Last week, Trump’s Labor Department proposed a rule aimed at making it easier for businesses to call workers “independent contractors” instead of employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act. It’s the latest round in a regulatory back-and-forth. The legal details get dense fast. But the real-world implications are straightforward: millions of workers are at risk of losing foundational minimum wage and overtime protections, exacerbating their financial precarity.

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) provides employees with minimum wage and overtime protections. When Congress passed the FLSA, it sought to cover the broadest concept of employees possible, including those who were performing piece rate garment work out of their kitchens - something that today might look like gig work.

Since the 1940s, courts across the country and in vastly different employment contexts have consistently held that someone is an employee if they are economically dependent on the employer for work. Despite this broad protection in the law, too many employers today misclassify workers as independent contractors—including dishwashers at restaurants, auto mechanic technicians, and even nurses—in order to sidestep legal obligations and lower labor costs. These misclassified workers don’t just lose out on minimum wage and overtime protections. They are often misclassified under other employment laws too, leaving them saddled with higher payroll tax burdens, all while not having the protections of Unemployment Insurance if they are let go, Workers’ Compensation if they are injured on the job, or other typical benefits associated with employment.

Trump’s latest proposed rule would give employers cover to misclassify more workers as independent contractors. Specifically, it tosses aside a decades-long test that the Wage and Hour Division uses when determining a worker’s economic dependence, and instead advances a slimmed down version of the test that will enable businesses to more easily skirt their responsibilities under the FLSA. The Department believes that the long-standing test as articulated in the Biden 2024 Final Rule leads to “unnecessary classification of….workers as employees” and makes the independent contractor classification “more difficult.”

In short, the Department thinks the current test is too complicated, and employers are erring too often on the side of classifying workers as employees. The Department further claims that a slimmed-down test of classification would be a better fit for the modern economy. But at a time when businesses’ relationships with workers is getting more complicated, the test for determining classification shouldn’t be narrowed; it should remain probative. At a moment when we need a high-powered microscope to understand the complex layers of business models and management practices, the Department of Labor is seemingly saying a simple magnifying glass will do just fine. This approach will only exacerbate trends already underway in industries and occupations that have traditionally provided stable, middle-class jobs. Take, for example, nursing.

You might assume that someone working as a nurse in a hospital or nursing home is surely an employee of those entities. Not so anymore. Already, hospitals are relying on staffing agencies to fill nursing positions, and these agencies, in some cases, are misclassifying nurses as independent contractors. Research from the Roosevelt Institute has also highlighted how new app-based companies are using Uber-like platforms to hire, place, and manage nurses, all while claiming they are independent contractors. On these platforms, workers must compete for shifts and bid on pay, sometimes not knowing until the morning of whether they got a shift. These gig platforms have created a race to the bottom in wages and job quality, leaving some nurses without their own health insurance and relying on second jobs to make ends meet. Under Trump’s proposed rule, it will be far harder for workers under these models of management to realize their rights under the Fair Labor Standards Act. And it will only encourage other businesses to follow suit.

To be sure, there are many legitimate independent contractors who are in business for themselves. These small businesses are important parts of our economy. But a dishwasher in the back of a restaurant isn’t in business for herself. An auto technician who shows up to the same shop day in and day out likely isn’t in business for himself. And surely a nurse caring for patients in a hospital isn’t in business for themselves.

The Trump Administration pulled out a sledgehammer on a cornerstone of the New Deal. Trump’s DOL and others who are proponents of making it easier to classify workers as independent contractors often claim this provides workers with greater flexibility in their life. But flexibility doesn’t mean better outcomes. Weakening the FLSA doesn’t result in a better life for more workers.

In fact, recent research on job quality experienced by workers shows stark differences in outcomes between independent contractors and employees across some key metrics. Independent contractors, for example, are more likely to report receiving less than 24 hours notice of when they need to work. At the same time, they are no more likely than W-2 employees to say they have input on when they can take a few hours off for personal reasons. Yet, independent contractors remain more likely to report wanting to work more hours and receive more money.

Last week’s proposed rule sadly isn’t a surprise but it is a stark reminder of how little this Administration cares about using the tools of government to enforce laws and advance policies that enable workers to secure a better life.

For what seems like the 50th time in my long life, the US, with Israel, has attacked another nation, as per usual without an honest debate in Congress and so far with the reported deaths of both Iran’s leader and 80 or so of its schoolgirls. I’m not going to pretend that I understand the workings of President Donald Trump’s brain well enough to gauge the casus belli, but I will note—because again I’ve been around a while—that Iran has the world’s second-largest reserves of natural gas and the third-biggest pool of oil (trailing only Saudi Arabia and, um, Venezuela).

As oil executives helpfully explained to Politico last month, they are generously prepared to be a “stabilizing force” in Iran should the regime fall—indeed, they’d rather do it there than in Venezuela because, as executives explained, “Iran’s oil industry, despite being ravaged by years of US sanctions, is still considered to be structurally sound, unlike that of Venezuela’s”:

Bob McNally, a former national security and energy adviser to former President George W. Bush who now leads the energy and geopolitics consulting firm Rapidan Energy Group, said the prospects for growing Iran’s oil production are “completely different” from Venezuela’s.

“You can imagine our industry going back there—we would get a lot more oil, a lot sooner than we will out of Venezuela,” McNally said. “That’s more conventional oil right near infrastructure, and gas as well.”

In the meantime, our attack almost guarantees that the price of oil will jump, also good news for the industry that backed the president’s re-election so fulsomely. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported:

Iran and its neighbors on the Persian Gulf are some of the largest oil and gas producers in the world and the country has long threatened to disrupt oil exports as an act of self-defense or retaliation from attack.

That may be already happening. According to data from Bloomberg, some oil tankers are pausing or turning around outside the vital Strait of Hormuz, a narrow, deep channel between Iran and Oman that connects the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea and thus to global markets in and bordering the Indian Ocean.

But this kind of analysis is almost too easy, because so much of the geopolitics of the last century has been about the control and the flow of oil.

What’s interesting is the lessons others are taking from it.

Let’s look for a moment at Cuba, which seems like it might well be next on the Trump hit list. The president said Friday that he was looking for a “friendly takeover” of the island nation, and it’s clear that the tool he’s using is energy: After cutting off Venezuelan supplies, he’s also pressured Mexico to stop sending crude to Havana. As a result, he explained, “They have no money. They have no anything right now.”

Which is largely true—things in Havana have grown desperate in the last few weeks as Washington has tightened the screws they’ve been turning for decades. As the Spanish newspaper El Pais put it in a story, the entire nation is on “the verge of darkness” as energy supplies dwindle. It quotes a young anthropologist, José Maria:

He says the blackouts don’t affect him as much as others: His area is “privileged,” close to the water pump that supplies the municipality. He doesn’t have a generator, but he does have a rechargeable fan and a battery for his phone. From his apartment, on some days, he can see entire neighborhoods plunged into darkness.

As it happens, I went to Cuba to do some reporting the last time the country was in such a fix, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and with it Havana’s economic lifeline. In those days the country’s biggest problem was food, and it survived in part with a fairly remarkable turn toward urban agriculture. I was endlessly impressed with the Cubans I met who were learning how to grow the food their neighbors needed, even as I was depressed by the police state they were inhabiting.

Now the overwhelming problem is energy, and it’s here that something else quite profound has been happening: an almost unbelievable surge in the production of solar power. As The Economist reported on Thursday:

Mr Trump is obsessed with oil, but Cuba has been building out an alternative source of energy supply at record pace: solar panels imported from China. According to Chinese export data compiled by Ember, a think tank, in the 12 months to April 2025 Cuba’s imports of Chinese solar panels grew by a factor of 34, faster than anywhere else in the world. The island has gone from having almost no solar power a few years ago to levels which help it cope with Mr Trump’s embargo.

The regime’s energy policy is mostly responsible for the boom. In March 2024 the government announced a plan to build two gigawatts of solar power plants by 2028. It depends heavily on China for funding and construction, as well as for the solar panels themselves. On February 11 the government claimed that its new solar plants generated almost a gigawatt of power during the lunchtime peak, enough in that moment to meet the electricity needs of a third of the country.

With their help, life of a sort stumbles on. Here’s a Reuters report from last week:

“Given the frequent outages, which pretty much stop you from doing anything, a friend offered to help me invest in panels and set everything up,” Havana resident Roberto Sarriga told Reuters.

Sarriga said that with the help of solar panels he could have internet, charge his phone so people can locate him, and power a TV to keep his elderly mother entertained watching her favorite soap operas.

Most people can’t afford their own panels, of course—unless they have relatives abroad who can send them dollars. But private businesses often can, and on Thursday the government offered new tax breaks for businesses that undertake new renewable energy projects. Perhaps in response, the Trump administration said on Friday that it would allow small oil sales to private businesses.

“The strategy here is to show the Cubans and the world that the only lifeline that Cuba has left is the United States,” said Ricardo Herrero, executive director of the Cuba Study Group, a nonpartisan policy and advocacy group in Washington. “That doesn’t mean choke them off. That means leave it clear that they have become a de facto dependency of the United States.’’

But it’s not the only lifeline. China has solar panels to sell, for cheap, and once they’re up your lifeline is the sun. And unlike the oil terminals we apparently bombed at Iran’s Kharg Island complex Saturday morning, there’s really no good way to strike at solar energy, because it’s inherently decentralized. Look at that picture at the top of this essay, of a small farmer washing off his solar panels; that’s a person set up to survive what the world has to throw at him.

That’s clearly the story from Ukraine, which has weathered Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assault on its energy infrastructure by building a new, harder-to-attack infrastructure. As Paul Hockenos reports:

Wind and solar arrays with independent transmission lines are scattered over the landscape, which makes them harder to hit and easier to repair. “A coal power station [is] a large single target that a single missile could take out,” says Jeff Oatham of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest energy company and its largest private energy investor. “You would need around 40 missiles to do the equivalent amount of capacity damage at a wind farm.”

Solar, too, makes an unattractive target. “Attacking decentralized solar power installations is not economically rational,” says Ukrainian energy expert Olena Kondratiuk. “Missiles and drones are expensive, and significantly disrupting such systems would require a large number of strikes, while the overall impact on the energy system would remain limited.” Both solar and wind parks can function even when parts of them are out of operation.

It’s not just missiles, either. Iran, for instance, is widely regarded to have the ability to mount cyber attacks on centralized American infrastructure. As Rodney Bosch reported during the last round of US strikes on the nation:

US intelligence officials had warned that Iran might retaliate against American involvement by launching cyberattacks on critical infrastructure. Electrical grids, water systems, and financial networks were seen as high-risk targets.

(On days like this, I’m glad I have solar panels all over the roof. )

China has obviously figured out all these lessons. It foresaw the attacks on Venezuela and Iran, two of its big suppliers of crude, and began to dramatically increase its oil stockpile. But of course it’s done something much more important: build out the un-embargoable supply of electrons that come, most easily and cheaply, from the sun and wind.

Since 2021, China has added more power capacity across all energy technologies than the US has in its history, including 543 gigawatts last year, according to figures released late last month by the country’s National Energy Administration.

None of this is about ideology. China, Cuba, the US, Venezuela, Iran—all suffer from democratic deficits at this point (a sad list for an American to have to compile). It’s about power, in both meanings of that word.

And it’s about survival, as the rest of us imagine rebuilding a world that might actually work for its inhabitants. We have a few humble but powerful tools—the solar panel, the windmill, the battery—that make it easier to imagine something other than our current nightmare.

"Cuba is next," said Sen. Lindsey Graham on Sunday night in America, March 2, 2026, grinning between a Venezuelan surgical decapitation and an Iranian bombing campaign like a man checking items off a list. "They are going to fall. This communist dictatorship in Cuba, their days are numbered."

They are already falling.

They fall in hospitals without power. They fall in nursing homes without food. They fall in cancer wards where the machines went silent weeks ago and no one came back to restart them. They fall in kitchens where mothers boil water they carried for miles, over fires made from broken chairs and splintered tables. They fall in apartments dark for 20 hours a day, on an island 90 miles from Florida, while a United States senator smiles on television and calls it progress.

This is not a warning about what might happen to Cuba. It is a clinical description of what is happening right now, today, while you read this, while the news cycle skids forward to the next detonation and pretends the last one never happened.

The strategy is to open enough fronts to make sustained resistance on any single front feel impossible.

Since December 2025, the United States has seized oil tankers on the open sea, threatened tariffs against any nation that dares sell fuel to Cuba, and pressured Mexico into halting shipments. The timeline is precise: The first tanker seizure came on December 10. The last major fuel delivery arrived on January 9. On January 29, the executive order dropped, threatening tariffs on any country that supplies Cuba with oil. The island has not received a significant shipment since, and Bloomberg satellite analysis shows nighttime light levels across eastern Cuba have fallen by 50%. The island is going dark, and we can see it from space.

An engineer would call what followed a cascading systems failure. Fuel feeds the electrical grid. The grid powers the water pumps. The pumps keep millions of people alive, or they used to. Sever the first link and the rest follows with mechanical certainty, then human consequence, then preventable death.

Now the grid fails for up to 20 hours a day in parts of the country. Eighty-four percent of Cuba's water pumping infrastructure depends on electricity that no longer reliably exists, so taps go dry and pressure vanishes. Nearly 1 million people get drinking water from tanker trucks that are running out of diesel, which means even the emergency solution is collapsing. Five million Cubans live with chronic illnesses, and chronic illness does not pause for politics. Thousands of cancer patients have watched chemotherapy and radiotherapy simply stop, not because the medicine is gone, but because there is no power to deliver it. The United Nations resident coordinator in Havana has called it what it is: acute humanitarian risk, deteriorating by the day.

