This week I spoke at an interfaith vigil for Palestine at the University of Maryland, We had to pass through metal detectors to reach the field where the event took place. Students were not allowed to have loudspeakers—or, apparently, even lighting. I had prepared notes, but I couldn’t see them in the darkness. This is reconstructed from those notes.

Brothers and sisters, friends, I want to start by addressing the people of Palestine. You have shown the world that human beings are capable of more strength, faith, and courage than most of us could ever imagine. We love and honor you. We mourn for every man, woman, and child slaughtered with U.S. arms and U.S. dollars in the name of democracy.

But the people of Palestine didn’t sign up to be anyone’s inspiration. They didn’t enlist for this sacrifice. They were drafted into it after the Second World War by a world order that was and is dominated by Western powers. Those powers took their land—not out of idealism, as we were told, but for reasons of control and hegemony.

Those of us who try to promote justice for Palestine—which I think describes most of us here—often find ourselves facing a barrage of mind games and word games. Here’s why that’s on my mind tonight: I write and speak often about Palestine, so I’m used to nasty correspondence. But I got more this weekend than I expected, because what I’d written on Friday felt pretty mild. After some biased coverage from CBS News, some allies and I circulated a petition asking CBS to put a camera crew at the Hebron crossing, to show people what happens there so they can make up their own minds.

That’s it.

Judging by the responses, you’d think “make up our own minds” was hate speech. I’m sure you’ve experienced this, too: Even if all you say about Palestine is “Gosh, it’s too bad about the children,” the responses can be vitriolic.

This has been a shocking year—for the sheer volume of lives lost, for the magnitude of the violence, and for the nakedness of the genocidal intention displayed by Israel and supported by the U.S.

Let me quote some of the emails I received. (Don’t worry, I’ll leave out the bad language and personal insults.) One accused me of “flaming the fire that is... causing the unprecedented rise in antisemitism and just plain old Jew hatred everywhere.”

Another said, “Many more countries should be called out for their atrocious stances on racism, woman’s rights, religious rights, and freedom of any kind... be fair and balanced.”

One self-described expert wrote, “Do you understand that Jews cannot enter any Palestinian area without the risk of being killed or kidnapped?” (Apparently he hasn’t heard of “settlements.”) Another said, “People are getting sick and tired of your one-sided complaints.”

See what they’re doing? Every day we’re told that even mild criticism of Israel makes you an awful person who promotes “Jew hatred,” who’s unfair and unbalanced, who makes people “sick and tired.”

They want us to feel badly about speaking up for Palestine—as if it’s wrong to oppose the killing of children or the mass starvation and homelessness of an entire population. They want us to feel ashamed for telling the truth.

But you know what? I’m done. I refuse to let anyone make me feel ashamed for telling the truth. Nobody will make me feel badly about demanding justice.

I’m proud of speaking up, and I hope every one of you is proud too. Please don’t stop.

But I will say this: I think a few of these comments arise out of genuine pain and fear. Western interests have spent 75 years manipulating the emotions of an innocent people who had barely survived an unthinkable trauma.

I know; I lived through some of that manipulation. It wasn’t just in school or on the evening news. It permeated the culture.

When I was eight years old my parents took me to see a movie about Israel that was very popular at the time. The theme song began, “This land is mine, God gave this land to me...” ( Talk about “extremist rhetoric.”)

Those Western forces—who never had any special love for the Jewish people—instilled fear in millions to promote their cynical objectives. Today, they’ve frightened them so much that defending innocent infants feels like hate rather than humanity. That’s no way to live.

But I can have compassion for them and still know they’re tragically misguided.

People act as if we, not they, are too selective with our empathy. Psychologists call that “projection.” They tell us we should mourn all the innocent dead. I do—with all my heart and soul. The other side may dehumanize; we will not. As the anticolonialist revolutionary Omar Mukhtar reportedly said, “They are not our teachers.” We will not stoop to their level.

The Jewish and Islamic traditions both say that to kill one innocent person is to destroy an entire universe. “One innocent person;” that’s an individual measurement. As individuals, I mourn each innocent soul equally. Each is precious. Each is to be grieved for. Each is a universe, infinite.

But the freedom struggle is not about individuals or individual lives. It’s about a system—a system of colonialism, apartheid, and genocide. It’s about entrenched and globalized racism. It’s about the debasing of international courts, diplomacy, and organizations—especially those that rightly condemn Israel’s illegal occupation, its wanton cruelty, and its many violations of international and moral law.

This has been a shocking year—for the sheer volume of lives lost, for the magnitude of the violence, and for the nakedness of the genocidal intention displayed by Israel and supported by the U.S.

It’s been shocking on the home front, too. I’ve been shocked by what I’ve seen and heard from people I know, from politicians, from public figures…

I thought I had a pretty good idea how things work around here. I didn’t know the half of it. In the last year I’ve seen my country exposed as a shadow—no, the shadow of a shadow—of the image it presents to the world. Sure, I knew about its militarism, colonialism, racism, and hypocrisy. I wasn’t even surprised by its support for the first waves of slaughter against Gaza. Saddened and horrified, yes, but not surprised.

But what shocked me then, and shocks me still, is its unending support for relentless genocide—day after day, week after week, month after month—with only the most translucent veneer of empty rhetoric to cover it.

And I’m surprised by the brazenness with which America’s global military machine wields its power, not only around the world but here in America. All other institutions in this country—media, police, employers—bow before it. That includes educational institutions. This machine openly suppresses our rights—especially your rights as students who deserve to speak and think freely while pursuing peace and justice.

The weaponization of antisemitism: I have to say, I did see that coming. But they’ve taken it to new levels.

Which makes this a good time to talk about my own background: My father’s parents came from a Jewish village in what was then Russia and is now Ukraine. My mother’s mother was French. My maternal grandfather was born in a covered wagon headed west. (Three out of four of my grandparents were immigrants, but no white American has ever asked me “where I’m from.” Hmm.)

My maternal great-grandfather fought in the U.S. Civil War. My paternal great-grandfather was a senior rabbinical judge in Russia who presumably made judgments based on halakhic law. (If you don’t know what halakha is, it’s the Jewish version of shar’ia—without all the bad publicity.)

I’m proud of my Jewish grandparents, who came to a new land with nothing. My grandmother was one of the strongest people I’ve ever known. My grandfather was a tailor and a left-wing union organizer who as a young man helped his entire village escape from the pogroms.

You know what “pogrom” means, right? It’s the Russian word for “Cossacks doing to Jewish villagers back then what settlers do to Palestinians in the West Bank today.”

And so, here we are, one year later. What happens next? Nobody knows the future, least of all me. But I can offer some observations before I go:

I was a child during the integration of the segregated, apartheid American South (although that’s still a work in progress). People said Black people would never be able to vote, or even to eat in the same restaurants as white people. They said it was impossible. But it happened.

