions were estimated at 536,410 tons of carbon dioxide. Ninety percent of that deadly pollution was "attributed to Israel's air bombardment and ground invasion," according to Greenpeace, which concluded that the total sum of carbon emissions "is greater than the annual carbon footprint of many climate-vulnerable nations."

A report issued around the same time by the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) painted an equally frightening picture of what was taking place in Gaza as a direct result of the war. "Water and sanitation have collapsed," it declared last June. "Coastal areas, soil, and ecosystems have been severely impacted," it continued.

But that was over seven months ago, when parts of Gaza were still standing. Now, almost all of Gaza has been destroyed. Garbage has been piling up for 15 months without a single facility to process it efficiently. Disease is widespread, and all hospitals have either been destroyed in the bombings, burned to the ground, or bulldozed. Many of the sick are dying in their tents without ever seeing a doctor.

Without any outside assistance, it was only natural for the disaster to worsen. Last December, Médecins Sans Frontières issued a report titled Gaza: Life in a Death Trap. The report, a devastating read, describes the state of medical infrastructure in Gaza, which can be summed up in a single word: non-existent.

Israel has attacked 512 healthcare facilities between October 2023 and September 2024, killing 500 healthcare workers. This means that a population is trying to survive during one of the harshest wars ever recorded, without any serious medical attention. This includes nearly half a million people suffering from various mental health disorders.

By December, Gaza's Government Media Office reported that there are an estimated 23 million tons of debris resulting from the dropping of 75,000 tons of explosives—in addition to other forms of destruction. This has released 281,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the air.

Once the war is over, Gaza will be rebuilt. Though Palestinian sumud (steadfastness) is capable of restoring Gaza to its former self, however long it takes, a study conducted by Queen Mary University in the U.K. said that, for the destroyed structures to be rebuilt, an additional 60 million tons of CO2 will be released into an already severely impacted environment.

In essence, this means that even after the devastating war on Gaza ends and the rebuilding of the strip concludes, the ecological and environmental harm that Israel has caused will remain for many years to come.

It is baffling that the very Western countries, which speak tirelessly about environmental protection, preservation, and warning against carbon emissions, are the same entities that helped sustain the war on Gaza, either through arming Israel or remaining silent in the face of the ongoing atrocities.

The price of this hypocrisy is the enduring suffering of millions of people and the devastation of their environment. Isn't it time for the world to wake up and collectively declare: enough is enough?

Republicans are using their massive structural media and social media advantage to try to destroy Gavin Newsom, Karen Bass, and the California Democratic Party.

It follows an old script, that’s recently been played out in Russia and Hungary, among other nations: Want to seize control of a nation and turn it into a neofascist state with the consent of the people? Just take control of the channels of public information and news, and then turn lies about your opponents and their supporters into a perceived reality.

Over the past 50 years, Democrats have been busy focusing on and working out policies to benefit average Americans. Increasing access to medical care, $35 insulin, reducing student debt, the CFPB to protect people from banks, cleaning up the environment, American Rescue Act, Inflation Reduction Act, etc.

Republicans and billionaires aligned with them, however, have not only fought against all these efforts, but, far more importantly, have engaged in a massive power play to shift control of popular opinion — and thus control of our government — toward themselves in a way they believe could be permanent.

The plan for this wasn’t a secret; it was laid out in a 1971 memo by tobacco lawyer Lewis Powell, who Richard Nixon put on the Supreme Court in 1972 where he could participate in putting the plan into action — as he did with the Buckley and Bellotti decisions (Powell wrote the latter) legalizing political bribery by saying “money is free speech” and “corporations are persons.”

It began the corruption of the American government by the Reagan administration.

But the details of the GOP’s efforts — which Democrats and wealthy Democratic donors should begin to emulate now if our republic is to survive — are rarely discussed. Here’s what they did, in outline, and how Democrats can fight back.

First, Republicans realized that public opinion drives everything, so they set out to seize as much control over the instrument that drives public opinion as they could: the media.