Cuba's population has plummeted from roughly 11 million to an estimated 8.6 million in five years, a peacetime collapse that demographers compare, for sheer velocity, to nations at war. Sugar production has fallen to its lowest level in over a century. The official inflation rate masks a real rate economists estimate near 70%, which means wages rot while prices sprint. Airports cannot provide jet fuel. Garbage trucks sit empty. Hospitals operate by flashlight, and a flashlight is not a ventilator.

And on Sunday, a senator from South Carolina went on television to say their days are numbered, as if the dying had not already begun, as if the darkness were not already inside the wards.

I am an engineer by training. I see systems. I also see what people do when they want to hurt civilians while keeping their hands clean.

Siege is a system.

It has inputs: fuel, food, medicine, money. It has choke points: tanker seizures, executive orders, tariff threats. It has predictable failure modes: grid collapse, pump failure, hospital shutdown, preventable death. It has a kill chain too, and it selects its victims with the cold efficiency of triage in reverse. The elderly go first. Then the chronically ill. Then the infants whose mothers cannot reach hospitals that cannot run incubators. Then everyone else, slowly, invisibly, deniably.

This is not new. The architecture is old. Only the language changes, and the public gets trained to hear that language as policy instead of violence.

In the Warsaw Ghetto, supply lines were severed, medical infrastructure collapsed, and a population was sealed inside and slowly starved. The authorities described it as a public health measure. The engineers of that system understood that you do not need to kill people directly if you can cut off what keeps them alive and let time do the rest. In Gaza, the same architecture returned: fuel cut, hospitals dark, water systems destroyed, international law invoked by everyone and enforced by no one, while cameras rolled and the death toll climbed and the world performed its anguish on schedule and moved on.

Cuba, March 2026: tankers seized on the open sea. Airports grounded. Cancer wards without power. A population that increasingly cannot leave because Nicaragua has closed its visa-free corridor and the Florida Straits remain as lethal as ever. The Supreme Court struck down the tariff mechanism that underpins the blockade, and the administration has shown no sign of relenting. Not a pause, not a pivot, not even the decency of shame.

The architect of this particular siege is Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a Cuban American whose parents left the island before Fidel Castro took power. He has spent a career positioning himself for this moment. That a man whose family left the island seeking a better life now engineers another for the millions who remain is not irony. It is the kind of cruelty that requires a surname and a face.

I am not calling this a genocide. I am describing a pattern, because the pattern is visible if you stop letting the headlines drag your eyes away. Civilian populations besieged through infrastructure strangulation. Justified by the language of regime change. Enabled by the manufactured exhaustion of everyone who might object.

That exhaustion is not an accident. It is the strategy.

I have spent the past year documenting how this administration builds systems designed to break people slowly. Detention facilities that warehouse human beings indefinitely while the paperwork dissolves—70,000 detained and climbing at 3,000 a month, with the courts gutted too fast to process them. Environmental protections gutted by executive order faster than any court can respond. Regulatory frameworks designed to expire by default if no one has the resources to defend them. The cruelty is not always loud, but it is always organized, and it always counts on you to look away.

Cuba is not a different story. It is the same story, told in Spanish, 90 miles from shore, with an ocean in between that is treated like a moat around your conscience.

Consider the sequence. In January, Venezuela was struck and its president seized. On January 29, the executive order blockading Cuba dropped, pushing its population into darkness. This weekend, Iran was struck. Immigration and Customs Enforcement continues to operate in American cities under rules that courts have challenged and the administration ignores. Detention capacity expands. Environmental rollbacks accelerate. Each crisis buries the last, and the burial is the point.

Venezuela buried the detention story. Iran buried Venezuela. Cuba is being buried by Iran. And by Tuesday, something new will bury Cuba, because the machine does not rest and it does not need your agreement. It only needs your fatigue.

This is not incompetence. It is architecture. The strategy is to open enough fronts to make sustained resistance on any single front feel impossible. To overwhelm not just governments and institutions but the moral attention of ordinary citizens. To make atrocity feel normal, ambient, inevitable, like background noise you learn to tune out because it hurts too much to keep hearing it.

Every authoritarian project in history has relied on the same calculation: The public's capacity for outrage is finite and can be outpaced. Move fast enough. Break enough things at once. People stop tracking the damage. Then silence arrives, and even when silence is not consent, it functions like consent, and the architects know that. They build for it.

We said, "Never again" after the Holocaust. We said it while watching Gaza in what should have been real time but always felt like delay. We are saying it now, about everything and nothing, the words worn down by repetition, polished by overuse, easy to carry and easier to abandon.

Cuba is 90 miles from Florida. The people are real. The starvation is real. The hospitals are dark. Cancer patients are dying. Water is not coming. And a United States senator went on television Sunday evening and smiled about it.

So here is the test, and it is not abstract. The lesson of "never again," apparently, is that it has a radius. It has an attention span. It has an expiration date. The architects of this era know exactly how to exploit all three, and they do it in plain sight, with clean suits and confident voices and a grin that dares you to care.

Do not let them.

Do not let Cuba become the crisis you meant to care about but never quite got around to, wedged between the bombing and the raid and the next emergency engineered to make you forget the last one. Do not outsource your moral attention to the news cycle. Do not accept exhaustion as an excuse. Do not accept policy language as a mask for suffering.

The siege is the strategy. The overwhelm is the weapon. And your attention, right now, today, is the one thing they cannot seize on the open sea.

When the Israeli lobbying group UN Watch spread disinformation about Francesca Albanese, they were trying to silence her condemnations of the true “common enemy of humanity”—the illegal system of oppressive, corporate-media-military and surveillance forces shaping a brutal new world order, and now bombing Iran.

Francesca Albanese has evoked the ire of Israeli officials, the US government, and Western countries that have failed to stop, and continued to support, Israel’s genocide in Gaza. They are mad at her for doing her job and excelling at it. When she accepted the position as United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, she was a widely published human rights expert. She never hid her focus and strong positions on the rights of Palestinians or the fact that her historically grounded research focused on Israel’s occupation of Palestine. She began as special rapporteur in May 2022, and by November she gave a talk at the Irish Center for Human Rights titled, “Resetting the Mind: Settler Colonialism, Apartheid, and the Right to Self-determination in Palestine.”

Albanese has proven to be the most important global voice defending Palestinians against the Israeli extermination campaign in Gaza that has continued for 28 months. In doing so, she exposed a growing web of neocolonial forces at the forefront of genocide, still intent on completing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and turning Gaza into a multibillion-dollar resort for the billionaire class (revealed on a disgusting though rarely cited videotape). President Donald Trump’s profit-making enterprise called the “Board of Peace” convened for the first time in January, and some 60 countries were invited to join for a one-billion-dollar fee in a pay-to-play scheme that Pope Leo XIV referred to as an attempt to replace the UN. Jeremy Scahill explained on Democracy Now! what exactly this muddle of corporate shills, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and a group of ragtag government representatives are dreaming up for their Epstein-Class playground on the Mediterranean. Depriving Gazans of any independent representation or defense, their terms are these: “You either fully bend the knee and accept a colonial apartheid regime [and] accept a new reality as dystopian plantation workers on Jared Kushner’s real estate project or we’re going to kill you.” As Asal Raad pointed out, “’They’re building resorts on the graves of Palestinians… slaughtered in a genocide—for profit—and @nytimes calls it a ‘glittering plan.’”

Francesca Albanese has incisively corrected the record and debunked Israel’s denials and justifications for genocide so often repeated in the Western Press. It took her one eloquent sentence to expose media’s role in facilitating Israeli attacks on the enclave when she wrote, “Israel has written one of the darkest pages of human history and the world is still holding the pen.”

The powerful global consortium of weapons-based profiteering and neocolonial states have attacked one of the most forceful advocates for humanity, at the same time the US and Israel are bombing Iran.

She made it look easy when she shattered a foundational rhetorical question lobbed at anyone who dare criticize the state of Israel, Do you believe Israel has a right to exist? When a journalist threw that one at Albanese, she patiently explained: “Israel does exist. It is a recognized member of the United Nations.” France and Italy exist, if they want to merge that’s up to them, but she added, “What is enshrined in international law is the right of a people to exist.”

Last year over 700,000 people signed a petition nominating Albanese for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. But her effective advocacy for Palestinian rights made her the target of US sanctions. The action came after she published a study in July 2025, naming the major global corporations profiting from Israel’s ongoing occupation and genocide in Gaza. She named 60 companies that have played a role in "sustaining Israel’s settler-colonial project.” The military-industrial complex, dominated by US weapons manufacturers, is, unsurprisingly, at the heart of this nexus. The occupation and bombing of Gaza “provided a testing ground for cutting-edge military capabilities: air defense platforms, drones, AI-powered targeting tools, and even the US-led F-35 programme.” After being used on Palestinians, deadly technologies are marketed as “battle proven.” At a major weapons conference in Tel Aviv in December 2025, Israel boasted that their weapons are tested “live on Palestinians” to increase profits.

In the July report, Albanese also drew attention to the financial industries, consulting firms, social media, and public relations companies that help design the misleading narratives that have deflected blame, refused to use terms likes genocide, and parroted Israeli talking points in sanitizing Israel’s brutality.

In tandem with the nexus of military force, security surveillance, corporate and media power, its acolytes are formulating an attendant neocolonial ideology. At a Munich Security Conference in February, US Secretary of State Mario Rubio introduced the conceptual architecture for, in the words of Jonathan Cook, “a return to brutal Western colonialism,” in a speech well-received by European dignitaries. The humanitarian community is left struggling to find a way to continue to represent humanity as the ground shifts beneath their feet.

When Albanese began to expose the big picture of expanding military domination, and warned of its global consequences, the campaign to discredit her went into high gear. The latest attacks on the special rapporteur came in response to a videotape appearance she made at a conference in Doha where she argued that this growing systemic threat should be viewed as a “common enemy of humanity.”

The pro-Israeli lobbying group UN Watch, released an altered video of her talk and claimed that Albanese called Israel itself the “enemy of humanity.” One need only look at the original tape of her address to prove that she said no such thing. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot augmented the false charges adding that Albanese condemned Israel “as a people and a nation,” and demanded her resignation. Pointing to the doctored videotape being used to portray her as antisemitic, Albanese told Medhi Hasan, “The cut and paste of that video was so rudimental that it was almost insulting to human intelligence.”

The powerful global consortium of weapons-based profiteering and neocolonial states have attacked one of the most forceful advocates for humanity, at the same time the US and Israel are bombing Iran. They are committing crimes of aggression against a sovereign state that has not threatened or attacked them, and major media outlets such as the New York Times have spurred them on. After a US bomb struck a girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran, killing 165 people (mostly girls between the age of 7 and 12), hours later another US-Israeli strike on the town of Lamerd hit mostly teenagers in a gymnasium, killing 20 youthful volleyball players. Witnesses described “the continuous screaming of the injured.” But news of these bombings were not prominently featured in establishment media. As Fatima Bhutto put it, “From Gaza to Iran, Children Have Always Been Sacrificed by Western Imperial Aims.” Trump’s illegal war is unpopular—just a quarter of Americans back the strikes on Iran—and there is no legitimate rationale for another war in the Middle East.

Former UN official and Human Rights Lawyer Criag Mokhiber has also identified what he referred to as a “US-Israeli Axis,” calling it “the greatest threat facing humanity today” and describing it this way: “A murderous bombing campaign in Iran, continuing genocide in Palestine… belligerent occupation of several countries, acts of transnational terrorism, repression at home, schemes to profit from murder and colonization… massive corruption of the public and private sectors across the West, sanctions against human rights defenders and international courts, attacks on international institutions, the dismantling of international law, mass surveillance of the rest of us, and a growing trail of blood and destruction around the globe.”

In her characteristic expression of deep humanity, woven into Francesca Albanese’s words is an alternative vision of a world shaped by humanity and freedom. “We, who do not control large amounts of financial capital, algorithms, and weapons, we now see that we, as a humanity, have a common enemy. And freedoms, the respect for fundamental freedoms, is the last peaceful avenue, the last peaceful toolbox that we have to regain our freedom.”

The gaggle of for-profit genocidaires, or what Trump calls his Board of Peace, is looking to expand its mission from Gaza to other conflicts, seeking to further dismantle international law and the humanitarian community. As the death toll escalates under US-Israeli bombs and spreads war throughout the Middle East, Negin Owilaei argues in Truthout, “We need to reckon with the American War Machine,” and I would add, push back against the common enemy of humanity—the growing nexus of military and propaganda alliances.

When I was small my mother warned me never to approach a sick animal. The dying ones, she said, are the deadliest of all.

That hasn’t been my experience; most of the dying creatures I’ve encountered just want a quiet place to pass their final hours. The source of my mother’s anxiety was closer to home than she had yet to recognize, but her fear was palpable. She was haunted by the vision of her curly-haired child falling prey to some sickly, snarling, yellow-eyed feral creature with nothing left to lose. That’s a mother’s worst nightmare.

Flash forward to February 28, 2026. Dozens of schoolchildren were reported dead in “one of two strikes that appear to have hit schools since US and Israeli warplanes launched their attack on Iran around 10:00 a.m. local time.” It was a mother’s worst fear come true, many times over.

Why would Israel and the United States kill children? The genocide in Gaza has made it clear that neither country is shy about the systematic extermination of the very young when it serves their strategic interests. These deaths, however, seem to be the products of tactical indifference rather than intentional annihilation. The girls’ school was near an Iranian naval base, and the high school was in the neighborhood where former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lived and was targeted by bombers.

Every empire in history has eventually turned against its own people, and always at the same historical moment: right before it dies.

This is how dying animals behave in a mother’s nightmare. They’re not looking for human children to kill—not the way an airborne raptor or an Israel Defense Forces soldier would. They simply lash out blindly in a desperate fight against the inevitable. Sometimes children get in the way.