I worked in communist Europe, where I saw the Soviet empire collapse—something else people thought was impossible. But it happened.

I spent time in South Africa, where people once thought apartheid was permanent and that there would be a bloodbath if it fell apart. They said a peaceful transition was impossible. But it happened.

And so, while I can’t back it up with facts and figures, I sense something coming—something people say is impossible. My head and my heart both tell me that not only is a free Palestine possible, it is inevitable. I see the people of Palestine, and I see all of you here tonight, and I know that you’ll keep the faith and continue the struggle until that day comes. Deep inside, I feel it.

And so, I tell you now that I am certain—in my body and my soul—that justice will prevail and Palestine will be free.

Jill Stein doesn’t give, as the old saying goes, a flying f*ck about democracy. Instead, she’s all about how famous she can become and how much money she can grift off her repeated presidential campaigns. It’s a damn dangerous game.

Fresh off her 2016 political quacksalvery, in which she handed that year’s election to Donald Trump, this professional grifter — who’s been doing real damage to the Green Party for over a decade — is trying to get Trump back into the White House.

As her Wisconsin campaign manager, Pete Karas, told Politico:

“We need to teach Democrats a lesson.”

Arguably, Democrats have already learned that lesson.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost Wisconsin to Trump by 22,748 votes; Stein carried 31,072 votes. In Michigan the story was similar: Clinton lost to Trump by 10,704 votes while Stein carried 51,463. Ditto for Pennsylvania, where Trump won by 44,292 votes and Stein pulled in 49,941 votes.

Had Clinton carried those three states she would have become president.

The Green Party — that I safely voted for in 2000 when I lived in non-swing-state Vermont — deserves a candidate who’ll work to produce real change rather than simply run repeated vanity campaigns that cripple our admittedly flawed electoral system.

Those slim margins may be a distant memory, however, given how hard Stein is pounding on Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania Democrats against President Biden’s unfortunate support of Israel’s brutal bombing campaign in Gaza. As Newsweek reported last week:

“In Michigan, a battleground state where the Greens are campaigning hard, and which has a large Arab American community, 40 percent of Muslim voters backed Stein versus just 12 percent for Harris and 18 percent for Trump, according to a late August poll by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

“Michigan has more than 200,000 Muslim voters and 300,000 with Middle Eastern or North African ancestry. Biden won there in 2020 by 154,000 votes, while Trump carried the state with a victory margin of just 10,700—or 0.23 percent—in 2016.

“In Wisconsin, the CAIR poll showed Stein on 44 percent and Harris on 29 percent, while she also leads the Democrat candidate among Muslims voters in Arizona.”

I moderated the 2012 presidential debate between Stein and Libertarian Gary Johnson; she and Johnson both had the smell of cheap political hustlers to me then, a feeling that’s only been reinforced in the years since.

Stein certainly hasn’t done much to advance the stated goals of the Green Party. Back in the day, it was the Greens leading the charge against climate change and in favor of instant runoff voting, having considerable success with the latter.

David Cobb, a Texas environmental attorney, ran on the Green ticket in 2004 and was a regular on my radio program that year. He explicitly told people listening to my show in swing states to vote for John Kerry instead of him, calling it his “safe states” strategy.

He refused to campaign or even appear in battleground states, a statement of both high integrity and real patriotism.

Stein has neither. This is her third run for president (Howie Hawkins was the Green candidate in 2020 and was not on the ballot in most swing states.)

Instead, she’s bragging about how she’s going to hand the 2024 election to Donald Trump. Presumably she’ll be spared the imprisonment that Trump says he’s preparing for the rest of us in politics and the media. As Stein boasted to Newsweek:

“Third Way found that, based on polling averages in battleground states, the 2020 margin of victory for Democrats would be lost in four states — Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin — because of third party support.

“So they can’t win. There’s a fair amount of data now that suggests the Democrats have lost. Unless they give up their genocide.

“We’re doing outreach all the time to a lot of different groups, but it’s really been the Muslim Americans and Arab Americans who have really taken this campaign on like it’s theirs — like they have enormous ownership over this.”

Running for president and keeping an iron grip on the once-noble Green Party has become Stein’s singular mission. And she’s killing the Party — and its once-sterling reputation — in the process. As Alexandria Ocasio Cortez said:

“If you run for years in a row, and your party has not grown, has not added city council seats, down ballot seats and state electives, that’s bad leadership. And that to me is what’s upsetting.”

As Peter Rothpletz wrote for The New Republic in an article titled Jill Stein Is Killing the Green Party:

“As of July 2024, a mere 143 officeholders in the United States are affiliated with the Green Party. None of them are in statewide or federal offices. In fact, no Green Party candidate has ever won federal office. And Stein’s reign has been a period of indisputable decline, during which time the party’s membership—which peaked in 2004 at 319,000 registered members—has fallen to 234,000 today.”

Stein brought along a Fox “News” film crew when she crashed the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, cementing her reputation as a hustler who’ll hook up with anybody who’ll provide her with fame or fortune.

There are, apparently, no Democrats in America clean or pure or virginal enough for Stein; as Rothpletz reports, she even attacked Bernie Sanders for being a “DC insider” and “corrupted” by corporate money.

Meanwhile, her campaign, theoretically opposed to giant monopolies and defense contractors, has taken money from Google, Lockheed Martin, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and McKinsey.

Stein is working hard to win the votes of disaffected Muslims in Michigan and Wisconsin, among other swing states, and could well deny Harris the White House this year just like she so proudly did to Clinton in 2016.

The unfortunate reality is that our system of democracy — created way back in 1789 — essentially requires a two-party system because we have first-past-the-post, winner-take-all elections. The result is that third parties always tear votes away from the major party with which they are most closely philosophically aligned.

And the Electoral College, by creating swing states, amplifies the problem.

Until America adopts proportional representation nationwide (which would require a constitutional amendment) or instant runoff voting (which could be done by law), a vote for a third-party candidate will always damage the party most closely aligned with it. Jill Stein understands this well, but chooses to ignore (or to intentionally exploit) its consequences.

Most other advanced democracies use a parliamentary or proportional representation system where the party that gets, for example, 12 percent of the votes gets 12 percent of the seats in Parliament. This allows for multiple parties and a more vibrant democracy.

However, it wasn’t until the year the Civil War started, 1861, that British philosopher John Stuart Mill published a how-to manual for multi-party parliamentary democracies in his book Considerations On Representative Government.

It was so widely distributed and read that nearly all of the world’s democracies today — all of them countries that became democracies after the late 1860s — use variations on Mill’s proportional representation parliamentary system.

The result for those nations is a plethora of parties representing a broad range of perspectives and priorities, all able to participate in the daily governance of their nation. Nobody gets shut out.