The details of the GOP’s efforts — which Democrats and wealthy Democratic donors should begin to emulate now if our republic is to survive — are rarely discussed. Here’s what they did, in outline, and how Democrats can fight back.

Second, they realized that the Senate was the power-based linchpin for control of the legislative branch and the key to controlling both the Executive and Judicial branches because only the Senate confirms presidential cabinet positions and federal judges.

If they controlled the Senate much of the time and occasionally got a Republican president, they could also easily stack both the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court.

To control the Senate, they knew, they had to control a majority of the states. And that came back to controlling public opinion through the media, particularly in low-population or largely rural states where media could be bought or coopted cheaply.

To first influence public opinion, back in the 1970s-1990s era, billionaires associated with the GOP built a whole series of institutions whose sole purpose was to influence public opinion in ways that comported with the billionaire’s oligarchic agenda.

They crank out policy papers, write op-eds for newspapers and websites, engage in social media, and provide “expert” guests for TV, radio, NPR, and podcasts. Another major function is to “educate” and lobby Republican elected officials about policy and nominees to executive and judicial positions.

Those include:
— Cato Institute
— Mercatus Center at George Mason University
— Americans for Prosperity
— Heritage Foundation
— Manhattan Institute
— American Enterprise Institute (AEI)
— Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI)
— DonorsTrust
— Independent Women's Forum (IWF)
— Federalist Society
— Judicial Crisis Network (Now Concord Fund)
— Republican State Leadership Committee
— Alliance Defending Freedom
— Marble Freedom Trust
— 85 Fund (Formerly Judicial Education Project)

They also created the State Policy Network, which funds and guides a network of state-based think tanks in every state in America. They similarly influence political discussion through interactions with the media by publishing papers, participating in social media, and lobbying/educating Republican governors, state representatives, and senators. (At the end of this article is a list of them.)

There is no similar infrastructure on the left because no lefty billionaires ever set out to create one.

There are a few left-leaning think tanks and policy outfits like Public Citizen, NAACP, ACLU, Center for American Progress, Economic Policy Institute, Roosevelt Institute, Demos, and the Century Foundation. None of these, however, have levels of funding, inter-agency coordination, or integration with the Democratic Party that even begins to approximate the list of conservative organizations above.

In addition to creating powerful, well-funded groups to influence public policy, conservatives focused on the media itself, which they had historically seen as their enemy. Early efforts included Lee Atwater’s famous 1980s “work the refs” strategy of complaining loudly whenever media outlets reported on partisan issues that reflected poorly on the GOP and its politicians.

These were followed by funding and rolling out Rush Limbaugh’s show (1988), Reagan fast-tracking the citizenship of Rupert Murdoch and the subsequent start of Fox “News”; Sinclair’s purchase of hundreds of local TV stations; billionaires like the Dickey brothers purchasing hundreds of local radio stations; and Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital purchasing Clear Channel (2008) and then taking progressive Air America programming off their stations (2010).

Multimillionaire televangelists and wealthy rightwing Hispanics got into the game as well over the past two decades, purchasing over a thousand radio stations nationwide.

The result of these collective efforts is around 1500 radio stations programming rightwing talk (and hundreds of young “farm team” rightwing talk show hosts learning the trade in local markets), almost a thousand “nonprofit” religious stations that also push rightwing politics, and several hundred rightwing Spanish-language stations (that had a huge influence on the Latino vote in 2024).

Rightwing media is now a multi-hundred-billion-dollar-a-year enterprise that includes three major cable TV networks, and more recently rightwing billionaires have ventured into the newspaper business. Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post, Patrick Soon-Shiong picked up the LA Times, Rupert Murdoch bought the NY Post and The Wall Street Journal, and New York City-based hedge funds run by rightwing billionaires own around half of all local newspapers in the country.

And now they’re focusing this media behemoth toward their efforts to destroy the Democratic Party in California and neuter Governor Newsom’s hopes to one day become president.