Yes, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dead. Big deal. Others like him were already prepared to step in.

Our political culture is naive, almost childlike, in its attachment to the “great man” theory of history, with the “evil man” as its shadow side. Powerful figures do sometimes alter history, but only within those timeworn channels Alfred Tennyson called the “ringing grooves of change.” Khamenei’s power began with the US overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953, which set the stage for Iran’s current theocracy. The brutality of the Shah only hardened the steely resolve of Khamenei’s predecessor, who cast aside pro-democracy Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri to put Khamenei in power. If it hadn’t been him, it would have been someone equally hard-lined.

US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are merely the latest leaders to be vomited up from a groove whose name is “colonialism.” Its source is not the culture or beliefs of ancient Jewish tribes. This groove traces back to the chieftains and pagan shamans of pre-Christian Europe. It rings with the sound of cauldrons and cannons and the church bells of the inquisitor. If some of its own children must be sacrificed, too, so be it.

Once again, pro-democracy protesters have been betrayed by US-made bombs. Attacks by foreign countries almost always strengthen their current leadership and weaken protest movements. There’s no reason to think this time will be any different. Khamenei is almost certainly more powerful in martyrdom than he was in the last months of his life. The protesters must now wait for the inevitable betrayal. May they find solidarity in just people around the world.

As-yet-unconfirmed reports suggest that the bombers have targeted some of the leaders who are best positioned to form an independent government. That wouldn’t be surprising. The US and Israel don’t want an independent Iran. They want a vassal.

But wait, you say. Israel and the United States aren’t dying animals. They’re very much alive and will be for the foreseeable future. Don’t be so sure. Netanyahu has been clinging to power for years to avoid prosecution for a litany of corruption charges. Trump was also threatened by multiple prosecutions before winning re-election. Both men, having feasted lavishly on ill-gotten gains, were desperate to avoid the consequences of their own actions.

For Netanyahu, Israel’s future looks grim. Much of the world has turned against it. Public opinion is evolving from revulsion over its actions to doubts about its very legitimacy as a theocratic ethno-state. Public support for Israel, once considered immutable, has plummeted in the US and Western Europe, especially among younger people who are more likely to consider it an “apartheid state.”

Israel, dependent on Western largesse, is likely to face a critical decision when these generations assume power: become a truly democratic state that ends radicalized privilege or remain an unsustainable international pariah. Either way, the clock is almost certainly ticking on the era of Eretz Israel envisioned by Zionism’s founders. It may take decades, with great bloodshed along the way, but this change seems increasingly likely.

Trump and Netanyahu may parade before the cameras like winners, but they carry the stink of losers—moral, spiritual, and tactical losers.

This is not an outré idea. Israel’s military and political leaders see this future almost as clearly as independent observers do. No wonder they’ve become increasingly open in their violence. It’s a sign of desperation as well as hate.

The United States may not disappear as a nation in the foreseeable future. But its global dominance and that of its elites will end, and probably soon. That prospect fills its current leaders with existential dread. Billionaires build airstrips in the Hamptons and rehearse the apocalypse in mountaintop retreats. Politicians try to seize control of oil-rich nations through brute force and feed the fantasy that exorbitant military spending can crush the spirit of independent peoples.

As the philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote, “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this twilight, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Richard Nixon said this when he tried selling an equally delusional war to the American people: “If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world."

The “forces of totalitarianism and anarchy” are us. Every war the US has fought in the intervening half century has been a strategic and military failure. The United States has become a pitiful, violent giant—lethal and proud, but pitiful just the same. It spends itself into social oblivion for military machinery. It turns the technology of human suppression against its own population with increasing ferocity. As inequality surpasses that of the Gilded Age, software surveils our every move as drones and helicopters hover in the sky.

Every empire in history has eventually turned against its own people, and always at the same historical moment: right before it dies.

Trump and Netanyahu may parade before the cameras like winners, but they carry the stink of losers—moral, spiritual, and tactical losers. They’re pitiful because they’re desperate, and they’re desperate because their realms are dying. The grief of mothers and fathers means nothing to creatures such as these.

Here’s silent whisper for the wounded and discouraged, the grim-faced and the grieving, the unseen victims in Palestine and Yemen and Iran and around the globe: May they see with their hearts that time is running out for the Trumps and Netanyahus of their hearts. May they take comfort in the inevitability of their fall.

Yes, they’re still deadly. Of course they are. They’re killers. But so was John Wayne Gacy, and he was a clown.

Since resuming power 13 months ago, President Trump has declared he should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. At the same time, he has attacked civilian boats in the Caribbean, abducted the head of Venezuela, blockaded Cuba, conducted air strikes in Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, and Syria, and even threatened to invade Greenland. He bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities last June, and now is waging war to achieve regime change, not an easy task in a country of 90 million people.

What is common to all these strikes is that the target was weak. Note that Trump is not trying to topple North Korea, or force Russia out of Ukraine, or threaten China’s economic domination. His targets can’t do much harm to the US, at least in the short run, which makes it easy to score what he calls “victories.”

It’s obvious that Trump loves the feel of power. It no doubt gives him a rush more intoxicating than any drug. He is the ruler of the strongest nation in the history of the world, but he doesn’t have the freedom to unilaterally act on domestic affairs, although he constantly tries. The courts are in the way, as is popular dissent. Judges and citizens are preventing him from exerting his will, even making him change course by removing troops and immigration forces. And it will, he surely knows, get even worse if the Democrats gain control of either house of Congress.

But he has a free hand in foreign affairs. The Supreme Court won’t stop him and there is no international court that the US recognizes, nor does he believe he is morally bound by international law. He couldn’t care less about the United Nations, and he hopes that military engagement against the weak makes him look strong to the American public. Also, in Iran’s case, a war with a quick victory has the added benefit of possibly improving his paltry approval ratings by diverting public attention away from “affordability” and the Epstein files. Already the joke is that they should have called the Iran adventure, “Operation Epic Epstein.”

Just think what the total freedom to attack means for Trump. For starters he gets to deploy his toys—the trillion-dollar arsenal of US warships and fighter planes. It’s the ultimate video game for power-hungry adults. And no one can stop him abroad, and while the Republicans in Congress could, they certainly won’t.

Trump seems to believe that these military attacks will secure his place in history as the greatest president of all time. He and only he had the guts to get rid of the Iranian theocracy that has bedeviled the US since the 1979 hostage crisis. And only he will end communism in Cuba, that pesky island of resistance only 90 miles from shore. Most importantly, he is remaking the Middle East into a US-Israeli safe zone. He is showing the world that the US means business and that whatever it wants, it should get—of course in the name of protecting the US and securing world peace.

As Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Steven Miller, put it, “We live in a world , in the real world…that is governed by strength, this governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.”

Before claiming all this aggression demonstrates Trump truly is a Hitler-like dictator, we should recall that he is not the first Commander-in-Chief to follow these “iron laws of the world.” Truman sent troops to fight in Korea (1950), Eisenhower sent them to Lebanon (1958), Kennedy to the Bay of Pigs in Cuba (1961), Johnson to Vietnam (1964), Nixon bombed Cambodia (1969), Reagan invaded Grenada (1983), George H. Bush invaded Panama (1989), Clinton bombed Kosovo (1999), Obama bombed Libya (2011), Trump sent missiles to Syria (2017,2018), and Biden ordered airstrikes in Syria (2021), and Yemen (2024)—all without a declaration of war by Congress.

This is what US presidents do because they can. But no president has been quite as overtly aggressive as Trump. Even when he tries, he can’t hide his desire to dominate. He doesn’t spend time building alliances or forming a consensus at home. He just acts as if the weaker countries of the world are his playthings. He can push them around at will, first with tariffs then with bombs, and his sycophantic enablers will cheer him on. From Trump’s perspective, what’s not to like?

Nothing, unless it doesn’t end well. And there are dozens of ways his current path in Iran could lead to his own destruction. The American public is not likely to approve of these adventures, especially if prices rise because global trade is severely disrupted. More ominously, it’s possible that a war with Iran could spiral out of control, sucking the US in with ground troops and leading to yet another forever war and American casualties. That’s why MAGA isolationists also are having trouble with Trump’s foreign interventions.

And there is a question of whether the Iranians who want regime change will trust the Americans. They are certainly aware that the Afghans who assisted US forces and the CIA in their (failed) war of liberation were awkwardly abandoned during our troop withdrawal, and those who were given safe haven have in many cases been unceremoniously kicked back to their dangerous homeland by Trump.

The upshot of all this adventurism is that we may again witness a moment in history when the universe actually bends towards justice. Debilitating hubris has a way of striking down the mighty: LBJ was driven from office by his Vietnam debacle and Nixon had to resign because of his secret dictatorial actions. Will Trump blow himself up as well?

Maybe, but let’s pray, with the nuclear button close at hand, he doesn’t take all the rest of us with him.

Once again, the United States and Israel are illegally attacking Iran, as they did last June. It is already a regional war, which will take a horrible toll on ordinary people in many countries, with reports a girls’ school was bombed, killing at least 85 people.

Unlike the limited strikes in last June’s 12-day war, this is aimed not just at Iran’s nuclear or military facilities, but at regime change in Iran, as President Donald Trump declared, and government targets in Tehran have been hit, with Israel claiming Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed. Predictably, Iran is firing back at Israel and at US military bases in the region.

Late last week, the Foreign Minister of Oman, who had been mediating negotiations between the US and Iran, stated prospects were good for a possible agreement. However, according to an Israeli official, the talks were apparently a treacherous ruse, as the US and Israel had planned coordinated attacks on Iran for months.

This crisis lies at the feet of President Trump, who abrogated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in his first term. That multilateral agreement had effectively capped Iran’s nuclear program well short of acquiring The Bomb. Now, once again, two nuclear-weapon states are bombing a non-nuclear-weapon state. Meanwhile, Trump has preposterously called for Iranians to overthrow their government.

Congress should also impeach, convict, and remove the president from office for this illegal act, as politically unlikely as that appears now.

The timing of this attack, while perhaps planned for months, came as momentum was building in just the last few days for Congressional War Powers Resolution votes in both the House and the Senate. Democratic leadership in both Houses of Congress had coalesced behind the resolutions, Senate Joint Resolution 104, sponsored by US Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.), with 12 other co-sponsors, and House Concurrent Resolution 38, sponsored by US Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), with over 80 co-sponsors. That resolution may be voted on as soon as Tuesday or Wednesday, according to Khanna.

Sen. Kaine issued a statement asking, “Has President Trump learned nothing from decades of US meddling in Iran and forever wars in the Middle East?” and “Is he too mentally incapacitated to realize that we had a diplomatic agreement with Iran that was keeping its nuclear program in check, until he ripped it up in his first term?,” while calling the war a colossal mistake and “a dangerous, unnecessary, and idiotic action.”

US Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, stated, “Everything I have heard from the administration before and after these strikes on Iran confirms this is a war of choice with no strategic endgame,” and “It does not appear Donald Trump has learned the lessons of history.”

Congress must assert its constitutional authority over matters of war and peace against an out-of-control, rogue president and executive branch, and vote in favor of the Iran War Powers Resolutions. Congress should also impeach, convict, and remove the president from office for this illegal act, as politically unlikely as that appears now.

Anti-war protest demonstrations are already being held this weekend in many cities, including Washington, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Princeton, Norwalk, Greenbelt, Canandaigua and others, reflecting not only the illegality of this war but also its unpopularity, as 70% of Americans oppose war with Iran, according to a recent poll. The world urgently needs more diplomacy, not more war.

While this may prove impractical as the war has already begun, and may metastasize in unpredictable ways, we should recall the recent Don’t Give Up the Ship video by six US senators and representatives, all veterans of the military or intelligence services, reminding members of those services of not only their right, but their obligation, to refuse to obey illegal orders. I don’t know if this illegal attack on Iran was what they had in mind, but it certainly applies.

On Saturday in the Washington, DC area, it was sunny and warm after an unusually cold, snowy winter. I had thought of taking a stroll on Theodore Roosevelt Island to watch the Potomac River flow, as Bob Dylan might recommend, but was deterred by the thought of the smell and filth from the collapse of the major sewage pipe that released over 240 million gallons of poo into our precious, life-sustaining, wild river. One cannot help but reflect on the metaphorical, and literal, consequences of our choices as a nation, to prioritize endless, bottomless spending of our tax dollars on war and weapons of destruction over infrastructure to keep our communities safe and healthy.

May we start making better choices, right now. Let’s end this senseless war and prioritize human and environmental needs over the profits of the war machine.

A mini-brouhaha has erupted over whether or not the Democratic National Committee has buried an “autopsy” report on its party loss in the 2024 presidential election. Some fear that the report isn’t being released because it suggests the defeat was the Harris campaign’s failure to break with the Biden administration’s disastrous policy that enabled Israel’s sustained genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza. As a result, some groups are charging the DNC with a coverup and demanding that the autopsy report be released.

I’ve been on the DNC for more than three decades and am no stranger to how the party handles, or avoids handling, issues involving Palestine/Israel. In 1988, I spoke from that year’s convention podium introducing Jesse Jackson’s platform plank calling for “mutual recognition, territorial compromise, and self-determination” for both Israelis and Palestinians. For my efforts, I was asked to withdraw from the DNC—because “party leaders” were concerned that Republicans would use my membership as an issue in the campaign. (I was reinstated in 1993). I served 16 years on the party’s Executive Committee and 11 as co-chair of its Resolutions Committee. On eight occasions, I presented testimony arguing that the party needed to acknowledge Palestinian rights. And in 2016 I was appointed to serve on the Convention Platform Drafting Committee. Having argued and lost this many times, I am well aware of the party establishment’s fear of addressing Palestinian rights. Finally, this past year, I was appointed by Chair Ken Martin to serve on a Middle East Working Group, which he created to sort out how our party deals with America’s policies in the Middle East.