Governing becomes an exercise in coalition building, and nobody is excluded. If you want to get something done politically, you have to pull together a coalition of parties to agree with your policy.

Most European countries, for example, have political parties represented in their parliaments that range from the far left to the extreme right, with many across the spectrum of the middle. There’s even room for single issue parties; for example, several in Europe focus almost exclusively on the environment or immigration.

The result is typically an honest and wide-ranging discussion across society about the topics of the day, rather than a stilted debate among only two parties.

It’s how the Greens became part of today’s governing coalition in Germany, for example, and are able to influence the energy future of that nation. And because of that political diversity in the debates, the decisions made tend to be reasonably progressive: look at the politics and lifestyles in most European nations.

But until America adopts proportional representation nationwide (which would require a constitutional amendment) or instant runoff voting (which could be done by law), a vote for a third-party candidate will always damage the party most closely aligned with it. Jill Stein understands this well, but chooses to ignore (or to intentionally exploit) its consequences.

The Green Party — that I safely voted for in 2000 when I lived in non-swing-state Vermont — deserves a candidate who’ll work to produce real change rather than simply run repeated vanity campaigns that cripple our admittedly flawed electoral system.

It’s time to say “good bye” to Jill Stein and rescue — and then improve — our democratic republic.

Last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 254,000 jobs were created in September and that job growth in both July and August was stronger than initially reported. This report was just the latest confirmation of the extraordinary strength of the U.S. labor market in recent years. This strength is what led to real (inflation-adjusted) incomes recovering far faster after the Covid-19 recession than they have following previous recessions. Even better, real wage growth has been by far the fastest at the low end of the wage scale, which has reduced inequality.

This labor market strength was also 100% a policy choice. Unlike previous business cycles, policymakers passed fiscal relief and recovery measures at the scale of the shock, and it proved that low unemployment could be restored very quickly after recessions so long as this policy lever was pulled with enough force.

Public appreciation of this accomplishment has been blunted by the outbreak of inflation in 2021 and 2022. While inflation has been steadily reined in since early 2023, the public’s perception of the economy remains soured by it. In a strict economic sense, the public mood seems odd: If real wages are higher and more equal now than at equivalent points in previous recoveries, why isn’t the public mood much better?

Policymakers who chose not to target significantly higher unemployment rates to tamp down inflation made the correct judgement that inflation was mostly driven by shocks that would fade even with labor markets remaining strong.

One reason put forward as to why the public dislikes inflation even if real wages and incomes are rising is pretty persuasive: Workers see wage growth as something they individually achieved while inflation was a policy mistake inflicted on them. This outlook is understandable, but it’s totally wrong.

Policy choices influence wage growth every bit as much as inflation—and sometimes more. When wage growth is slow, policymakers deserve blame—not workers. When wage growth is strong, however, it is because policy has done something right, not because workers spontaneously decided to become more productive or harder-working.

It is deeply damaging to U.S. policy debates that this is not more broadly appreciated.

For decades when wage growth for the vast majority of workers was anemic, these workers were often told it was because they weren’t skilled enough to keep pace with the demands of technological changes and globalization. This was false. It was intentional policy decisions that suppressed wage growth in those decades, policy choices meant to redistribute income upwards toward capital-owners and corporate managers.

In the past four years, workers have seen fast wage growth not because they are working more productively or harder—U.S. workers have always been the most productive in the world and have always worked hard. What changed was that policymakers decided to target a rapid return to sustained low unemployment, keeping unemployment below 4.5% for the longest stretch of time since the Vietnam War. In 2021, these tight labor markets were also accompanied by unprecedently large and expansive unemployment insurance benefits and cash transfers to households. These public supports gave workers more breathing room than ever before to be choosy about which jobs they took. These policy choices are why wages grew so fast so early in the pandemic recovery.

In fact, over the pandemic recovery, the policy fingerprints on fast wage growth are far clearer than those on too-high inflation. Inflation after 2019 was driven by two global shocks—the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Inflation accelerated everywhere in the advanced world, and the precise amount by country was wholly unrelated to policy choices they made.

The most common critique of policymakers is that the Federal Reserve should have engineered softer labor markets and tolerated higher unemployment to break inflation’s momentum. This thinking is wrong. There is a long and extremely well-developed literature nearly unanimously showing that higher unemployment has larger and more reliable effects in reducing wage growth than it does in reducing inflation.

Policymakers who chose not to target significantly higher unemployment rates to tamp down inflation made the correct judgement that inflation was mostly driven by shocks that would fade even with labor markets remaining strong. That is, they chose to not sacrifice wage growth (and the jobs of millions of workers) to pull down inflation.

In short, the inflation of recent years was—sadly—inevitable. The fast wage growth over the past four years was made possible entirely by proactive policy decisions. Getting this straight is crucial for getting better policy going forward. And it should make the public much more appreciative about the macroeconomic choices made since 2020.

In a case that is disappointing but not surprising, the agreement between the government of Azerbaijan and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) for hosting the climate conference COP29, is replete with significant shortcomings and ambiguities on the protections for participants’ rights. Human Rights Watch has obtained a copy of this host country agreement, signed in August 2024, which has yet to be made public.

For instance, the agreement states that while conference participants “shall enjoy immunity for legal process in respect of words spoken or written and any act performed by them,” a separate clause requires them to respect Azerbaijani laws and not interfere in its “internal affairs.”

There is no clarity in the agreement about what actions could constitute “interference” with Azerbaijan’s “internal affairs,” and whether Azerbaijan’s laws apply in the UN-run conference zone. Given Azerbaijan’s strict limitations on freedoms of expression and assembly, which violate international human rights law, participants' actions within the zone could be subject to reprisals outside the zone.

Azerbaijan has a longstanding record of severely limiting free speech and peaceful assembly. It uses abusive laws to paralyze independent nongovernmental organizations and silence dissent.

At the 2023 Bonn Climate Conference, UNFCCC member states highlighted that host country agreements should be made publicly available and should uphold international human rights law.

Civil society organizations, including Human Rights Watch, have repeatedly called for host-country agreements to be made public for participants to have confidence that their rights will be protected when attending climate conferences. Last year, Amnesty International obtained a copy of the COP28 agreement between the government of the UAE and the UNFCCC, and although some positive elements were included, they concluded that overall human rights safeguards in the HCA were insufficient for participants.

Just weeks before COP29, members of civil society, including activists, journalists and human rights defenders, still lack clarity about the protections in place to ensure their human rights are respected at the conference.

It is regrettable that these agreements are shrouded in secrecy, and it shouldn’t fall to civil society organizations to share them publicly. In the interests of transparency and accessibility, the UNFCCC should publish past, current, and future agreements on its website.