Again, there is no leftwing or Democratic analog to this media empire that’s been created and is held together largely by a handful of conservative billionaires.

A major parallel strategy Republicans followed was to use this media monster to take over enough states to take control of the Senate and, even when not in majority control, use the filibuster to block Democratic efforts at reform.

There is no leftwing or Democratic analog to this media empire that’s been created and is held together largely by a handful of conservative billionaires.

Their initial focus was low-population and largely rural states, as radio stations, TV stations, and newspapers in those markets are often very cheap.

By the end of 2010, when Romney/Bain shut down the progressive Air America radio network that had helped get Barack Obama elected in 2008, one could drive from coast-to-coast and continuously hear rightwing talk radio but only rarely (when passing through big cities or on SiriusXM) find a progressive voice.

This silencing of progressive talk radio and absolute dominance of the airwaves, both on radio and TV, made it easy for Republicans over the past 35 years to flip low-population and rural states that had been Democratic for generations into the GOP’s camp.

West Virginia, Arkansas (former governor: Bill Clinton), Kentucky, Louisiana, Alabama, Montana (former governor: Brian Schweitzer), Iowa (former governor: Tom Vilsack), Wyoming (former governor: Mike Sullivan), Tennessee (former senator: Al Gore), Georgia (former governor: Roy Barnes), Missouri, and Texas (former governor: Ann Richards) all went from solid blue or largely blue to solid red, as there have functionally been no dissenting voices heard in local media since the 1980s.

A large handful of other states followed a similar trajectory, giving Republicans majority control of the least democratic of our legislative institutions, the Senate, where Wyoming (pop: 584,000) has the same two senators — and thus the same legislative power — as California (pop: 38.9 million).

Following these victories, Republicans turned their attention to the fastest growing aspects of the Fourth Estate: Social media and podcasts. With help from Vladimir Putin’s Internet Research Agency and Wagner Group trolls, GOP operatives, politicians, talk hosts, podcasters, influencers, and cyberbullies began to saturate social media and podcasts with messages condemning Democrats for every little thing that went wrong in America.

Most recently, they’ve brought control of X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp under their banner, both through allowing the uninhibited spread of political lies and disinformation and by tilting their secret algorithms that control what content people see toward the right.

As a result, Republicans — using their vast think tank and media power — have succeeded in rolling back voting rights, civil rights, women’s rights, and taking an axe to public education. And now they’re using lies and slander to go after Gavin Newsom.

This massive machine was so successful in recasting the public perception of elected Democrats that millions of dispirited formerly-Democratic voters simply gave up and failed to vote in the 2024 election.

Next in their sights — along with more tax cuts for the billionaires who funded all this — are healthcare and Social Security, as they work to roll back the last 100 years and end the New Deal and Great Society.

If Democrats want to slow this speeding train heading toward single-party rule of America, they must get with the program and begin to support existing and build out new and powerful policy think tanks and media operations.

The coming election of a new DNC chair presents an opportunity to begin reforming and redirecting the efforts of the Party to a 50-state strategy that can effectively compete with Republicans.

And billionaires with a social conscience — like MacKenzie Scott, Reid Hoffman, Laurene Powell Jobs, and Tom Steyer — need to consider emulating the efforts of Charles Koch, Miriam Adelson, Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, Robert and Rebekah Mercer, and Ken Griffin.

Republicans have already decided to exploit the climate-change-driven wildfires on the west coast to try to flip California from Blue to Red in the next elections. They’re using their massive media machine to promote naked lies, blaming the fires on Democratic politicians while obscuring the role of the climate change driven by oil industry executives who fund the GOP and many of their think tanks.

Without an all-hands-on-deck effort to build out a Democratic media machine now, our precious democracy may soon be replaced with an authoritarian dystopia that serves nobody but the morbidly rich.

And California could become their biggest victory since the election of Governor Reagan.