And yet, I believe that for those of us who support Palestinian rights and are concerned that leading Democrats have been on the wrong side of this issue for too long, the fight over whether an autopsy report exists and, if it exists, what it might say, is not where we need to be focusing our energy.

I say this because we already have all the evidence we need to write our own autopsy report that demonstrates conclusively that voters, especially Democrats and Independents, are fed up with blind support for Israeli policies. This is a fact. And while we have hard polling data to prove it, establishment Democrats and political consultants reject this reality and continue to operate from an outdated playbook.

But the changes are real and can’t be ignored. A wide range of polls have established just how extensive they are. A recent Gallup poll shows that for the first time more Americans sympathize with Palestinians (41%) than with Israelis (35%). This is especially pronounced among Democrats where sympathy for Palestinians is three times greater than it is for Israelis. And a John Zogby Strategies poll from February shows that a plurality of Americans now view the US relationship with Israel as more of a liability (45%) than an asset (34%). Again, among Democrats the margin is three to one (57% to 19%).

This growing antipathy toward Israel translates in shifting attitudes toward policy. In August of 2025, The Economist found:

• 43% of voters favor decreasing military aid to Israel, with only 13% wanting to see an increase in such aid. Among Democrats the decrease/increase ratio is 58% to 4%. Among Independents, it’s almost the same.

• Is Israel committing genocide? Among all voters, 44% say “yes” and 28% say “no.” Among Democrats, the ratio is 68% “yes” and just 8% “no.” And among Independents, it’s 45% to 19%.

Other polls show voters affirming that they’re more likely to support candidates who advance such positions and less likely to vote for those who defend Israeli policies and want to maintain current levels of military aid to Israel.

For further evidence of this shift, with just months before the midterm elections, it’s striking to note that more than three dozen congressional candidates have already declared their intent to reject PAC contributions from AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups. This includes a number of sitting members of Congress, all of whom have previously been strong supporters of Israel and have, in previous elections, been the recipients of millions of dollars from pro-Israel sources, including PACs and dark money independent expenditures. One of these members of Congress recently spoke at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in which she termed Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide and announced her support for cutting US military arms to Israel.

While these changes in attitudes toward Israel have been brewing for several years now, they were dramatically accelerated by Israel’s more than two-year assault on Palestinians in Gaza. While the horrors accompanying Hamas’ October 7th attack generated an initial flush of support for Israel, as the toll of Palestinian civilian casualties grew and the extent of Israel’s gratuitous mass devastation of Gaza became clear, support for Israel collapsed.

This was clearly in evidence in the 2024 presidential contest. Post-election analyses showed that Vice President Kamala Harris lost the backing of a wide range of Democratic and Independent voters because she refused to make a decisive break with President Biden’s support for Israel. Instead of listening to her own instincts and being more critical of Israeli practices and more vocal in support of Palestinian rights, she listened to the establishment political consultants who cautioned against “rocking the boat” on this “sensitive issue.”

The consultants, campaign operatives, and media analysts didn’t get the changes that were afoot then, and they still don’t get it now. They are caught in a time warp that views the US politics of the Middle East as if the last two years of Israel’s genocidal war hadn’t occurred. But they did happen and they have been transformative.

It used to be said that criticism of Israel was akin to touching the “third rail” in American politics—avoid it or get burned. In a way, it still is but in reverse. Support for Israel was once the issue sine qua non for candidates for Congress. Polls now show that voters are less likely to vote for candidates who refuse to criticize Israel or who take money from pro-Israel PACs.

As we get closer to the 2026 midterm elections, we can expect more candidates to publicly distance themselves from Israeli policies. We can also expect that pro-Israel groups will panic and up the ante by pouring tens of millions into defeating candidates who are critical of Israel. My sense is that this may backfire, as it did with the recent special House election in New Jersey, because in 2026 what will be controversial are Israeli policies and pro-Israel campaign contributions, not the opposite. The sooner the analysts, consultants, and media figure that out, the better our politics will be.

Given this background, fighting for the party to release an autopsy, is less important. Surely, if it exists, it should be released, but where our attention might better be focused is in supporting candidates who are refusing to accept pro-Israel PAC contributions and running on platforms challenging failed policies of the past. We should also join the growing number of Democratic National Committee members who are calling on the party to ban dark money in elections. This is an instance where looking forward, not backward, will help to bring the change we need—and to be where Democratic voters are already.

I grew up with a vision of a possible instant apocalypse, inspired (if, under the circumstances, such a word can even be used) by the nuclear obliteration of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II. It could happen at any moment, even if you were “ducking and covering” under your school desk, as I did in those years. And I was hardly alone. That was a genuine generational nightmare of the 1950s and early 1960s — the possibility of a nuclear war between my country and the Soviet Union that might devastate my city, New York (or your city, FILL IN THE BLANK), and our world. But in those years what I never could have imagined was that, even without an atomic blast, I might already be living through the extremely slow-motion equivalent of just such an apocalypse, which should, of course, be the definition of climate change.

And with that in mind, let me start this piece with a distinctly slow-motion apocalyptic moment some seven decades later, one I’m living through not as a young kid under that desk at school but as an old man under the presidency of Donald J. Trump. Recently, in a White House ceremony, the president was crowned the “undisputed champion of beautiful clean coal” by the Washington Coal Club, an event attended by Environmental Protection Agency (or do I mean Environmental Destruction Agency?) administrator Lee Zeldin, as well as Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, both, as the Guardian reported, “staunch coal advocates.” The ceremony was in honor of the “signing of an executive order directing the defense department to secure long-term power purchase agreements with coal plants for military installations and other ‘mission-critical facilities.’”

And honestly, you don’t need to know much more to grasp that this world — as the Guardian also reported recently — is heading for a potential “point of no return” on the way to becoming an all too literal (if still reasonably slow-motion) hell on Earth, a genuine “hothouse planet.” Imagine that! And imagine that, in the future, the Trump administration is working so energetically to make far hotter, far faster, there will be no desks to duck under. And imagine as well that the man “we” chose to elect to a second term in office in November 2024 is now working all too feverishly to ensure that he’ll be remembered as the president of no return and that, before he’s done, it won’t just be the East Wing of the White House that he will have turned into rubble.

In that context, let me tell you just whom I feel bad for: the reporters on the beat in Washington, D.C., covering… yes, that genuine nightmare, President Donald J. Trump, the second time around. I often dream about trying to tell my parents (who died in 1977 and 1983) about this world of ours and You Know Who. But there would honestly be no way to do so. If they were to appear now, I’d be at a complete loss and, in any case, they would never believe me. Whatever I told them would, from the perspective of their ancient American world, seem like the most ludicrous form of fiction imaginable, not even a good (or bad) joke. A president like Donald J. Trump? Dream on. (Or more pointedly, of course, nightmare on.)

And yet here we indeed are. No question about it. And imagine this: the American people, or at least 49.7% of us, elected for a second time a man whose most essential goal remains the literal fossil-fuelization of planet Earth. Though all too few of us say so, Donald J. Trump as president of the United States should distinctly be considered the nightmare of our age, or possibly of any age. Once upon a time, you couldn’t have made such a thing up and yet, unbelievably enough, he wasn’t just elected president once (after all, anyone can make a mistake, even a truly grim one) but — yes! — twice! How could that have been possible, especially for a candidate so intent on taking our world down with him? Indeed, in November 2024, the American public reelected a former president who seemed to be itching to turn the United States into his personal property, while working all too literally to incinerate this planet. Just try to imagine that!

Can Donald Trump Flip American Democracy on Its Butt?

And that should indeed be considered a nightmare and a half. In this piece, then, let me offer both my pity and compassion to the reporters who have to cover Donald J. Trump for at least the next three years. Yes, hard as it might be to believe, barring a health disaster, always possible for someone who is going to turn 80 in July, we indeed do have (almost) three more years of him — and I should undoubtedly add “at least” to that. After all, he’s already clearly thinking about how to flip the more than two-century-old American political system on its head (or do I mean its butt?) and turn it into something else entirely — transform it, in fact, into his personal property. (Exactly what he and his associates have recently been trying to do with this country’s elections, which the president would now like to “nationalize.”) And to hell with the Constitution or anything or anyone else who might try to stop him! (As he wrote at one point on Truth Social, “RECORD NUMBERS ALL OVER THE PLACE! SHOULD I TRY FOR A FOURTH TERM?”) And don’t forget that the Trump Organization is already selling “Trump 2028” hats for a mere $55.

So, make that possibly five, six, seven, or more flaming years of him working to shut down (or at least endlessly stall) wind and solar projects in this country while continuing to fossil-fuelize the United States (and, naturally, the planet) in a striking fashion.

Of course, I’m perfectly aware that all of that might indeed not happen. Despite this ever eerier present we’re now living through, it might only be my grim fantasy of our future. Even Donald J. Trump might not be able to literally flip the American system on its ass. But given what we’ve gone through so far, don’t count on it not happening either.

And, of course, we’re not just talking about the man who wants to flip the system on its butt, we’re talking about the guy who seems all too intent on doing the same thing to planet Earth. Someday, Donald Trump may be known as the end-times president, since he and his Republican confederates (and I use that word advisedly) seem remarkably intent on ensuring that this planet will indeed become a hellhole for our children and grandchildren. At some level, it should be considered beyond remarkable that even 49.7% of Americans voted for a presidential candidate intent, perhaps above all else, on burning this planet to the ground.

Giving Imperial Decline a New Name

I mean, just imagine that, in Donald Trump’s world (as well as Vladimir Putin’s and Benjamin Netanyahu’s, since there’s nothing like a good war to drive staggering amounts of planet-heating fossil-fuel gasses into the atmosphere), this planet is his birthday cake and he’s intent on lighting the candles (most recently, of course, with his war in Iran).

After all, 2023, 2024, and 2025 were, as a threesome, already record-setting when it came to the (over)heating of our world. They were the three warmest years on record, and undoubtedly 2026 won’t be an anomaly when it comes to heating the Earth to the boiling point. In short, to make a particularly depressing point, whether you’re talking about fires, floods, droughts, or heat waves, what once would have been considered extreme weather is becoming ever less so, year by grim year. In the United States in 2025, there were 23 — yes, 23! — extreme climate-related disasters, each of which cost us more than a billion dollars. In short, the extremity of climate change is slowly becoming the norm.

In other words, we’re already on a different planet — and one only becoming ever more so thanks to those wars and world leaders like Donald Trump who remain so committed to the use of fossil fuels. And sadly, by the time they’re done, the resulting slow-motion apocalypse will be one where children won’t even be able to imagine ducking under their desks for protection.

In short, President Donald J. Trump is bringing us ever closer to “a point of no return” when it comes to climate-tipping points. Even in his own terms, by emphasizing fossil fuels the way he does, and trying to put the — yes, torch! — to anything associated with green energy, including electric vehicles, he’s turning whatever future we still have on this planet over to the Chinese in a fashion that should give imperial decline a new meaning. After all, despite the fact that China is still using staggering amounts of fossil fuels, the leaders of that country are also putting no less staggering financial resources and effort into creating green-power systems of every sort, which they’re already selling around the world. Meanwhile, they’re producing and exporting Electric Vehicles, or EVs, in a dramatic fashion. In fact, for the first time last year, the Chinese deployed more clean power in their country than fossil-fuel generating capacity.

On this planet right now, if you want a sign of imperial rise and decline, just check out the opposite ways China and the U.S. are dealing with clean energy. In the end, Donald Trump and crew would rather blow up boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Eastern Pacific Ocean, militarily seize the president of Venezuela, plan for taking control (in whatever fashion) of Greenland, and… well, do I really need to keep going? But climate change? No change there, just more of the same.

In short, President Trump remains remarkably intent on fossil-fuelizing our climate (and us) to death. Just the other week, in fact, he announced that, as the New York Times reported, he was “erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet… a key step in removing limits on carbon dioxide, methane, and four other greenhouse gases that scientists say are supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and other extreme weather.” And count on this: for the next three years, that’s only the beginning when it comes to the president who has all too bluntly called the very idea that climate change might be a threat to public health “a scam.”

And count on something else as well: blowing up boats will prove to be nothing compared to setting fire to this planet.

Once upon a time in the previous century in this country, “red” was short for communist. In 2026, however, red should be short for fire, for the burning of this planet. Though Donald Trump is certainly no commie, he stands every chance of turning himself into the reddest president ever (and I’m not just thinking of those blazing red ties and hats he wears). Someday, his name will undoubtedly be synonymous with wildfire, drought, and unbearable heat, while “Trumping the planet” will mean heating it to the weather version of the boiling point.

In some fashion, give him credit. Donald Trump is all too literally intent on making himself into the president from hell, the president of no return, while ensuring that the rest of us will be living on one hell of a planet.

When Daniel Ellsberg died in 2023, the world lost a unique voice of sanity. Five decades earlier, as a “national security” insider, he had released the top-secret Pentagon Papers to expose the official lies behind the ongoing Vietnam War. From then on, he never stopped writing, speaking and protesting for peace, while explaining how the madness of nuclear weapons could destroy us all.

Now, Ellsberg’s voice is back via a compelling new book. “Truth and Consequence,” being published this week, provides readers with his innermost thoughts, scrawled and typed over a 50-year period. The result is access to intimate candor and visionary wisdom from a truly great whistleblower.

“My father is dead now,” Michael Ellsberg writes in the book’s introduction, but “I for one care a great deal that he consented to allow us to compile this eclectic corpus of his important thoughts and musings.” Michael worked with his father’s longtime assistant Jan R. Thomas to sift through and curate the huge quantity of private writing.