More urgently, it should publicly call upon the Azerbaijani government to respect its human rights obligations and facilitate a rights-respecting climate conference.

Since Vice President Kamala Harris took the reins at the top of the Democratic ticket in late July, she has repeatedly declared: “We’re the underdogs.”

Even after a stretch of positive media coverage, a widely praised Democratic National Convention and a debate performance in which she dominated former President Donald Trump, Harris has continued to cast her campaign as a longshot.

Why the handwringing, when Harris is polling far better than President Joe Biden was before he dropped out of the race?

Some pundits have stacked it up to a savvy get-out-the-vote strategy. But the race really is that close: Especially in decisive swing states, the Harris campaign is, in many ways, the underdog. And considering the far larger size of Biden’s 2020 lead — and how narrow his win turned out to be — Democrats have every reason to worry.

Harris has not yet rebuilt the fragile coalition that pushed Biden over the finish line four years ago.

Trump is a uniquely flawed candidate and his dismal record in office is easy to excoriate, as Harris demonstrated during the September debate. His presidency showered the rich with tax cuts, squeezed working people, offshored jobs, terrorized immigrant communities and failed to respond to a pandemic that led to mass preventable death and turned the economy upside down. The Supreme Court justices he appointed have curtailed reproductive rights and targeted the entire regulatory apparatus. And the far Right’s Project 2025 playbook promises to roll back decades of progressive reforms, from voting access to LGBTQ rights.

What’s more, Trump has promised a regime of vengeance that would directly target journalists, organizers and anyone considered a political enemy.

Still, Harris has not yet rebuilt the fragile coalition that pushed Biden over the finish line four years ago. Compared with Biden in 2020, polls show Harris underperforming with voters of color, younger voters and seniors — all key for Democrats. And when it comes to lower-income voters and those with less formal education, Harris is being outrun.

A second Trump term would mean economic mayhem for the working class and a disaster for the labor movement. Yet, according to CNN political analyst Harry Enten, “Trump has more working-class support than any GOP presidential candidate in a generation,” while Harris is poised to have the worst Democratic performance among union voters in decades.

Among Arab American voters, support for Harris has cratered as the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza continues, with Israel expanding its assault into Lebanon. A mid-September poll from the Arab American Institute (AAI) shows that, among likely Arab American voters, Trump leads Harris 46% to 42%, a far cry from 2020, when Biden won nearly 60% support. Many of these voters say the war on Gaza is a top priority — and they could be won over with a change in policy.

In Michigan, home to a significant Arab American population including Palestinian and Lebanese families, internal polling shows Harris is “underwater,” according to Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.). Based on publicly released polls, the state is a toss-up at best. The Uncommitted National Movement, which drew more than 100,000 voters in the Michigan Democratic primary, has refused to endorse Harris due to her continued support of “unconditional weapons” for Israel’s campaign of annihilation. (Hillary Clinton lost Michigan by around 10,000 votes in 2016; Biden won it by 150,000.)

These underlying dynamics should ring alarm bells for a Democratic campaign entering the final stretch of a cardinal race with potentially catastrophic consequences. If Democrats take the authoritarian threat posed by Trump as seriously as they profess, they need to change course in order to cobble together a cross-section of voters who can vault Harris into the Oval Office.

That change should start with promising a shift away from unflinching sponsorship of Israel’s military offensives. Seven in 10 likely voters want to see a ceasefire in Gaza, which will require forcing the hand of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, including by conditioning arms in line with international and U.S. law. Polling from AAI suggests that backing these restrictions would make 56% of Arab American voters more likely to support Harris.

Netanyahu has proven time and again he is unwilling to reach peace; Harris can promise to use U.S. leverage to make him. This move, backed by a majority of Americans, would help make inroads among a vast stratum of voters — including those in Michigan, Wisconsin and other swing states — eager to support the Democratic nominee if the party would simply stop underwriting a genocide. It’s also the morally correct position — tens of thousands of Palestinian women and children have already been slaughtered by American weapons, and the Netanyahu government appears dead set on not just continuing but expanding its onslaught.

On the economy, Harris could depart from her recent approach of cozying-up with crypto financiers and wealthy business interests by instead leaning into the populist, class-war rhetoric and policy planks Democratic voters have responded to in the post-Obama era. Harris has embraced good policies like reviving the expanded child tax credit, building millions of new housing units, continuing to invest in green manufacturing and going after price-gouging companies. But with a majority of the population living paycheck to paycheck, working-class Americans are in desperate need of a bold redistributive agenda that would materially improve their lives right now. Targeting the elites and billionaires is an effective strategy to win over lower income voters, and while Harris has adopted appeals in this direction to acknowledge economic grievances, there’s more runway left to address them.

Harris can take a big swing by doing more to champion the pro-working class policies her party nominally supports—in speeches, ads and voter appeals.Harris could make central in her campaign the extremely popular positions already in the 2024 Democratic Party platform — such as a federal $15 minimum wage; extending Medicare to cover hearing, dental and vision; capping out-of-pocket drug costs while forcing the pharmaceutical industry to lower prices; expanding Social Security; limiting rent increases by corporate landlords; and passing the PRO Act to massively grow union membership.

In these final weeks of the campaign, Harris can take a big swing by doing more to champion the pro-working class policies her party nominally supports — in speeches, ads and voter appeals. As the 2020 campaign drew to a close, Biden took such a pro-worker message to the stump and went on to prevail in the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

"In these final weeks of the campaign, Harris can take a big swing by doing more to champion the pro-working class policies her party nominally supports..."

These progressive realignments by Harris would also help vitalize the get-out-the-vote operations that were pivotal to Biden’s victory four years ago when young voters helped clinch swing states by coming out in droves. This year, youth voter registration is lagging behind 2020, and top Democratic groups are privately fretting that the lack of meaningful outreach to young people of color could cost them the election. In focus groups, younger voters cite concerns about the economy as well as the assault on Gaza as motivating factors in their decision. Compelling them to not just vote but also knock doors, travel to swing states and make calls should be a top priority.

Unlike campaigning alongside Republicans, as Harris has recently done, shifting to the left could also bring new energy to the constellation of grassroots organizations that engineered Biden’s Covid-era ground game in critical battleground states. The Sunrise Movement, the Working Families Party, People’s Action, Seed the Vote and Black Voters Matter have announced major electoral outreach efforts in swing states, which is welcome news for Democrats. But their work could have a larger impact if the Harris campaign makes concrete efforts to win over the now disaffected voters Democrats counted on last time. In a recent canvass led by SEIU Local 32BJ in Pennsylvania, for example, The New Yorker reports that “plenty of working-class Philadelphians had reservations about Harris.” Taming those doubts is the task at hand.

Biden’s exit offered Democrats a new direction and a real shot at defeating a despotic, revenge-fueled union buster in Trump. Harris still has a chance to respond to the clear warning signs that have made her the underdog. She should take it.