Can I admit something to you? Gotta say... I feel embarrassed about this. Perhaps even ashamed.

Okay, here goes: Yes, when I read, see, or hear accounts of what is happening in Los Angeles right now, I do experience empathy and sadness and compassion. And—oh yeah—also a healthy dose of heartbreak and rage about the torrents of disinformation that, these days, automatically mushroom around any event of any significance, especially if climate change is involved.

But—and here's the confession part—I am guessing that my primary reaction, the one about which I feel shame, is based upon this: I'm not there.

In other words, since it's not myself (or any of my loved ones) who is being directly and viscerally and financially impacted, my reactions of empathy occur (literally and figuratively) at a distance. Sure, I'll experience these feelings for a while, especially as I am taking in information or pictures about the situation, but then most of that will quickly evaporate as I go about my day. My at-a-distance reactions almost never move me to take direct and impactful and lasting action, because... I'm not there.

And so my primary reaction is a mixture of relief and (here comes the shame part) some level of indifference.

I'm not proud of this. But there it is.

Right now, there are obviously many thousands of people in Los Angeles who are "there." Right there. Exactly there. They are directly experiencing one of the scientifically understood symptoms of a fossil fuel-supercharged, heating planet.

It's an April day in 2001 and I sit across from the chief of hepatology of Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia as he shares the conclusions of various diagnostic procedures brought on by some recent health difficulties.

"David, you have a disease called Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis (PSC), which is a progressive narrowing of the bile ducts."

Hmm. Okay. That doesn't sound all that bad, right? Okay, I'm not even sure what bile ducts do or where they are located, but...

"So," the doc continues, "What it comes down to is that you will eventually need a liver transplant, and there's nothing we can do to prevent that."

Shock. Utter shock. You see, I wasn't feeling any symptoms of this disease, this PSC. None at all. I'd been dealing with an unrelated medical matter and labs revealed that something was off with my liver numbers and further investigation revealed the PSC.

It took me about a month to get over the shock of my diagnosis. And then... well... I just got on with living my life mostly as if nothing had changed. Since I had no symptoms (they would begin to kick in about three years down the road—fatigue, itching, jaundice) and could do nothing to prevent the disease progression, it was as if I didn't have a disease at all.

I wasn't "there" yet.

Back to Los Angeles. Full Disclosure: I know much more about climate change than the average person. I researched it intensively and wrote 15 published articles back in 2012-2015. Then... I mostly gave up writing about it. Why? Because it gradually became apparent that mere information—no matter how compellingly or creatively expressed—was NOT going to move most people to take significant action.

Why? Because most people would not be "there" for years and decades to come? Sure, climate change would become more and more symptomatic, but the Earth is a big place. An increasingly occurring wildfire here or there, a superstorm here or there, a superdrought here or there, still ends up leaving the vast majority of folks not being obviously and viscerally impacted.

I mean... at least at first.

January, 2006. Dr. Susan Althoff—one of three surgeons who performed the liver transplant—shoots me a steely look: "David, we WILL get you through this."

I am laying on my bed in the liver-transplant wing of the University of Pennsylvania Hospital. My youngest brother is also in this wing since, about a week before, he donated half of his liver to me (It's called a Live Donor Transplant).

So now I've got a new half-a-liver (which, incredibly, will grow to a 100% liver in about a month's time, as will my brother's remaining half-a-liver). The problem is that my body has so far rejected my new liver. This is not particularly uncommon. Suddenly, there is a huge hunk of "foreign" tissue inside of me, and my body's immune system is trying to eject it. There are drugs for this, which I am now taking and will be taking for the rest of my life.

But these drugs are being overwhelmed, and so they put me on the next protocol—high dose steroids. And—wheeeeee!—the steroids DO give me drug-induced diabetes but are not enough to turn the tide. Dr. Althoff has just entered to give me that piece of bad news. I am beyond exhausted and respond with some expression of despair and hopelessness.