The book’s subtitle—offering reflections on “catastrophe, civil resistance, and hope”—could hardly be more timely.

Now, the barbaric war on Iran is enabled by remaining silent and just following orders.

At the center of “Truth and Consequence” are the tensions between conscience and deference to authority.

“Don’t delegate conscience,” Daniel Ellsberg wrote.

“Most people conform and accept,” he noted. “A minority protest, withdraw. A tiny minority resist, take risks.”

“The temptation is strong to obey powerful men passively and unquestioningly,” Ellsberg observed in 1971, the year he turned himself in for giving the Pentagon Papers to the press and faced the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison.

He instantly became a pariah among colleagues who’d been his friends at the RAND Corporation, a think tank serving the US war machine. He’d been working there as a strategic analyst before and after a stint at the Defense Department.

“After I released the papers,” he vividly remembered, “some people were afraid to write to me . . . to shake hands with me . . . to receive a phone call from me.” Three years later, his takeaway was: “Accept the risks of freedom and commitment, instead of the risks of obedience and conformity.”

Ellsberg came to see grim downsides of society’s upper crust. He had graduated from Harvard and went on to get his PhD there. But in 1976 he wrote: “The function of an education at an elite university is to learn inattention and passivity, to learn to disconnect your daily work from the moral values of your family upbringing—sharing, love, trust, mutual dependence—and be part of maintaining a system of inequality, privilege, unnecessary suffering, war, and risk of extinction.”

The next year he wrote: “I have fallen out of love with the State and its Establishment, and I have regained a hopeful affection in the democratic ideal, process, and people who are untouched by power—those outside the base of the existing pyramid of obstruction, power, and privilege.”

And: “Most human-caused destruction, suffering, death, and enslavement (i.e., ‘evil’) is performed by men, at the direction of men. These are typically ‘normal,’ competent, personally agreeable and compassionate men who perform their acts in obedience to lawful orders—or, less often, in obedience to unlawful orders.”

1982: “Massacre is made doable by a chain of command that continually invokes habit, obedience, and career, as well as by leaders’ geographical and bureaucratic distance from the killing.”

Ellsberg had extensive firsthand experience in helping to fine-tune preparations for inflicting radioactive Armageddon, especially during the Kennedy presidency. Later, it was a role that haunted him.

“In this era of the potentially imminent extinction of most of life on Earth, there is now a moral dimension to every aspect of how one spends one’s life,” he wrote in 1977. “The foundation of all morality is that we must now live with awareness of the mortality of our species and the vulnerability of the Earth and all life.”

1985: “The future is not some place we are going to. The future is what we are creating every day. If we continue to prepare and plan for thermonuclear war, that is what we are going to get.”

By the time Ellsberg suddenly found himself vilified and beloved for releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971, he was a devotee of civil disobedience. “Use of a radical, novel, powerful, and possibly illegal tactic of nonviolence,” he wrote that year, “is a form of useful work that is perfectly suited to illustrate the evil being combated.”

And he added: “I have never before shrunk from violence—from imagining it, planning it, preparing for it. I have wanted, and I have gained, the respect of violent men. Now I want the respect of gentle women, gentle men, and children.”

1984: “Nonviolent resistance has a special power to raise the question ‘What can I do to change this situation?’ I have felt that power in my own life.”

1985: “One way of calling attention to a danger or an illegal practice is to take an action of obstruction, or symbolic obstruction, that will lead to your being in court. Once there, in the context of your defense you can raise issues of illegality, criminality, constitutionality, and danger.”

1986: “Nonviolent civil disobedience does not eliminate moral dilemmas, costs, consequences, and lesser evils. However, it does inspire a search for new ways of behaving, seeing, feeling, and being.”

1990: “Ask yourself, ‘Where is the environment where I can be showing moral courage now? My work? My family? My community?’ Find the strength and the moral courage to do what is right, without knowing what the effects may be.”

Ellsberg’s activism took him to jail many more times after he summed up his protest activities this way in 2006: “I have been arrested in non-violent civil disobedience actions close to 70 times, probably 50 focused on nuclear weapons: e.g. at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Production facility, the Nevada Test Site, Livermore Nuclear Weapons Design Facility, and the vicinity of ground zero at both the Nevada Test Site and the Vandenberg Missile Test Site. Other arrests have been for protests against U.S. interventions.”

Thirty-five years ago, at the time of the Gulf War, Daniel Ellsberg wrote in his journal: “There is a time when silence is a lie, when silence is complicity, and when silence betrays our troops, our country, and ourselves. We owe it to our troops, as well as to other potential victims of this war, to speak the truth about ourselves: what we believe, what we reject, and what we want.”

On February 16, 2026, one of us (Jeffrey Sachs) sent a letter to the UN Security Council warning that the United States was on the verge of tearing up the United Nations Charter. That warning has now come to pass. The United States and Israel have launched an unprovoked war against Iran in flagrant violation of Article 2(4) of the Charter, without authorization from the Security Council, and without any legitimate claim of self-defense under Article 51. They are trying to kill the UN Charter and the international rule of law, but they will fail.

At the Security Council on February 28, 2026, the US and its allies directed their condemnation not at the American and Israeli aggression, but at Iran. One US ally after the next condemned Iran for its retaliatory attacks yet absurdly failed to condemn the illegal and unprovoked US-Israeli attack on Iran. This performance by these countries was disgraceful and turned reality completely upside down.

The joint US-Israeli attacks were described by Trump as necessary because Iran “rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can't take it anymore.” This is of course a flat lie. As the letter of February 16 recounted, Iran agreed a decade ago to a nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that was adopted by the UN Security Council in Resolution 2231. It was Trump who ripped up the agreement in 2018. In June 2025, Israel bombed Iran in the midst of US-Iran negotiations. This time too, the Israel-US war plans were set weeks ago when Netanyahu met with Trump, and the negotiations underway between the US and Iran were a charade. This seems to be the new modus operandi of the US: start negotiations and then aim to murder the counterparts.

It is easy to understand why the US allies behave in the embarrassing and self-abasing way they did at the UN Security Council. In addition to the United States, eight of the other fourteen Council members host US military bases or grant the US military access to local bases: Bahrain, Colombia, Denmark, France, Greece, Latvia, Panama, and the United Kingdom. These countries are not fully sovereign. They are partially governed by the US. The US military bases house CIA operations, and the host countries constantly look over their shoulder to try to avoid US subversion in their own countries.

As Henry Kissinger famously said, “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be its friend is fatal.” We can add that to host US military bases and CIA operations is to turn your country into a vassal state.

As an absurd but telling example, the Danish ambassador parroted every US talking point, pointing her finger at Iran for its aggression as if Iran had not been attacked by the US and Israel. She completely forgot that such humiliating vassalage to the US will not play well for Denmark if the US occupies Greenland.

The truthful voices at the Security Council came from the countries not occupied by the United States. Russia explained correctly that the so-called West (that is, the countries occupied by the US) is engaged in victim-blaming when it points its finger at Iran. China reminded the Council that the crisis began with the US and Israeli attacks on Iran, not with Iran’s retaliation. Somalia’s ambassador, speaking on behalf of several African member states, truthfully portrayed the source of this recent escalation. The UN Representative of the League of Arab States spoke brilliantly about the root cause of Israel’s mad aggression: the denial of rights to Palestinian people, and Israel’s use of mass murder and regional war to prevent the emergence of a State of Palestine.

When Iran retaliates against US military bases in the Gulf, it is exercising its inherent right of self-defense under Article 51 of the Charter. We must remember that the US and Israel are openly and repeatedly assassinating Iran’s leaders, with the aim of overthrowing its government. When states murder a foreign head of state and attempt to destroy the government, the target of those threats is entitled under international law to defend itself.

The US-Israeli bombing murdered not only Iran’s Supreme Leader and several top government officials, but also more than 140 young girls in their school in Minab. These young children are the victims of a horrific war crime. The countries today that gave a pass to the United States and Israel for these killings—notably Denmark, France, Latvia, the United Kingdom, and of course the US —are also complicit in this war crime.

This UN Security Council emergency meeting will likely be remembered as the day the United Nations ceased to function from its headquarters on American soil. An international organization dedicated to the peaceful settlement of disputes cannot credibly operate from a country that wages illegal wars, threatens member states with annihilation, and treats UN Security Council resolutions as disposable instruments of convenience. For the UN to survive, and we need it to survive, it will need several homes around the world—in Brazil, China, India, South Africa, and others—honoring the true multipolarity of our world.

Let us be clear about what the United States and Israel are pursuing. The US objective is not the security of the American people. The objective is global hegemony. The attempt is to destroy the UN and the international rule of law—an attempt that will fail. Israel’s objective is to establish a Greater Israel, destroy the Palestinian people, and assert its hegemony over hundreds of millions of Arabs across the Middle East (from the Nile to the Euphrates, as US Ambassador Mike Huckabee recently asserted).

The United States’ delusional efforts at global hegemony are proceeding region by region. The US has recently claimed, in a wholly twisted supposed revival of the Monroe Doctrine, that it controls the Western Hemisphere and can dictate how Latin American countries conduct their economic and political affairs. The US kidnapped the sitting Venezuelan president to prove the point, and it now threatens to overthrow the Cuban government as well.

Today’s war against Iran aims to prove that the US similarly owns the Middle East. The war is part of a 30-year campaign, initiated by the Clean Break doctrine, to overthrow all governments that oppose US and Israeli hegemony in the region. Those joint Israel-US wars have included the genocide in Gaza, the occupation of the West Bank and the decades of wars and regime-change operations in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.

One part of the US global plan is to commandeer the world’s oil exports and to weaken China and Russia in the process. The US seizure of Venezuela was designed to ensure American control of that country’s oil exports, especially to control the flow of oil to China. US sanctions on Russia aim to prevent Russian oil from reaching India and China. Now the US aims to stop the flow of Iran’s oil to China. More broadly, the US aims to control the entire Gulf region plus Iran to maintain its imperial dominance.

The international order that Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt helped to build after the catastrophe of WWII was founded on a simple and profound idea – that law and respect, not force, should govern relations among states. That idea is now being destroyed by the very nation that did most to promote it in founding the UN. The irony is bitter beyond measure.

The truth is that the devastation of the war will not directly affect the so-called West: their children will not suffer traumas or death, and their countries will not be set ablaze. The victims of this attack are the people of the Middle East. They are the expendable ones who suffer from Western arrogance, abuse of power, and addiction to war.

We close with two observations. First, the United States will not achieve global hegemony or kill the UN. The world is too large, too diverse, and too determined to resist domination by any single power, much less one with 4 percent of the world’s population. The world outside of the US and the countries it occupies want the UN to live and thrive. The US attempt will surely fail, but it may cause immense suffering before it does.

Second, if Israel continues its addiction to war and occupation, it too will not survive. That addiction represents a mix of theocracy and post-traumatic stress. Part of Israel believes that it is the biblical kingdom of the 5th century BC. The other part lives in the traumatic memory of the Holocaust, and so is determined to kill any perceived adversary rather than learn to live together with it in peace. The Israeli Ambassador’s twisted defense of Israel’s brazen attack on Iran, as usual, cited the Bible and Auschwitz as the two justifications. These are Israel’s two perennial references, but not the real world of today.

A state that depends on permanent war, permanent occupation and slaughter of the Palestinians, and the indefinite subjugation of millions of people has no viable future, and the policies that the United States is now pursuing on Israel’s behalf will accelerate rather than prevent that outcome.

The two-state solution, which the Council has endorsed repeatedly, offers Israel a path to peace. Tragically Israel rejects that. The result, eventually, will be the end of Israel itself in its current form, especially as the US population is rapidly turning against Israel’s violent theocracy and towards the cause of Palestine. Perhaps there will be one democratic state for both Arabs and Jews living in peace, together, with an end of apartheid rule.

These are harsh truths, but emergencies demand honesty. The UN is being murdered by Israel and the United States. The Security Council must rouse itself from their military occupation by the US, and remember that they are the stewards of the UN Charter’s promise to maintain international peace and security.

Now that President Trump has launched an illegal, unprovoked war of choice on Iran, the next question inevitably becomes: how does this end? Or, what are some off-ramps Trump can take to end it before the situation turns out of control?

There are three broad scenarios; the first and most likely is that Trump continues this until he gets some sort of regime implosion and then declares victory, while also washing his hands of whatever follows.

This has been very clear in internal conversations: no one wants to take responsibility for the aftermath. This is essentially the difference between regime change and regime collapse.

That’s why they didn’t want to do an Iraq War-style regime change where you are actively trying to install a new government. If you do that, its track record becomes your track record.

Indeed, if the US manages to kill a lot of the different leaders of the current system, there could be some sort of an implosion. Trump could declare victory even though you would likely have in that case severe instability, or potentially civil war.

Another scenario is that the Iranians continue to strike back and outlast Trump. The Iranian onslaught would start to become too costly for the United States with casualty rates increasing (possibly even on the American side), inflation worsens, and global markets become destabilized.

And then the pressure on Trump internationally, from the American public, and from his own base would start to become so strong that he would have to look for an exit.

At that point, he may actually take the deal that was on the table: a deal that is better than what Barack Obama managed to secure, and that Trump nevertheless rejected. He may take that and suddenly declare it a victory, saying: “Thanks to my bombing campaign, we achieved this.”

There is also a third scenario, that is the least likely, in which after a couple of rounds of attacks, both sides may feel they can go back to the negotiating table.

They might even go back to the same agreement that was on the table during the most recent talks. And both sides could frame that as a win. Trump can claim he bombed Iran and was very successful. The Iranians can claim they struck back and were very successful. And then they come to some sort of agreement.