No one had expected that one year would be enough to recenter the Palestinian cause as the world’s most pressing issue, and that millions of people across the globe, would, once again rally for Palestinian freedom.

The last year witnessed an Israeli genocide in Gaza, unprecedented violence in the West Bank, but also legendary expressions of Palestinian sumud, or steadfastness.

It is not the enormity of the Israeli war, but the degree of the Palestinian sumud that has challenged what once seemed to be a foregone conclusion to the Palestinian struggle.

Yet, it turned out that the last chapter on Palestine was not yet ready to be written, and that it would not be Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who would write it.

The ongoing war has exposed the limits of Israel’s military machine. The typical trajectory of Israel's relationship with the occupied Palestinians has been predicated on unhindered Israeli violence and deafening international silence. It was largely Israel that alone determined the timing and objectives of war. Its enemies, until recently, seemed to have no say over the matter.

Yet, this is no longer the case. Israeli war crimes are now met with Palestinian unity, Arab, Muslim and international solidarity, and early, albeit serious signs of legal accountability as well.

The ongoing war has exposed the limits of Israel’s military machine.

This is hardly what Netanyahu was hoping to achieve; just days before the start of the war, he stood in the United Nations General Assembly Hall carrying a map of a ‘New Middle East’, a map that had completely erased Palestine and the Palestinians.

"We must not give the Palestinians a veto over (..) peace," he said, as "Palestinians are only 2% of the Arab world." His arrogance didn’t last long, as that supposedly triumphant moment was short-lived.

Embattled Netanyahu is now mostly concerned about his own political survival. He is expanding the war front to escape his army’s humiliation in Gaza and is terrified by the prospect of an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court.

And as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) continues to look into an ever-expanding file, accusing Israel of deliberate genocide in the Strip, the UNGA, on September 18, resolved that Israel must end its illegal occupation of Palestine within a year from the passing of its resolution on the matter.

It must be utterly disappointing for Netanyahu—who has worked tirelessly to normalize his occupation of Palestine—to be met with total and thundering international rejection of his schemes. The advisory opinion of the ICJ, on July 19, declaring that “Israel’s presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (is) unlawful” was another blow to Tel Aviv, which despite unlimited US support, failed to change international consensus on the illegality of the occupation.

In addition to the relentless Israeli violence, the Palestinian people have been marginalized as political actors. Since the Oslo Accords in 1993, their fate has been largely entrusted to a mostly unelected Palestinian leadership, which, with time, monopolized the Palestinian cause for its own financial and political interests.

The sumud of the Palestinians in Gaza, who have endured a year of mass killing, deliberate starvation and total destruction of all aspects of life, is helping reassert the political significance of a long-marginalized nation.

This shift is fundamental as it runs opposite to everything that Netanyahu had tried to achieve. In the years prior to the war, Israel seemed to be writing the final chapter of its settler colonial project in Palestine. It had subdued or co-opted the Palestinian leadership, perfected its siege on Gaza and was ready to annex much of the West Bank.

The sumud of the Palestinians in Gaza, who have endured a year of mass killing, deliberate starvation and total destruction of all aspects of life, is helping reassert the political significance of a long-marginalized nation.

Gaza became the least of Israel’s concerns, as any discussion around it was confined to the hermetic Israeli siege and the resulting humanitarian, though not political crisis.

While Palestinians in Gaza have tirelessly implored the world to pressure Israel to end the protracted siege, imposed in earnest in 2007, Tel Aviv continued to conduct its policies in the Strip according to the infamous logic of former top Israeli official, Dov Weissglas, who explained the rationale behind the blockade as "to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger."

But a year into the war, Palestinians, due to their own steadfastness, have become the center of any serious discussion on a peaceful future in the Middle East. Their collective courage and steadfastness have neutralized the Israeli military machine’s ability to exact political outcomes through violence.

True, the number of dead, missing or wounded in Gaza has already exceeded 150,000. The Strip, impoverished and dilapidated to begin with, is in total ruins. Every mosque, church or hospital has been destroyed or seriously damaged. Most of the region’s educational infrastructure has been obliterated. Yet, Israel hasn’t achieved any of its strategic objectives, which are ultimately united by a single goal, that of silencing the Palestinian quest for freedom, forever.

Despite the unbelievable pain and loss, there is now a powerful energy that is unifying Palestinians around their cause, and the Arabs and the whole world around Palestine. This shall have consequences that will last for many years, long after Netanyahu and his ilk of extremists are gone.

Since I couldn’t sleep, I figured I might as well write. I couldn’t sleep because of the picture in my mind—that tightly coiled ball of physics we’re calling Hurricane Milton as it tracks mercilessly across the Gulf of Mexico, headed toward a landfall tonight along the west coast of Florida. It scares me, for two reasons.

The first is the unrivaled speed with which it spun up, from tropical storm to Category 5 monster inside a day. This “rapid intensification” has become an increasingly common feature of hurricanes, because the heat content in the ocean is so high that the old models no longer suffice. We live, more and more, in a world of instant chaos: where wildfires can “blow up” in a matter of minutes because the fuels that feed them are so desiccated, where “flash” floods can, in minutes, turn a record rain into a street clogged with bobbing cars. These things have always been possible, but now they are common: we have in our minds the idea that the world changes at a geologic pace, moving in stately fashion through epochs and eras. But right now—as carbon dioxide accumulates more quickly in the atmosphere than at any point in the last 500 million years—”geologic pace” is measured in months. Hell, glaciers—our metaphor for moving slowly—disappear from one winter to the next.

And the second reason is: this speeded-up physics is increasingly crashing into the heart of the civilizations that we’ve built. Given the size of the planet, it’s more likely than not that a disaster will happen in somewhere sparsely populated—the boreal forests of Canada burned last summer, displacing Indigenous people of the north but mostly avoiding cities. Even Hurricane Helene last week came ashore in the Big Bend country north of Cedar Key, where people are thin on the ground. But just as California’s wildfires eventually and inevitably started taking out whole towns, Milton is aimed at one of the most built-up and vulnerable landscapes on earth. I think—from this morning’s bearings—that the very worst outcome may be dodged: if the hurricane comes in just south of Tampa Bay, its counterclockwise winds will work to drive the storm surge off that body of water. But if so it will mean sheer agony for somewhere further south, somewhere almost as overbuilt. Sarasota? Port Charlotte? And in very short order that will mean deep trouble for the insurance industry, already tottering in Florida

(It’s worth noting, if only in passing, that the two places Americans of my age thought of as refuges, idylls, dreams of the easy life were California and Florida. No longer).