Dr. Althoff responds with that steely look (see above) and explains: "We have one more protocol called OKT-3 (when they bring out the letters-and-numbers meds, you know it's serious). We've only used it three times in the last year. You'll know it's working if you get a high fever and start to feel really, really sick."

Twelve hours later, I am shivering under a special, ice-filled blanket. I have a high fever and feel quite sick, wrecked even. The OKT-3 is apparently working.

Finally, I am "there." Boy-oh-boy, am I there. Right there. Exactly there. Everything else in the world disappears. Every single thing other than wanting this to stop and wanting to get better and feel better. I would do anything.

Right now, there are obviously many thousands of people in Los Angeles who are "there." Right there. Exactly there. They are directly experiencing one of the scientifically understood symptoms of a fossil fuel-supercharged, heating planet. Most of them, I am sure, would do anything to make it stop and to make things better.

Even the ones who—subject to the unceasing and enormously financed propaganda of fossil fuel corporations and the governments and political parties that they have purchased—have denied the reality of human-caused climate change (as well as the ones—let us not forget—who blandly "believe" it, but have placed it way down on the list of concerns) will be less likely to dismiss the scientific reports that will be published finding that the intensity of these fires was 20% or 40% or 75% more likely to have happened due to the inexorably heating planet. These reports will be coming. This is certain.

Because—just like me under that ice blanket—they are finally "there," their nervous systems violated and assaulted. Their world turned upside down.

I am forever grateful to my brother. Yes, my situation was serious. But I was only one person. And I was willing to go along with the science. And I only needed one other person (with a compatible blood-type!!) to step up. And, lastly, as my fatigue increased and my weight melted away and my eyes and skin turned yellow, I was brought at least partially "there" and became willing to undergo fairly extreme and grueling duress to set things right.

But when it comes to setting things right climate-wise, there are 8.2 billion of us. Most are ceaselessly occupied trying to make ends meet. Many are swayed by the flat-out disinformation campaigns of those wishing to keep things as they are. Most—though this ratio will gradually swing the other way—are not yet nearly "there" in terms of direct-and-undeniable climate impacts.

This is a stark brew.

Things can get stark under the ice blanket or the thousand-and-one other grueling demands of major surgery and recovery (I needed a follow-up surgery in 2010 which was—I kid you not—at least 200% more difficult than the transplant. Once things are allowed to go a great degree out-of-balance, it becomes much more likely that unforeseen complications and collapses will ensue.)

I could have died during my transplant in 2006. I very nearly did die in the 2010 surgery.

Some people have died in the LA fires. The body count continues to grow. Many, many more have lost now-uninsurable homes, cars, pets, etc. The "stark brew" cited above all but assures that millions more people will die before anything close to enough "there-ness" occurs throughout the populace to prompt enough people to stand for change—even the grueling and deeply inconvenient change that is demanded by the physics of Earth.

I wish it were different. So do many people whom I know.

But it isn't different.

One barely noticed pledge by President-elect Donald Trump during the 2024 campaign appeared in a May Time magazine interview that offers an especially ominous warning about Trump 2.0. If he won a new term, Trump said, he would “probably” disband the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response policy established by Congress in 2022.

Fast forward to his new nominees, especially Secretary of Health and Human Services anti-vax conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has said he would pause National Institute of Health infectious disease and drug development research for eight years. As the saying goes, we might have a problem.

With confirmation hearings soon to begin for Kennedy and other healthcare department heads with similar views about to begin, the threat of future pandemics in an administration with a disastrous track record is another reason to urge their defeat.

If the U.S. had the same death rate as Australia, The New York Times later reported, about 900,000 American lives would have been saved.

The 2022 law was prompted by the worst pandemic in a century, that has killed over 1.2 million Americans. The law’s roots were in a pandemic global health security office former President Barack Obama set in the National Security Council. It followed Obama’s experiences with the H1N1 swine flu pandemic in 2009 that killed up to 575,000 people globally, including more than 12,000 in the U.S., and the 2014 Ebola outbreak that claimed thousands of lives in West Africa and provoked a major scare in the U.S.