However that would be difficult because there’s now absolutely no trust between the US and Iran.

But even if they did come to some form of agreement, it would be extremely difficult to implement, it would likely not endure, and it wouldn’t be anything more than essentially a ceasefire with a pretense of having a deal beyond that.

Meanwhile, Israel’s interest is in pushing the narrative that the negotiations were a ruse from the outset, and that this attack was already planned — because that narrative destroys America’s credibility as a diplomatic force, as a negotiator.

And the more you push the narrative that diplomacy was a lie from the outset, the more easily you can avoid any future negotiations.

I’m not convinced it really was a ruse from the beginning. There were elements in the US government who were sincere about the diplomatic path, but ultimately Trump fell for the type of pressure that he has proven himself to be far too susceptible to.

None of that makes what happened forgivable. It doesn’t make it legal. It doesn’t make it strategic. But we do have to recognize this: nothing would serve Israeli interests more than to completely destroy America’s credibility as a negotiating partner.

This article was adapted from Trita Parsi’s remarks during an appearance on Breaking Points.

Mark Twain supposedly once said, "Never let the truth get in the way of a good story," but there is a difference between a good story told in fun and a story (supposedly backed by independent scientific research) that people are led to believe because, well, science is supposed to be true. And so we come to the story of Roundup, the herbicide developed by Monsanto that swept the world because it worked and was the “safe” alternative to widely used weedkillers like Dicamba and 2,4-D,—it was said to be safer than table salt!

Roundup was developed in the 1970s as a non-selective herbicide, meaning it would kill almost any growing plant it touched. It was an effective burn-down herbicide farmers could apply prior to planting, and it assured an almost weed-free field at the beginning of the growing season. Roundup could be used in non-agricultural situations as well, to kill weeds and grass growing in sidewalk and patio cracks, around buildings, etc, but care was needed because, as noted, it was non-target and could kill whatever plant it touched.

For farmers, it worked well, except while it did kill growing weeds, buried weed seeds were not harmed, so a weed-free field at planting time did not ensure a weed-free field throughout the growing season. Weeds would continue to sprout, and more herbicide applications would be needed during the growing season.

Then Monsanto developed their big fix released in 1996, genetically engineered (GE) soybeans resistant to Roundup, followed by GE versions of other commodity crops: corn, cotton, sugar beet, and canola. Over-the-top spraying of these GE crops would kill everything but the crop, and Roundup became one of the most widely used herbicides in the world and GE crops came to dominate world commodity crop production.

Companies like Bayer have to protect their product and their profit even if they have to tell a few lies to do so.

While Monsanto sold Roundup with the slogan, “One spray is all you’ll ever need,” in time, it became clear that some weeds were developing resistance to Roundup and farmers were right back where they started, looking for herbicides that worked consistently. More genetic modifications were made to commodity crops making them resistant to other herbicides, like Dicamba and 2,4-D, the herbicides Roundup was supposed to have replaced. These multiple GE or “stacked” crops could be sprayed with a cocktail of herbicides, hopefully ensuring weed-free fields for the entire growing season.

Farmers are using more herbicide, even on the GE crops, and costs for GE seed have risen much faster than non-GE seed. Of course, the motive was never to reduce the farmer’s production costs or agricultural herbicide use but to increase it—that's where the profit is.

For farmers who didn’t jump on the GE bandwagon, finding non-GE seed is often difficult. Even more onerous, some farmers have found it necessary to plant GE seed as a preventative measure because non-GE crops can be damaged by chemical drift from neighboring GE fields.

So much for effectiveness, what about the safety of Roundup? In 2000 a study was published in the journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology that deemed the active ingredient in Roundup (glyphosate) was safe and not a human health risk. Since then, that study has been cited consistently as proof of Roundup’s safety. Numerous other studies have shown that glyphosate could cause cancer and that the inert ingredients that are part of the patented Roundup formulation increase the toxicity of glyphosate. Further, the practice of using Roundup as a desiccant on small grain crops (oats, wheat, and barley) prior to harvest puts Roundup directly on grain that enters the human food chain.

Since acquiring Monsanto in 2018, Bayer has paid out about $11 billion to settle almost 100,000 cancer-related lawsuits with approximately 61,000 still pending. In December of 2025 another blow to the claimed safety of Roundup came when the Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology journal withdrew the 2000 article that had touted Roundup’s safety. While the study claimed to be independent and peer reviewed, it has come to light that Monsanto's scientists played a significant role in conceiving and writing the article. Oops.

For decades Roundup has been sold as an effective herbicide, one that was safe for humans and the environment, and without which “consequences would be dire.” Companies like Bayer have to protect their product and their profit even if they have to tell a few lies to do so. They claim to produce safe products that help farmers thrive—real independent research refutes that. Bayer and the agribusiness industry may be thriving, but farmers are not and in these times, too few people seem to care that lies are accepted as truth.

Gestation crates are metal cages, typically no bigger than 7 feet by 2 feet, used to contain female pigs—known as sows—for most of their breeding lives. The crates are so small that their inhabitants cannot walk or even turn around. Natural behaviors such as rummaging, fetching food, nesting, and grazing are all denied to them.

Without question they are among the cruelest fixtures in the meat industry. Many countries in the Western world, including the European Union, have either banned or significantly restricted their use. The European Commission plans to phase them out entirely by 2027. A recent landmark piece of legislation, however, threatens to undo this critical progress.

The EU-Mercosur (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay) Agreement, signed to great fanfare on January 17, 2026, has been heralded as both historic and ambitious. Less discussed, however, is what the agreement could mean for animal welfare protections in both hemispheres.

The EU may be home to some of the highest animal welfare standards of any government in the world, but the same cannot be said for Mercosur, where millions of sows are still confined to gestation crates for long periods of time.

Unless safeguards are put in place, this trade agreement risks reversing the EU's progress on deforestation altogether.

Sinergia Animal, the international animal protection organisation whose Brazilian operations I lead, publishes a yearly report called Pigs in Focus, which ranks major Brazilian producers on their animal welfare standards. Despite being the country’s fourth-largest pork processor and a major dairy company, Frimesa has still not committed to ban crates for sows. Farrowing cages and battery cages for chickens remain widespread too. We have been negotiating with them for years, and despite their competitors making meaningful progress, they are still dragging their heels on making even basic improvements.

The problem does not stop with Frimesa. Minerva Foods, one of the leading meat producers in South America and a major supplier of pork products globally, continues to cause immense suffering. Ear notching, teeth clipping, and tail docking, as well as the routine misuse of antimicrobials, are all common. Again, while commitments to phase out these techniques have been made, our research exposes the use of excessively long deadlines that serve to prolong animal suffering.

These are not exceptional, isolated cases. They represent a wider system across Mercosur countries—one that may end up supplying significantly more of the meat consumed in the EU.

This raises serious questions about the EU’s commitment to animal welfare standards, which is why the European Parliament’s decision in late January to request a legal opinion from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on the agreement’s conformity with the EU treaties, thereby halting the ratification process, is a welcome one.

The review could take up to two years, which gives EU policymakers more than enough time to revisit the issue of animal welfare and mitigate against the new incentive structures now in place for Mercosur producers.

It would, however, be a mistake to assume that greater attention should be paid to animal welfare protections alone. After all, lower standards mean higher yields. In Argentina and Uruguay, 89% and 88% of eggs come from hens kept in battery or enriched cages. In Brazil the figure is 95%. In the EU, by comparison, 38% of hens are still kept in cages—something seen as too high but will nonetheless put European producers at a significant competitive disadvantage.

An increase in demand for meat will also magnify pressure on vital ecosystems. As demand for land and animal feed goes up, so too will the rate of deforestation. The resultant loss of habitat will accelerate biodiversity decline, threatening ecosystems that are a key natural defense against climate change.

These developments cannot be divorced from the geopolitics of the climate crisis. With the US having reneged on its international climate commitments, the pressure is on the EU to at least partially fill the leadership void. So far they are failing, with initiatives such as the Deforestation Regulation and electric vehicle mandate either abandoned or reduced in ambition. Unless safeguards are put in place, this trade agreement risks reversing the EU's progress on deforestation altogether.

So what can the EU do? At a minimum, Brussels must demand that meat produced under unacceptably low standards is not imported to the EU. However, equally important is that Mercosur countries are still able to benefit economically from the agreement by retaining access to the EU market. This means pushing for Mercosur countries to eliminate battery cages and sow stalls, ban mutilations without pain relief, enrich spaces, and meaningfully improve handling standards.

The EU talks a good game, but rhetoric alone is not enough. The ratification delay is a golden opportunity for reflection and to strengthen standards. Political leaders have been right to label the agreement as historic, but unless robust protections are put in place, it may well be remembered for all the wrong reasons.

Currently working people are inveterately distracted with attacks on the Constitution by MAGA gangsters, thugs, and reprobates.

Another distraction is the heinous protection of the international cabal of rich men guilty of exploiting young girls in the Epstein criminal network.

A third distraction is indoctrinating working people into supporting a glutted military budget while cutting programs for working people.

Distractions

General Dwight D. Eisenhower warned working people in 1961 of the dangers of the "military-industrial complex."

The root cause of unemployment, underemployment, and inflation is the wage and salary component of our economic model.

It results in violations of international laws to protect corporate profits in foreign countries like Venezuela; that includes the murder of innocent civilians in cruising boats.

However, a not so obvious din of these distractions is designed to numb Americans from zeroing in on the foundation of their chronic economic adversity and anxiety.

That foundation is the wage and salary construct of our economic model.

Economic Model Decline

The symptoms of the decline of our economic model are well documented.

The Ludwig Institute of Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP) reported a functional unemployment rate in November 2025 of 24.8%. LISEP reported a real inflation rate of 9.4%.

Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed, (ALICE) reported that 42% of households in the US were below the ALICE threshold of poverty.

The underemployment rate reported by the Burning Glass Institute in February 2024 was 52% for college graduates.

These are chronic symptoms of an economic model that cannot provide an equitable and moral distribution of employment opportunities. If you harbor the belief that anyone here can become rich or wealthy, think again.

Progressives recognize that the Republican Party has devolved into a fascist cult. The evidence is Project 2025 and screams daily that our government is being replaced by rich con artists inside the Trump administration swamp.

However, polls do suggest that working people are becoming more aware that our economic model is failing them.

Regrettably, this increasing discontent stops at addressing the symptoms rather than the cause cemented into our economic model.

Many progressive politicians, scholars, academics, and journalists go to the water's edge of the cause, but cravenly avoid a discussion of the that cause.

Upton Sinclair’s assertion in 1935 is applicable:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. (“I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked”)Root Cause

The root cause of unemployment, underemployment, and inflation is the wage and salary component of our economic model. To understand how that model is inherently exploitative and inequitable, the basics must be understood.

The following is a simplified example on that process.

The primary purpose of our economy is to return a private profit to the business owner.

The basic opportunities for a contented lifestyle are decreasing.

There are two types of investment that the business owner must spend.

First is expenditures on space, plant, machinery, tools, hardware, software, technological advances, and raw materials. This includes legal registrations, licenses, permits, and financial services. Often, the business owner inherits the business so this expenditure may be minimized.

Next, the business owner must purchase the physical or mental efforts of the employees. It is realized in the form of wages and salaries.

The employees create the products or services that the business owner sells in the market. In spite of the delusions of many business owners, no business owner creates those products or services alone. It is a social process.

If the business owner paid the employees the salary and wages equal to the value of the products or services created by them, there would be no profit.

Hence, there would be no reason to continue the business. Moreover, the business owner must compete with other business owners to sell as much as possible and minimize costs. Parenthetically, layoffs and recessions crushing working people are the usual remedy for the business owner.

Specific Example

The business owner must sell the products or services created by the employees at a price above the amount spent on wages and salaries.

In this example, a male employee works a typical nine to five workday.

In that workday, the employee works for wages or a salary that will allow him to maintain himself or his family.

However, inside that workday is the key to the exploitation and moral flaw in this economic process. It appears that the employee is being paid for working a full day, but that is not the case.

The business owner must calculate the amount paid to the employee based on how much is required for a private profit.

The employee is working some hours to provide a profit for the owner and some hours to maintain himself or his family.

In this example, in one workday the business owner pays $50 an hour for all the initial expenditures listed above to create one product.

The employee must be paid to create the product or service. By an arbitrary calculation of the business owner, it is $10 an hour.

The business owner must sell the product or service in the market by charging an amount above what has been spent already to produce it. It was created for $50 plus $10 which equals $60.

However, the business owner must sell the product or service for $70 each to obtain a profit of $10. The “new” value of the product or service is $70, yet it cost $60 to create.

If the employee created a product or service that is worth $70, it is inescapable that the employee is not being compensated for the value that he created. This is basic exploitation of unpaid labor and, in most spiritual belief systems, immoral.

Perceptive Voices

Pope John XXIII wrote on this subject:

We therefore consider it our duty to reaffirm that the remuneration of work is not something that can be left to the laws of the marketplace; nor should it be a decision left to the will of the more powerful. It must be determined in accordance with justice and equity; which means that workers must be paid a wage which allows them to live a truly human life and to fulfill their family obligations in a worthy manner. (Mater et Magistra May 15, 1961)

Martin Luther King commented on this moral flaw:

We are saying that something is wrong... with capitalism... There must be better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism. Call it what you may, call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God’s children (1966)

Malcolm X, American Muslim leader, spoke at one of his speeches at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City in 1964:

You show me a capitalist, and I’ll show you a bloodsucker.Consequences

The inherent exploitation of our economic model begins at the wage and salary level. From there we organize, produce, transport and distribute goods and services. Private profit for the business owner supersedes all other values.

In the US we have seen the values of community, family, and social sentiment diminished. Those values are overwhelmed by a tsunami of advertising urging working people into a conspicuous consumption of material items whether needed or not.