We’ve spent some time in recent years worrying that there was too much fear-mongering and doom-saying in the way we talked about climate change—that it was wearing people out. And indeed there’s truth there—if we’re going to do what we must, the story in the years ahead needs to be as much about the adventure of turning our planet solar as the dread that we’ll turn our planet Venus.

But there are important moments when fear is a crucial resource. A week ago, in the wake of Helene, the veteran climate activist and North Carolina native Anna Jane Joyner wrote this dispatch from New York’s “Climate Week”

There were fancy parties, cheerful sun imagery and giant signs reading “HOPE.” The dominant theme was: We can solve this! We need to tell hopeful climate stories! But there’s no “solving” a hurricane wiping out western North Carolina, hundreds of miles from the sea. Only focusing on optimism is like telling a cancer patient that everything will be OK if they just stay positive. At best, it comes across as out of touch; at worst, it feels callous. Yes, we can still prevent the worst impacts and must demand our governments scale solutions and act urgently, but we cannot minimize the horrors unfolding now, or that it will get worse in the coming years.

And yesterday, on air, the veteran Florida weatherman John Morales let his fear show through. As Cara Buckley recounted in the Times,

“It’s just an incredible, incredible, incredible hurricane,” Mr. Morales said of Milton, closing his eyes and slightly shaking his head. “It has dropped. …”
His voice faltered. He looked down, drew a shaky breath and continued, “… it has dropped 50 millibars in 10 hours.” For viewers who didn’t understand the staggering implications of this barometric plunge, Mr. Morales’s choked delivery said enough. “I apologize,” he said in a quavering voice. “This is just horrific.”

This kind of fear is entirely useful—there are, I have no doubt, people who left their homes and drove north towards Georgia after hearing the break in Morales’ voice. He saved lives. And he did it entirely honestly. “You know what’s driving that,” he said to viewers. “I don’t need to tell you. Global warming. Climate change.” It’s honest fear, driven by deep understanding. As Morales wrote in an essay in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists last year

“As the temperature of the planet increases, my confidence in forecasting storm intensity is decreasing… Today I am no longer as comfortable in putting everyone at ease in regard to the strength of a storm. I am afraid of rapid intensification cycles happening at the drop of a hat.”

The fear of a planet where the old rules no longer hold is the ultimate fear—because then how do you even think about the future? And that’s as true as politics as it is in meteorology. The deep fear that wakes me up at night has only partly to do with the weather weather; it’s the political fronts moving through America that scare me just as much. In the wake of Helene, absurd lies about FEMA spread across social media, fueled of course by the GOP nominee. Josh Marshall, one of the finest trackers of political craziness in this country, reports this morning that the news currently circulating on the right is that Milton and Helene were the result of “weather manipulation” by Democrats designed to…something.

That, of course, is dishonest fear, driven by dishonest people. And those dishonest people may well end up in control of our country. We have 26 days left, and every one of them counts. We need to hold our nerve, do the work, and see if we can bring America safely through Hurricane Trump. That won’t deliver us to safety, but it’s a start.

The U.S. government often claims to stand for the rule of law, but this past year has made it painfully clear that this doesn’t apply to Palestinians. The moral, financial, and security costs of U.S. support for Israel’s rapidly expanding wars are adding up for Americans, too.

Since October 7, 2023, around 42,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, plus over 700 more in the West Bank. Over 1,100 Israelis have been killed, too. These tragedies are a direct consequence of Israel’s illegal, U.S.-backed occupation of Palestinian territory and its war on Gaza, which must both end immediately.

From the mass killing and maiming of Palestinian civilians to the forced starvation and deliberate destruction of Gaza’s health infrastructure, Palestinians and international experts have warned from the start that Israel is committing a “textbook case of genocide” in Gaza.

The U.S. has enabled this ongoing genocide and other crimes by providing unconditional support for Israel despite mounting atrocities.

Despite the International Court of Justice finding genocide “plausible” and calling on Israel to prevent it and ensure the delivery of lifesaving aid, Israel — like the U.S. — has ignored all of the court’s orders.

The U.S. has enabled this ongoing genocide and other crimes by providing unconditional support for Israel despite mounting atrocities. This has emboldened Israel to expand its assault to Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen as it threatens to drag the U.S. into a wider war with Iran.

None of this is inevitable.

As Israel’s chief supplier of arms, the U.S. has sent billions worth of high-powered explosives since October 7, which have turned up at massacre after massacre committed by Israel’s military. That’s a violation of our own laws barring assistance to forces that commit human rights abuses or block delivery of humanitarian aid, as Israel has done.

“Our democracy is at stake” has been an ongoing refrain this election season. But it’s also a threat to our democracy when elected officials ignore the vast majority of their constituents who have rightly demanded a permanent ceasefire and arms embargo on Israel. Instead of listening to voters, our leaders have backed violent crackdowns on protests, which threatens our First Amendment rights.

The costs of war always reverberate at home. Our policymakers have expressed support for the war using racist, dehumanizing rhetoric, which has directly contributed to rising anti-Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim hate crimes, harassment, and discrimination.

And even though most Americans oppose Israel’s war on Gaza, we’re still paying for it.

Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates that over the past year, the U.S. has spent at least $22.76 billion and counting on Israel’s onslaught in Gaza and other U.S. military operations in the surrounding region. In August, the Biden administration approved an additional $20 billion in arms sales to Israel.

All this comes on top of the $3.8 billion the U.S. already sends Israel in military aid each year. That same $3.8 billion a year could fund 29,915 registered nurses, 394,738 public housing units, or 39,158 elementary school teachers, according to the National Priorities Project.

As our post-COVID safety net continues to crumble, more people are left unable to afford housing, health care, groceries, education, and other basic necessities. Compounding these challenges, more states are battling climate disasters. We desperately need those funds at home, not funding wars and lawlessness abroad.

We desperately need those funds at home, not funding wars and lawlessness abroad.

Nevertheless, many of our elected officials would rather support the military-industrial complex than their own constituents. In a particularly flagrant example, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham recently appeared on Fox News to plead for more U.S. weapons for Israel in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, which had ravaged his home state of South Carolina.

More than statistics, law, and politics, our nation’s role in the Palestinian genocide should shake our conscience and cause us to question its morality. Are human rights and justice good for some but not others? And can we recognize our complicity in this genocide and not take action to end it?

However one answers these questions, our shared humanity hangs in the balance.

The Biden administration’s approach to the Middle East crisis that erupted in the wake of October 7, 2023 is on the brink of collapse. Israel’s aggressive maneuvers, coupled with Iran’s growing involvement, are pushing the region toward a full-scale war, one that the Biden administration ostensibly hoped to avoid.