Trump eliminated the office in 2018, suggesting, The Associated Press reported, “that he did not see the threat of pandemics in the same way that many experts in the field did.” In March, 2020, former pandemic office director Beth Cameron wrote she was “mystified” by the unit’s shutdown “leaving the country less prepared for pandemics… all with the goal of avoiding a six-alarm blaze.” Trump officials insisted they were fully prepared. Facts on the ground tell a different story.

In December 2019 the first reports emerged of patients in China suffering symptoms of an unknown pneumonia-like illness, drawing reminders of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus, SARS Cov-1. By early January 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) began referring to the outbreak as a 2019 Novel Coronavirus, soon to be renamed Covid-19.

With infections spreading in Asia, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in late January reported the first U.S. cases. The first U.S. deaths occurred in January 2020. By mid-March, when Cameron’s op-ed appeared, the WHO confirmed more than 118,000 Covid cases and 4,291 deaths.

Australia, which had a similar profile of libertarian individualism and a right-wing prime minister in 2020, created a bipartisan response with opposition Labor Party and state leaders, and medical officers out front. They quickly subsidized production and distribution of masks, prioritized testing and contact tracing, and understood some shutdowns were necessary. If the U.S. had the same death rate as Australia, The New York Times later reported, about 900,000 American lives would have been saved.

Trump: ‘It’s Going to Be Fine’

The first year of Covid-19 was critical to establishing the protocols and public health protections to confront the crisis and reduce the deaths and suffering. But, due to widespread government failures, infections spread like wildfires. Yet the Trump administration was glacially slow to react. In his first public statement January 22, 2020, Trump declared, “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”

In multiple comments tracked by Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), Trump downplayed the danger. February 2020: “Looks like by April… when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away,” “CDC and my Administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus,” “We’re going very substantially down, not up,” and, “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

Due to Trump’s malfeasance; promotion of misinformation, including false miracle cures; and actively discouraging government and community safety steps to slow the spread, Covid-19 exploded.

As Trump’s term ended on January 20, 2021, the U.S. recorded 25 million cases, and over 400,000 deaths.

Embracing the sluggish signals from Washington, hospitals stalled on adopting critical safety protocols and were ill-prepared for the flood of desperately ill patients that led to cascading deaths, with bodies piling up in makeshift morgues or refrigerated trucks outside hospital doors. It was made worse by inadequate isolation of infected patients and shortages of ventilators and proper protective equipment for overwhelmed nurses and other healthcare workers who paid a horrific price with thousands of deaths and many leaving due to unwillingness to work in unsafe conditions.

Trump’s failures continued for months. At a White House press conference on April 3, Trump eroded a new tepid CDC guidance people consider wearing masks, as other countries were now requiring to reduce transmission of the virus, by adding he would not do so.

Trump’s position, New York University sociologist Eric Klinenberg recalled, “undermined it,” suggesting “to anyone in his world that wears a mask, it’s cowardly, weak, feminine, so no one’s going to wear masks. [It] becomes clear to everyone in the Republican establishment that bearing your face is the way to show solidarity and support to the president,” reinforcing a partisan political divide on not just masks but soon all public health measures.

In late April 2020, as the U.S. death toll passed 60,000, Trump said, “This is going away.” In May, amid 80,000 deaths, Trump said, “We have met the moment, and we have prevailed.” In June, with 110,000 dead Americans, Trump said, “It is dying out, it’s going to fade away.”

On August 31, with the death count passing 180,000, Trump said, “We’ve done a great job in Covid, but we don’t get the credit” blaming a “fake news media conspiracy.” For months, Trump demanded an end to steps some states were implementing to limit infections. As Trump’s term ended on January 20, 2021, the U.S. recorded 25 million cases, and over 400,000 deaths.