Simultaneously is the harsh economic reality for working people. The basic opportunities for a contented lifestyle are decreasing. Those opportunities are quality and affordable healthcare, smart and accessible education, safe and comfortable housing, healthy nutrition, and a clean environment.

This dilemma can be addressed by providing the material opportunities above with policies formed by the best of spiritual and secular values.

That can only be realized by a transition to an economic model based on realistic democratic principles and collective profits.

Otherwise, the present economic immiseration and despair will continue to transform working people into a morass of fear and hatred seeking scapegoats to blame. They will become an alienated, vapid mass of untethered individuals at the mercy of the soulless and parasitic oligarchs who live off the products and services of their labor.

Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) condemns Donald Trump and the Trump Administration, as well as their enablers in Congress, the media, and elsewhere for launching and supporting a reckless, illegal, unprovoked, and unconstitutional war on Iran over the past 24 hours.

Last June, we issued a statement denouncing Trump’s bombing of Iran because it posed risks of “spiraling into a regional or even global conflict that could shatter fragile economies and displace millions.” Trump’s unprovoked war on Iran is now confirming our worst fears.

This war is already inflicting significant humanitarian suffering, causing chaotic economic disruption, and risking grave damage to the international order.

The War on Iran has also precipitated a constitutional crisis, attacking the foundational principles of our democratic republic by blatantly violating the separation of powers. It also violates the War Powers Resolution of 1973.

We the People must not fail to meet this crisis. This latest precedent of unchecked abuse of power imperils our democracy, potentially fatally.

The US Constitution vests in Congress the sole authority to declare war (Article I, Section 8). Members of both parties have already acknowledged that Trump’s war against Iran without prior authorization from Congress is unconstitutional.

Senator Jeff Merkley, (D-Oregon), a veteran member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations said this war “shreds our Constitution, which assigns decisions of war to Congress.”

Member of the House Armed Services Committee, Representative Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) called the war “blatantly unconstitutional.” Rep. Khanna co‑authored a bipartisan War Powers Resolution that would restrain Trump from launching such illegal, immoral, and reckless military operations.

Representative Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) described Trump’s attacks as “acts of war unauthorized by Congress.” He is also leading the effort for the War Powers Resolution.

Senators Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) sponsored a similar Resolution. Sadly, Republican congressional leaders continue to block Rep. Khanna’s and his colleagues’ efforts to enact a War Powers Resolution in the House.

This unconstitutional, illegal war continues an alarming pattern of the Trump regime’s contempt for the Constitution, Congress, U.S. law, and international norms, as well as basic ethics and morality. Trump has previously ordered illegal attacks against Iran and Venezuela without lawful authorization.

The Trump administration has routinely trampled basic human and civil rights through violent, even deadly operations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement targeting US citizens and lawful residents. We cannot tolerate fascistic policies including fatal shootings, abusive raids, indefinite detentions, and family separations.

Trump, his Department of Justice, and other appointees have escalated their contempt for Congress and the constitutional separation of powers by publicly attacking members of Congress during hearings, by stonewalling and ignoring subpoenas, and by defying oversight powers, and by implementing illegal orders and lawless policies.

Trump’s illegal war on Iran and the rule of law establish an intolerable pattern of egregious abuses of power, directly threatening our constitutional order, our safety, and our way of life. These intertwined crises cry out for an immediate, decisive response by the Congress and the US public.

Therefore, PDA demands that all members of Congress, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike, uphold their oath of office to defend our constitutional republic. The Constitution offers one and only one remedy when President a repeatedly breaks the law and arrogantly refuses to abide by the limits on the power clearly laid out in the Constitution. That remedy is impeachment, followed by removal from office.

To effectuate that, PDA calls upon its hundred of thousands of supporters across the country—as well as every American who wants to preserve our constitutional democratic republic—to contact their Senators and Representatives by phone, email, social media, and in‑person visits to demand two things: 1. An immediate end to the War on Iran, and 2. The initiation of impeachment proceedings against Trump and all complicit Trump Administration officials.

Furthermore, we urge organizations and individuals across the country to launch protests and other forms of nonviolent civil disobedience to demand an end to the war. These could include boycotts, or a refusal to purchase any non‑essential goods and services, or some form of intentional non-participation, or any other lawful means until all US military operations against Iran cease and Congress initiates efforts to remove all lawless Trump officials from power.

Trump’s illegal, unconstitutional war on Iran is not only a moral and humanitarian disaster, but also a profound constitutional crisis. The Congress and the American people must oppose, rebuke, and punish Trump and all those complicit in the Trump administration’s escalating attacks on our liberty, our Constitution, and the rule of law. We the People must not fail to meet this crisis. This latest precedent of unchecked abuse of power imperils our democracy, potentially fatally. We can and must overcome these clear and present threats to our lives, liberty, and way of life.

The FANTASY STATE OF DER FÜHRER TRUMP’S speech turned an already pitiful Congress into a TRUMP DUMP of self-adulation, debasing the historic purpose of the annual State of the Union address. President Donald Trump spewed one hour and 48 minutes of nonstop repetition and canned lies about “the golden age” of America, and claimed that in just one year, his presidency has “achieved a transformation like no one has ever seen before and a turnaround for the ages.” (Standing ovation by his GOP supplicants.)

Trump’s “turnaround” has orchestrated the corporate hijacking of the federal government, its people-protection agencies, and the federal workforce. Each day, he illegally plunges our country further into a deeper, more violent dictatorship. He has shattered our Constitution and serially violated the rule of law he swore to uphold.

Tyrant Trump turned this event into an egomaniacal showbiz spectacle, handing out awards to soldiers, a rescuer of flood victims, a 100-year-old veteran, and others brought in as props of virtues to cover his embedded vices.

Trump’s tirade was his usual grab-bag—full of delusions about his past greatness and illusions about the coming glorious future for Americans. Bereft of shame, he repeats lies that the media have corrected. The Associated Press published a story titled “FACT FOCUS: A Look at Trump’s False and Misleading Claims in His State of the Union Speech” the same night so many lies gushed from his foul MOUTH.

Shuddering with anxiety, dread, and fear are millions of Americans who may lose their Medicaid insurance to help pay for Trump’s tax favors for the Plutocrats. Who are the winners in this scenario?

Despite the media repeatedly correcting the record when Trump slanders his opponents with words perfectly applicable to him, he continues defaming those who challenge his lawless actions and fabricated charges. He sticks to his racist vilifying of impoverished immigrants over our Southern border, ignoring, as do all presidents, our historical backing of dictators and oligarchs who oppress and starve their own people, many of whom become asylum-seekers.

A segment from the State of the Union illustrates how Trump demeaned the seriousness of the assemblage by combining his monstrous juvenile ego with inappropriate frivolity:

Our country is winning again. In fact, we’re winning so much that we really don’t know what to do about it. People are asking me:

“Please, please, please, Mr. President, we’re winning too much: we can’t take it anymore. We’re not used to winning in our country. Until you came along, we were just always losing, but now we are winning too much.” And I say, “No, no, no, you’re going to win again. You’re going to win big. You’re going to win bigger than ever.” And to prove that point, here with us is a group of winners who just made the entire nation proud. The men’s goldmedal Olympic Hockey team, come on in.

He then meandered on and on about the team’s play.

One of Trump’s favorite epithets perfectly applies to him: “A ‘deranged’ distractor,” trivializing the plight of half of the American people who are losing ground in the desperate struggle to escape poverty in the world’s richest country, controlled by the few over the many.

These include 25 million American workers held down by Trump’s refusal to push for raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to $15 per hour. The United States has the lowest minimum wage in the Western world. Is this Winning?

Tens of millions of Americans are at risk of losing their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) assistance (formerly known as food stamps), whose budget was cut by Trump and GOP legislation last year to help pay for his tax cuts for the already under-taxed super rich and big corporations. Are these people Winning?

Elon Musk’s Tesla corporation made $5.7 billion in US profits last year and paid ZERO federal income tax. One Tesla worker alone sends more tax dollars to the US Treasury than did the Tesla corporation and probably its boss. Musk was the architect of the illegal, criminal, Trumpian DOGE rampage that closed or strip-mined federal agencies mandated to protect the health, safety, and economic rights of American consumers and workers. Is letting corporate polluters, corporate crooks, and huge tax evaders wreak havoc on America Winning?

Shuddering with anxiety, dread, and fear are millions of Americans who may lose their Medicaid insurance to help pay for Trump’s tax favors for the Plutocrats. Who are the winners in this scenario?

Are the elderly losing their Meals on Wheels winners? Are the little children losing Head Start winners? Are the scientists shut out by Trump from working to prepare our country for coming pandemics and the rising violence of climate disruption winning? Remember, NBC reported that in 2020, “President Donald Trump accused Democrats of ‘politicizing’ the deadly coronavirus during a campaign rally here on Friday, claiming that the outbreak is ‘their new hoax’ as he continued to downplay the risk in the US.” Trump has repeatedly downplayed the impact of Covid-19. No one wins when a President ignores serious outbreaks of viruses and contagious diseases, resulting in tens of thousands of preventable fatalities.

The Congressional GOP knew ahead of time of Trump’s “circus barker” performance. As the hosts, they could have urged him to provide a serious and truthful presentation of the State of the Union and saved his presentation of wandering, egotistical commentary and lies for a political rally. Instead, they gave him or the people he mentioned several standing ovations, shouting “USA, USA, USA.” Tragically, the GOP majority in Congress is rubber-stamping Trump’s policies and allowing him to weaken our domestic defenses against economic, environmental, and health threats in ways we have never seen before.

When co-belligerent Trump got to the Israeli genocide of hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinian babies, children, women, and men, he focused on the recovery of the remaining bodies of the Israeli hostages under the rubble. He made no mention of the tens of thousands of Gazans violently killed by US weapons, whose bodies are still under the rubble, and who were not recovered for burial.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues with impunity to break the ceasefire violently because Trump fears what Netanyahu may have on him in Israeli intelligence files.

It was past 11:00 pm ET when the 12-minute Democratic response was delivered by the new Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger. She accused Trump in strong, succinct language of corruption at the highest levels of Trump’s regime and of making life for the people harder, more expensive, and fearful.

What the governor failed to do was make the affirmative case for an authentic Democratic Party COMPACT FOR AMERICA, answering the venerable question: “Whose Side Are You On?” She could have said the Democrats stand for a living wage, Medicare for all, restoring taxes on the super rich, an authentic child tax credit cutting child poverty in half, cracking down on corporate crooks stealing big time from consumers and workers, and transitioning from a bloated military budget of a fossil-fueled Empire to building public works and installing renewable energy for communities across the land.

Once again, the Democrats blew an opportunity to persuade voters that the Democratic party is going TO STAND FOR THE PEOPLE in the critical November election.

At his February 2026 State of the Union address, Great Leader Donald Trump was atypically modest about his achievements as president in his second term. He has conquered inflation; ended eight wars; taken $1 off the price of gas; created jobs as never before; conquered unemployment; ridded the cities of criminals and immigrants; secured $18 trillion in investments with highly effective tariff wars; and created a peace board with a modest $1 billion entry fee.

Of course, none of these claims is true. But the president should be honored for his hard work and delusionary beliefs. President Trump loves nothing more than hearing his name and seeing it affixed, preferably in gold color, to apartment and office buildings, casinos, and consumer products. The board of trustees of John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, most of whom Trump appointed and whose chairman is Donald, voted to rename it the Trump-Kennedy Center. But more work is to be done. The following buildings, objects, and programs are just a first cut of the most important honors.