Initially, the administration calculated that U.S. interests could survive the Gaza conflict on its own, but the risk of being drawn into a broader war with untold consequences has loomed larger. U.S. President Joe Biden’s calculated ploy to restrain Israel, especially regarding Lebanon, by offering support for its Gaza actions, now seems like a failed effort to prevent an even larger conflict. Washington’s attempts to rein in Israel, including diplomatic missions to Egypt and Qatar, have failed to shift Israeli policy. Despite repeatedly sending key figures like the CIA director and Secretary of State Antony Blinken to broker peace, the United States has been left looking complicit, supplying weapons even as Israel continues its incursions. Biden, for all his efforts to distance America from the widening chaos, can no longer escape the charge that his administration bears responsibility for enabling Israel’s unchecked escalation.

Washington is now viewed as an accomplice in the region’s unfolding chaos. Biden’s reluctance to push for a cease-fire in Gaza became more untenable by the day. By June, the so-called Biden-backed peace plan emerged, supported by Hamas and begrudgingly accepted by Israel, only for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to shift the goalposts, ignoring U.S. requests to steer clear of Egypt’s Rafah border. Instead, Israel occupied the Philadelphi corridor, violating the Camp David Accords. The U.S. response? More military aid to Israel.

Netanyahu’s gamble is clear: provoke enough conflict, and Washington will have no choice but to step in. It’s a risky game, one with global consequences.

Netanyahu, meanwhile, seems to have secured Washington’s tacit approval to target Hezbollah in Lebanon, escalating a conflict that is spiraling out of control. The results have been devastating. Booby-trapped devices detonated in everyday locations such as homes and hospitals, killing civilians, including children and medical staff. The assault displaced thousands from their homes along the Lebanon border, yet Israel’s appetite for aggression appears far from sated.

While nominally approving only a “limited” strike on Lebanon, the United States has repeated a troubling historical pattern. In 1982, Ariel Sharon promised limited Israeli operations in southern Lebanon, only for Israeli forces to advance to Beirut, laying siege to the city. Israel remained an occupying force until it was driven out in 1989 by Hezbollah.

Despite months of diplomatic wrangling, President Biden has been unable to compel Netanyahu to honor the comprehensive cease-fire agreement it accepted back in June. That plan, a phased approach to ending the Gaza conflict, remains in limbo as the war grinds on. Biden’s inability to assert control over the situation only deepens the crisis, casting doubt on U.S. influence in the region.

Ironically, the greatest threat to U.S. strategy in the Middle East hasn’t come from Iran, but from its closest ally, Israel. In the chaotic days following the October 7 attacks, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant pushed for a large-scale offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon. President Biden intervened, urging Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to shelve those plans and concentrate on Hamas. This scenario played out repeatedly, with Biden’s administration trying to restrain Israel from escalating the conflict beyond Gaza. But for Israel, Gaza was not the strategic prize it desired. Finding himself in a tricky position, Netanyahu now needs a decisive “win” to rebuild the credibility of the country’s national security apparatus, shattered by the failures of October 7. Facing potential investigations over those failures, he is desperately looking for a way to salvage his political standing.

The United States has found itself caught in the middle, struggling to manage an ally determined to shift the focus of the conflict. Netanyahu’s push for a military victory beyond Gaza threatens to drag Washington into a broader regional war, complicating Biden’s Middle East strategy and challenging America’s long-term interests in the region. Israel claims that Hezbollah is making life unbearable for its citizens, forcing many to abandon their homes for hotels. Even the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, despite his anger over Israeli attacks, had one consistent message: A cease-fire in Lebanon could only happen if there was a deal on Gaza. It’s a sentiment that even many Israelis agree with, with some finding Hezbollah’s former leader more reliable than their own prime minister.

But there’s a catch: Netanyahu is determined to separate any resolution in Lebanon from Gaza. On the surface, this latest military escalation seems focused on securing Israel’s northern border. But beneath it lies something far more calculated: Netanyahu’s long-standing ambition for a broader conflict.

This isn’t the first time he’s maneuvered global powers toward war. He convinced the Bush administration to topple Saddam Hussein on flimsy grounds and later persuaded Donald Trump to tear up the Iran nuclear deal. Now, Netanyahu wants a war with Iran, knowing that the United States would be obligated to defend Israel.

When Israel assassinated an Iranian official with whom they’d been negotiating, it crossed a dangerous line. Though Iran didn’t respond directly, Hezbollah did. Netanyahu’s gamble is clear: provoke enough conflict, and Washington will have no choice but to step in. It’s a risky game, one with global consequences. Israel appears unlikely to show restraint in the current conflict, and the Biden administration is caught in a difficult bind. Yet President Biden seems hesitant to use the leverage the United States holds to keep Israel from escalating further. His administration now hopes that Hezbollah and Iran might seek an understanding to deescalate the tensions along Israel’s northern border. But with the Israeli government unlikely to compromise, that hope feels increasingly fragile.

Scholasticide.

It’s a term coined in 2009, but has taken on new power as the devastation of Gazan schools, universities, and libraries becomes almost total. As Rice University Professor Abdel Razzaq Takriti of Scholars Against the War on Palestine said about the Israeli assault: “They’re demolishing universities and schools intentionally. They bombarded and destroyed every single university. They’re using schools as barracks and military stations.”

But another facet of scholasticide can be found in our own schools in the United States—erasing Palestinian lives and hiding the history of Palestine-Israel from young people.

Attempts to silence critical teaching around Palestine-Israel have at times been ferocious. And it requires courage for teachers to confront this repression.

In the forthcoming book from Rethinking Schools, Teaching Palestine: Lessons, Stories, Voices, Palestinian American educator Nina Shoman-Dajani writes: “Of the hundreds of assignments my children have brought home from school over the years, not one of them has referred to Palestine.”

In a review of children’s literature on Palestine, in the book, Nadine Foty, Palestinian-Egyptian-American early childhood educator, writes: “As a child, I remember feeling like I didn’t belong because I could never walk over to a map in my classrooms and see my father’s home, Palestine. When I asked, I was met by responses that Palestine didn’t exist.”

The curricular silence that turns Palestinians invisible impoverishes all young people. Instead of the knowledge they need to make sense of how Palestine became Israel and how Israel continues to wage war on Palestinians, they get nothing. Or worse.

Widely adopted corporate textbooks feed students pernicious myth after myth. Glencoe’s World History, for example, begins its section “The Question of Palestine” not with Palestinians, but with Jewish immigrants: “In the years between the two world wars, many Jews had immigrated to Palestine, believing this area to be their promised land.” The entire section simply tells Israel’s origin story as Israeli propagandists would tell it.

About Israel’s founding, Holt McDougal’s Modern World History lectures young people: “The new nation of Israel got a hostile greeting from its neighbors.” The first “Critical Thinking” question in the teacher’s edition asks: “What prevented the establishment of the Arab state in 1948?”

The sole possible answer the book offers: “Palestinian Arabs rejected the partition plan.” (That partition plan was seen by many as a temporary inconvenience, including Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, who wrote partition was “not the end but the beginning.”)