National Nurses United (NNU), one of the first to respond to prior pandemics during H1N1 in 2009 and Ebola in 2014, had gained valuable experience. By early January, 2020, “before most people in the U.S. had even heard of Covid-19,” as The New York Times noted, NNU began mobilizing and aggressively pushing employers, government elected officials, and health and regulatory agencies to implement decisive safety actions. In contrast to public agencies, NNU launched multiple public endeavors from rallies to marches, vigils, pickets, and other collective action, including strikes, to demand optimal protections for nurses, other healthcare workers, patients, and the broader public.

Employers took their lead from Trump and the federal agencies he influenced, including the CDC and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) that continually eroded safety guidelines and workplace regulations. Hospitals, observed NNU executive director Bonnie Castillo, RN, “took a gamble relative to how much to have and how much to be prepared. And the CDC came out with guidelines shifting, commensurate to what the hospitals are complaining of. The lower standard is cheaper. So they just kept lowering and lowering, all the way down to bandannas. They’re looking at us like fodder.”

The racist Legacy of Trump’s Covid-19 Malfeasance

Trump’s mismanagement and indifference to who was most harmed proved catastrophic for communities of color, including a large percentage who were essential workers in transit, food processing, service industries, and healthcare.

Early in the pandemic, Trump sought to shift blame from his administration to China, repeatedly referring to Covid-19 as “the China virus,” though by April the U.S., with 4% of the world’s population, accounted for 17% of global Covid-19 deaths. Trump’s racist scapegoating ignited a sharp rise in anti-Asian hate speech and physical assaults.

His future HHS nominee Kennedy was among those adding fuel to the fire. At a 2023 New York press event Kennedy claimed “there is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately… The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”

“We’re being treated like we don’t matter and we’re dispensable.”

Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) healthcare workers subsequently reported a rise in racist incidents, both in hospital settings and in their daily lives. Twice as many verbal and physical assaults were directed at women. “We must unite to challenge anti-Asian violence, harassment, and racism,” said University of California San Diego RN Dahlia Tayag at a statewide California Nurses Association protest against ongoing anti-Asian hate crimes.

The disproportionate racial impact was evident in Covid=19’s devastating toll on Filipino healthcare workers. Kansas City RN Celia Yap Banago, one of many RNs who had pressed her hospital to fix inadequate protections, was one of the first RNs to die in April 2020. “We were being told we’re not allowed to wear masks because it’s going to scare our patients,” said Jenn Caldwell, RN.

By August 2023 when the government stopped reporting healthcare-worker Covid-19 data, 5,753 healthcare workers, including 501 RNs, had died of Covid-19. In a June interview, Zenei Triunfo-Cortez, RN, CNA/NNOC’s first Filipina president, noted that nurses call for help from Trump and Congress “fell on deaf ears… Our employers are banking on (CDC) guidelines, which have been watered down… We’re being treated like we don’t matter and we’re dispensable.”

The Racial Disparity of Infections and Death

Centuries of structural racism accelerate the disproportionate impact of any crisis, including pandemics. As Trump was continuing to downplay the tsunami of infections and deaths, and discouraging safety procedures, the racial impact escalated. Black Chicagoans, 30% of city residents, comprised 72% of the Covid-19 deaths. Black Michigan residents, under 15% of the population, accounted for 40% of the deaths. Milwaukee African Americans, 26% of the population, totaled 70% of Covid-19 deaths. Similar rates were evident across the country, from states with large Black populations like North and South Carolina, to those with smaller percentages, such as Nevada and Connecticut.

Latinos were 80% of the first people admitted for care at San Francisco’s large public hospital and in Latino San Jose neighborhoods. Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islander infection and death rates were also higher in California. In March 2020, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham cited “incredible spikes” in Navajo Nation. Two months later, Navajo Nation still had higher Covid-19 infection cases per capita than much more publicized, hard-hit New York City.