• The Trump Constitution. Russian President Vladimir Putin promulgated one to make him president for life…
• The Trump and Genesis “I Can’t Dance” Ball Room. For $1 million, you can have a lifetime “I Can’t Dance” membership.
• Trump Archive and Bathroom. At Mar-a-Lago. Where he read classified documents, refused to return them, and washed his hands. Apparently.
• Donald Trump Prisons. Geo Group, with 100 facilities and a total of 80,000 “beds” (or, as they are usually called “cells”), has become the second-largest contractor for Trump’s mass incarceration campaign, with a 700% increase in profits since 2024. Private prisons gave Trump over $1 million toward his reelection. And Trump is a felon. Trump deserves a prison or two.
• The Trump Penn Station, Washington International Airport, and Gateway Tunnel. Trump said he would unfreeze roughly $16 billion in federal funding if Democrats support the name changes.
• Trump Toll Booths. Fifty percent of tunnel tolls go to the Trump Organization through booths emblazoned in gold paint as “Trump Little Towers.”
• The Trump Kennedy-Trump Center Drag Gala. To headline the opening of the 2026-27 season. It will include a reprise of the year 2000 drag performance of Trump with Rudy Guiliani. Special guest JD Vance dressed in drag as he was at Yale Law School. The Gala will be held monthly since schedule permits: Dozens of artists cancelled their performances.
• Trump and Sons Gaza Resort. For $2 million you can name a Gaza skyscraper after yourself.
• The Trump, Kennedy, Oz, and Heath Pharmacy. Medicaire has put a pause on funding medical equipment, orthotics, and prosthetics. For $1 million you can buy a pair of Trump Crutches™ for the needy.
• Qatar Trump Airlines: What to do with a gifted 747? Daily flights between any golf course and Mar-a-Lago.
• Trump Hospitals and Research Centers. No vaccinated or masked patients permitted. No cutting edge research allowed.
• The Trump Center for Human Resources (Trump HR™). His university went bankrupt, and he paid a $25 million fine for it. But Trump is a wonderful judge of quality employees whose main virtue is making their boss look good. A half dozen top administration officials are in the Epstein files.
• Trump Triumphal Arc. Bigger than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, but dedicated to heroes with bone spurs who salute North Korean generals. The Arc would resemble the meaning of Albert Speer’s “Cathedral of Light” to commemorate the thousand-year Reich in Nuremburg.
• The Jeff Epstein Beauty Pageant. Donald Trump co-owned and operated the Miss Universe Organization from 1996 to 2015. He bragged about going into dressing rooms. He may wish to re-acquire the business for his former friend (we have photos and emails).
• Trump Veterinary Center and Restaurant. Menu includes Cats and Dogs.
• Trump Amusement Park and Tariff Research Center. Highlight is the “TACO” Roller Coaster.
• Trump Rushmore National Monument. Granted, it must overcome significant geological and structural issues, and significant political opposition. But entry valid with “Trump the Beautiful” Park pass. If you deface the pass which has his orange likeness, you are deported.
• Trump Orange Cosmetics. Trump sells a tawdry fragrance whose slogan might be “Because real women love the kind of real man who smells of spray tan.” Also gaudy gold sneakers at only $800.
• Trump Condoms. In gold wrapper with label “Tiny Hands, Big Ego.” (Men whose ring finger is longer than middle finger have slightly bigger penises than average. This apparently explains why Trump flipped off an autoworker on a visit to a Michigan Ford plant. The Trump Footlong wiener, sold in Chicago, is 3” long.
• Trump Cell Phones. Already in the works. None have been delivered as promised six months ago. Phone comes loaded—with one app, “Truth Social,” discounted to annual fee of $100 per year.
• The Trump “Dzhugashvili” Prize. Joe Stalin awarded himself 11 major medals, including three Lenin prizes, but never the Stalin prize.
• The Trump Legislative Award. To be given annually to Trump himself for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed into law in July 2025 that will impoverish Americans, lead to hunger crises, cut medical care, successfully enrich billionaires, enable Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain residents without due process, and increase the deficit by $3 trillion in one decade.
• Trump Currency. Name and stunning physiognomy on legal tender. Representative Joe Wilson (R-SC) introduced the “Donald J. Trump $250 Bill Act.” In addition to the slang for the $100 bill as the “C-note” and “Benjamin” (Franklin), there will be the “Cheeto” or “Taco” for the $250 bill.
• Trump Collectible Cards. What could be more presidential? Already available including images of the four-time draft dodger wearing American flag boxing gloves that run counter to his own presidential order of August 2025 making it a crime to desecrate the flag.

To ensure these and other possibilities, in February 2026 Trump’s representatives filed three applications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to trademark his name for future use on an airport in a variety of possible names, along “clothing, handbags, luggage, jewelry, watches, and tie clips.” This would enable US citizens to continue to pay Trump through licensing fees. A reasonable patent lawyer might trademark “Grifting President™”.

Trump has already immortalized his legacy in: at least eight Trump towers, and at least 13 others never completed; 10 other Trump buildings, and a dozen more never completed; a handful of Trump hotels, but at least 18 never completed or renamed;15 golf courses, and five abroad, and several under discussion abroad funded by Qataris and Saudis; seven former casinos and four never completed that led to six bankruptcies; and 94 felonies and one case of sexual abuse.

Trump can already be satisfied to learn that scientists have named several creatures after him: a fragile yellow-white moth (Neopalpa donaldtrumpi), a fossil sea urchin (Tetragramma donaldtrumpi), and Dermophis donaldtrumpi, the proposed name for a new species of blind amphibious 10 centimeter-long worm.

Michael Parenti, who died on January 24 at the age of 92, blazed a long, brave, and often lonely trail through American political thought and radical politics. The author of more than 25 books, including such many-editioned classics as Democracy for the Few and Inventing Reality, Parenti leaves behind a rich and vital legacy of intellectual and moral clarity.

Arguably one of the most influential thinkers and writers on the US left this past half-century, Parenti stands out as uniquely courageous and unapologetic in directly confronting capitalism, US imperialism, and the manifold corruptions and inequities of society’s powerful. Where many liberal writers bemoaned corporations and the rich, Parenti educated generations (including this writer) about capitalism’s fundamental contradictions and intrinsic forces of inequality, harm, and destruction.

Parenti grew up in a working-class family in East Harlem in New York City, and worked for a few years after high school before obtaining his BA from City College of New York. From there, he gained a teaching fellowship at Brown University, where he earned his MA, then earned his PhD at Yale University. Parenti taught at a slew of different colleges and universities across the United States, eventually becoming an itinerant lecturer and writer after he was widely blackballed from academia for his ideology and activism.

In 1970, Dr. Parenti’s career as a professor was derailed when he was clubbed by police while protesting the shootings of students at Kent State, leading to his ouster from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He soon resettled at the University of Vermont, which then booted him when he was convicted for the protest altercation. Parenti became part of the Green Mountain State’s upwelling of political ferment. He ran for Congress in 1974 on the Liberty Union ticket, netting third place with 7% of the vote, while his then-friend Bernie Sanders garnered 4% in his run for the US Senate.

At a time when the most radical US political rebellions are sadly emanating from the fascist, bigoted MAGA right, what we so urgently need is a fierce, disciplined, unapologetic, nonviolent uprising from the progressive left.

While growing up in this fertile milieu of 1970s Vermont, I met Parenti through our interconnected communities and chatted with him many times over the years. Alongside his brilliance and courage, Parenti was warm, amiable, engaging, and funny. He had a visceral humanity and compassion to him that embedded both his interactions and his writing.

“What the military-industrialists fail to see is that the pyramid of power and profit they build rests on a crumbling base,” he wrote in a 1981 essay in The Progressive, one of several pieces he contributed to this magazine between 1975-1992. “Ultimately, no political-economic order can remain secure by victimizing its own people. Sooner or later, this truth returns to haunt the mighty.”

One trademark Parenti talent was his ability to pierce through clotted, contorted mainstream narratives with sharp original insights. A favorite of mine comes from a speech he gave before a packed auditorium at the University of Colorado in 1986:

The Third World is not poor. You don’t go to poor countries to make money... Most countries are rich. The Philippines are rich. Brazil is rich. Mexico is rich. Chile is rich. Only the people are poor. There’s billions to be made there, to be carved out and to be taken. There’s been billions, for 400 years, the capitalist European and North American powers have carved out and taken the timber, the flax, the hemp, the cocoa, the rum, the tin, the copper, the iron, the rubber, the bauxite, the slaves, and the cheap labor... These countries are not underdeveloped, they are over-exploited.

The crowd erupted in thunderous applause, as often happened at a Parenti speech.

Many of Parenti’s works, while maligned or dismissed by mainstream critics, have proven to be startlingly prescient. Democracy for the Few, first published in 1974, provides a trenchant original analysis of the multi-layered relationships between economic and political power. A few short quotes from the book bear chillingly close resemblance to the intertwinement of money and politics today:

The close relationship between politics and economics is neither neutral nor coincidental. Large governments evolve through history in order to protect large accumulations of property and wealth.It is ironic that people of modest means sometimes become conservative out of a scarcity fear bred by the very capitalist system they support.In almost every enterprise, government has provided business with opportunities for private gain at public expense. Government nurtures private capital accumulation through a process of subsidies, supports, and deficit spending and an increasingly inequitable tax system.

In his 1986 book, Inventing Reality, Parenti delivers a searing and wise indictment of corporate mass media that goes beyond standard critiques. While liberal critics of corporate media may decry big business control of journalism, Parenti’s examination dug deeper into core fundamentals of capitalism: “As with any business, the mass media’s first obligation is to make money for their owners,” he wrote, and these wealthy owners “determine which person, which facts, which version of the facts, and which ideas shall reach the public.”

As a young, budding journalist when Inventing Reality was first published, I learned a great deal, not only about who owns and controls the media, but also about the many hidden biases embedded in US journalism stemming largely from that economic power. As Parenti often pointed out, mainstream media discourse typically spans a narrow political continuum from liberal to conservative, rarely including any radical or progressive perspectives, particularly ones like Parenti’s which confront capitalism directly.

Ironically, following Michael’s passing, the New York Times ran a lengthy obituary piece that illustrated many of these biases, highlighting mainstream criticisms of Parenti’s “uncompromising” stances and terming his speaking style as “feisty and animated.” Displaying some of the biases Parenti long critiqued, Times staffer Trip Gabriel wrote, “Parenti seemed to view every American domestic challenge as the fault of capitalism and every US foreign venture as an act of militarized imperialism.” As if such an assessment is somehow objectively inaccurate.

Parenti’s passing is especially notable and poignant due to the dearth of radical political thought and leadership in the United States today. While he was often outcast and blackballed throughout much of academia, he was of a now-gone generation on the left that, at least to some extent, retained its radicalism and Marxist analysis. In this respect, Parenti and his ideas came from the Old Left of the 1930s to the 1960s, rather than the New Left movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which often diverged from Marxism and communism.

In today’s chaotic and confusing political landscape, we have left-progressive figures of varying prominence and radicalism, but very few who, like Parenti, directly confront capitalism and its structural, systematic destruction, rather than simply chronicling the many anecdotes of its impacts.

Parenti’s legacies are many and important. Through his books and countless lectures, he inspired generations of progressive-left activists and thinkers. He kept the American left’s torch, so often flickering and adrift, lit and sharply afire.

But there’s another reason I think it’s time for many to discover or revisit Michael Parenti’s prolific oeuvre. At a time when the most radical US political rebellions are sadly emanating from the fascist, bigoted MAGA right, what we so urgently need is a fierce, disciplined, unapologetic, nonviolent uprising from the progressive left.

Parenti’s old one-time friend, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), called for political revolution when he ran for president in 2016 and 2020. We hear less of that call to action today, when so much of our political energy and time are consumed by our desperate defenses against President Donald Trump’s hideous autocracy.

Amid the daily chaos and maelstroms over Trump’s unrelenting assaults on immigrants, human, and civil rights, our environment, and this nation’s withering democracy, the “Overton window” of the politically possible has been squelched nearly shut. These days, even many progressives have been at least temporarily reduced to anti-Trumpers and, to some degree, to the dreary-grim “Blue no matter who” camp. We could really use the bold radicalism of Michael Parenti now, with his piercing ferocity and that iconic moral and intellectual clarity.

Recent public announcements that many public libraries could no longer accept passport applications surprised many.

In a now unusual attempt at bicameral and bipartisan legislation, Rep. John Joyce (R-Pa.) and Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), have put forth bills (H.R.6997 and S.3733) that would enable all public libraries, whether they are organized as units of government or nonprofit organizations, to serve as passport acceptance facilities designated by the State Department.

As a university educator in Library and Information Science, I was at first taken aback by the passport application ban attempt. Many others were surprised that libraries had been accepting passport applications. But then perhaps neither the service nor the attempt to shut it down are a surprise at all.

Public libraries across the nation are an integral piece of our social and civic infrastructure. Librarians see up close the needs for social services in their communities, and they step up to meet those needs.

Libraries are where people step from one world into another, sometimes by opening books and sometimes by sharing space with people very different from themselves.

Libraries provide internet access for people who do not have the resources to get online from home or may not have a home where they can get online. Libraries provide physical shelter, in times of climate emergency like extreme heatwaves or intense freezes. They provide shelter for people who need to get off the street for a few hours to find a safe place. Recently, they have begin offering telehealth booths to support medical care in remote communities.

Libraries promote literacy, a lynchpin of economic security for both individuals and the communities in which they live. Indeed, there is considerable research demonstrating that there are higher literacy rates in communities with access to a public library, particularly in low income and rural areas.

There are approximately 17,000 public libraries in the United States, a number that has remained remarkably stable in the past few decades. Despite funding difficulties, skepticism about the value of physical libraries in the digital era, and political and social challenges to library collections, libraries remain at the center, meeting many of those communities’ needs.

Of course, it is perfect that libraries were places to apply for passports as they are places of border crossing. Libraries are where people step from one world into another, sometimes by opening books and sometimes by sharing space with people very different from themselves.

There is a public library that famously straddles the Vermont-Canada border where you can literally step across a border. That quiet fame has grown louder now that it plays a key role in Louise Penny’s latest novel, The Black Wolf.

To step into the world of the library at most you’ll need a library card. Everyone is welcome.

To be sure, not every library looks like it welcomes all people with open arms. Legacy architecture and practices can perpetuate the perception of the library as hushed and exclusive.

The precarity of funding for public libraries often prevents libraries from addressing that perception. Many libraries aspire to renovating and modernizing their spaces in ways that they simply cannot afford. Public libraries rely upon local taxpayers for much of their funding, but they also rely upon federal grants to innovate and develop new initiatives.

Nearly one year ago, President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order intended to dismantle the only federal agency dedicated to funding library services, the Institute for Museum and Library Services. The agency awards almost $300,000,000 in grants every year, including more than $160 million that goes to states and largely supports the work of public libraries.

The executive order was successfully challenged in court by the attorneys general of 21 states, and on November 21 of last year, the US District Court for the District of Rhode Island struck down the Trump administration’s attempts to dismantle the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

One result of this victory is that last month, IMLS awarded for eight projects “dedicated to building AI literacy.” Once again, libraries see a need and step up to meet it.

Many people voice public criticism and concern about the use of public libraries. Critics complain that they are overrun with noisy teens after school, socializing and playing video games. Some complain libraries are filled with sleeping, foul-smelling people who experience homelessness, or that they are opening the doors for children to step into obscenity.

But it is crucial to see the critical need for accessible public libraries in this country. It is important to support these bills now up for review to support libraries in providing passport application services, particularly in communities where it can be difficult or intimidating for people to use other federal offices.

More than that, it is essential for the country for policymakers, funders, and all Americans to support libraries through ensuring funding, community advocacy, and moral support. It is crucial to help libraries continue to be places where everyone can cross borders and step into new worlds.