Columnist Jamelle Bouie linked the disparities to “longstanding structural inequities.” Systemic racism in healthcare had a long history, evident in less access to medical institutions and caregivers, provider treatment biases, lower rates of costly health coverage, housing segregation, and higher concentration in polluted neighborhoods. Hospitals in Black neighborhoods were far more likely to close than in mostly white areas, a National Institutes of Health study found.

“What it meant to be an essential worker was to be deemed expendable.”

Black and Latino workers were also far more likely to hold “essential” jobs. Many were concentrated in lower paid jobs often forced to keep working due to economic need or employer pressure, including in food services, grocery and drug stores, and poultry and other meat processing plants. The Guardian reported alarmingly high transit worker death rates among bus and subway drivers, mechanics, and maintenance workers in New York, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, Washington D.C., and other major cities.

In September 2020, the CDC drew condemnation for reportedly soft-pedaling safety precautions due to political interference at a South Dakota meatpacking plant. All these factors resulted in workers of color having less economic ability or opportunity to shelter or work from home, and less access to safety measures, from masks to social distancing on the job where they risked constant exposure.

It also reinforced a class chasm with “a lot of professional and more affluent people who could afford to make the kind of sacrifices this public emergency called for who were able to protect themselves, able to sustain a level of comfort that other people in America were not,” says sociologist Klinenberg.

“It wasn’t like when we called them essential, we said, because you’re essential we’re going to honor you, we’re giving you masks, you get the best access to healthcare in the world, and here’s a bonus from all of us and our forever gratitude. What it meant to be an essential worker was to be deemed expendable. And it wasn’t just you, you got exposed to the virus, then you were more likely to go back home to your family who also got exposed to the virus. So you’ve got these neighborhoods throughout the country where there’s a lot of working class people who are getting exposed and they have higher mortality,” he added.

“Covid was kind of a search light that showed us everyone, everywhere we had studiously looked away from,” writer and activist Naomi Klein observed. “Suddenly we’re forced to think about the way in which our culture produces disposable people, whether they are working in elder care facilities when there’s suddenly Covid outbreaks, or the poultry plants [that] were Covid hotspots. Places where you never see a camera because we’re not supposed to think about, [like] what’s going on in prisons.” Klein cited “the myth of neoliberalism, like we are just individual people and families, and we don’t owe anything to each other. Covid said that wasn’t the case because you can’t just treat individuals, you have to treat a body of enmeshed individuals.”

Workers and unions had to fight their employers and public agencies under Trump to protect their members and the public. Union pressure, Castillo told The New York Times, moved some hospitals to act. In the first six months alone, NNU “staged more than 350 socially distanced protests, including two vigils in front of the White House for the nurses who died from the virus.”

Though Trump’s first term ended with the rollout of a Covid-19 vaccine, lasting damage had been done with his encouragement of opposition to critical community protections from masking to social isolation to needed closures to reduce the spread of the virus, and his sympathy for an escalating anti-vax movement. NNU early in 2021 characterized the Trump administration’s response as “one of denial and abandonment.”

Going forward, with Trump nominating people with similar views opposing the importance of a robust approach to public health, including full preparedness and action on sure-to-come future epidemics, there is ample cause for concern. A new avian flu’s first U.S. death has already occurred. Measles, polio, and other illnesses could mushroom, especially with health officials hostile to vaccines in charge of health agencies with vaccination rates already declining.

With confirmation hearings approaching, The New York Times this week reported the alarming vaccination drop “creating new pockets of students no longer protected by herd immunity [with]… now an estimated 280,000 kindergartners without documented vaccination against measles, an increase of some 100,000 children from before the pandemic.” Resurgence of polio, once virtually eradicated, is also a threat.

Rising temperatures from climate change mean that bacteria not only grow faster but are also associated with increased antibiotic resistance, facilitating the rise of new deadly pandemics. Factor in expected cuts in federal agencies and reduced enforcement of workplace and community protections by an administration more friendly to corporate demands for cuts in regulations.

Over the coming days and years, our vigilance and mass action will be critical to protecting public health.