The good news is that more and more teachers around the country are breaking through the mainstream curriculum’s silences and lies.

Pro-Israel efforts to repress critical teaching about the history of Zionism and Palestine echo the country’s ferocious right-wing attacks on anti-racist, social justice curricula.

Teaching Palestine collects stories of imaginative teaching from across the country: a simulation that introduces students to Israel’s apartheid system of fragmentation and domination; a critical thinking activity with students evaluating Palestinian narratives on the 1948 Nakba (the Catastrophe), alongside Zionist narratives that fill our textbooks; an historical dive into U.S. policy choices toward Israel from the 1956 Suez Canal Crisis through Hamas’ rise to elected power in Gaza in 2006; a role play activity on the ”seeds of violence” in Palestine-Israel that transports students to Palestine in the Ottoman era and the early years of Zionist immigration and ethnic nation-building alongside Palestinian dispossession; an elementary lesson that uses Malak Matar’s poignant children’s book Sitti’s Bird: A Gaza Story.

But attempts to silence critical teaching around Palestine-Israel have at times been ferocious. And it requires courage for teachers to confront this repression.

Some instances feel absurd. In Portland, Oregon, in response to student work on Palestine posted on the walls of a public school last spring, the school district recently instituted a new administrative directive. Now, teachers may display art or posters that might “stimulate and illustrate” an area of study, but if these are visible from a “common area” like the hallway, they must have prior approval from the building administrator. This fall, school officials tore down—literally—a teacher’s “Stop the Genocide” posters. In a meeting, administrators said that “Stop Genocide” would be permissible, but inserting “the” rendered this unacceptably partisan.

In an article included in Teaching Palestine, the young adult novelist Nora Lester Murad describes how the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) bullies teachers and students by pushing—and weaponizing—the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which conflates Palestinian perspectives with antisemitism.

In Philadelphia, students of the award-winning high school teacher Keziah Ridgeway made a podcast comparing the art of Palestinians with the art of enslaved people. In response, groups there including the School District of Philadelphia Jewish Family Association labeled Ridgeway’s work with students “antisemitic and dangerous.”

Amplifying the Jewish Family Association’s complaints against Ridgeway and other teachers, ADL later submitted a Title VI complaint against the school district. As Murad notes, in the complaint, “the ADL advocates for the ‘suspension and expulsion’ of students and the ‘suspension and termination’ of teachers, who under the IHRA definition… have engaged in ‘discriminatory conduct’ for being publicly critical of Zionism.”

As we reported in the spring 2024 Rethinking Schools magazine, four teachers in Montgomery County, Maryland were placed on administrative leave for public expressions of support for Palestinians. A charter school in Los Angeles fired two first-grade teachers and placed their principal on leave after one teacher posted on Instagram that they had taught a “lesson on the genocide in Palestine.” The Decatur, Georgia school district disciplined their equity coordinator for sharing “Resources for Learning & Actions to Support Gaza.”

A recent Jewish Federation of Greater Portland parent advocacy training I attended, told parents, “You are our eyes and ears”—“Record everything. Every single word.” One presenter told the story of a group of parents confronting a principal about a teacher who showed “one-sided” CNN videos. “We demanded that some action be taken. And this teacher—I can tell you, this year, that teacher does not teach at that school.”

Pro-Israel efforts to repress critical teaching about the history of Zionism and Palestine echo the country’s ferocious right-wing attacks on anti-racist, social justice curricula. As Jesse Hagopian points out in his forthcoming book Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education, almost half of public school children in the United States live in states that restrict teaching about race and racism.

Educators of conscience need allies who can support their efforts to build a curriculum that centers Palestinian perspectives. This is not the work of educators alone. They need parents, community members, social justice organizations, and solidarity activists to demand a school curriculum of fearless curiosity—one that looks forthrightly at the history of Zionism and Palestinian struggles for justice.

Palestine has been the site of invasion, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and war. But also of resilience, of hope. Let’s help teachers introduce young people to the critical stories they need to make sense of the world—and to change it.

No one wants a nuclear reactor in their backyard. It’s an eyesore and a health hazard, not to mention the hit to your property values. And don’t forget the existential danger. One small miscalculation and boom, there goes the neighborhood!

In the 1970s, in the southwest corner of Germany, the tiny community of Wyhl was bracing for the construction of just such a nuclear reactor in its backyard. Something even worse loomed on the horizon: a vast industrial zone with new chemical plants and eight nuclear energy complexes that would transform the entire region around that town and stretch into nearby France and Switzerland. The governments of the three countries and the energy industry were all behind the project.

Even the residents of Wyhl seemed to agree. By a slim 55%, they supported a referendum to sell the land needed for the power plant. In the winter of 1975, bulldozers began to clear the site.

What sacrifices must be made to achieve the necessary transition away from fossil fuels and who will make those sacrifices?

Suddenly, something unexpected happened. Civic groups and environmentalists decided to make their stand in little Wyhl and managed to block the construction of that nuclear reactor. Then, as the organizing accelerated, the entire tri-country initiative unraveled.

It was a stunning success for a global antinuclear movement that was just then gaining strength. The next year, in the United States, the Clamshell Alliance launched a campaign to stop the construction of the proposed Seabrook nuclear power plant in New Hampshire, which they managed to delay for some time.

A few years later, critics of the antinuclear protests would dismiss such movements with the acronym NIMBY for Not In My Backyard. NIMBY movements would, however, ultimately target a range of dirty and dangerous projects from waste incinerators to uranium mines.

A NIMBY approach, in fact, is often the last option for communities facing the full force of powerful energy lobbies, the slingshot that little Davids deploy against a humongous Goliath.

That very same slingshot is now being used to try to stop an energy megaproject in eastern Washington state. A local civic group, Tri-City CARES, has squared off against a similar combination of government and industry to oppose a project they say will harm wildlife, adversely affect tourism, impinge on Native American cultural property, and put public safety at risk.

But that megaproject is not a nuclear power plant or a toxic waste dump. The Horse Heaven Hills project near Kennewick is, in fact, a future wind farm projected to power up to 300,000 homes and reduce the state’s dependency on both fossil fuels and nuclear energy.

Windmills: Aren’t they part of the solution, not part of the problem?

Critics of that Washington state project are, in fact, part of a larger movement whose criticism of “industrial wind energy development” suggests that they’re not just quixotically tilting at windmills but challenging unchecked corporate power. Left unsaid, however, is that the fossil fuel industry and conservative think tanks like the Manhattan Institute have been working overtime against wind and solar renewable energy projects, often plowing money into NIMBY-like front groups. (Donald Trump has, of course, sworn to scrap offshore wind projects should he become president again.)

It’s a reminder that the powerful, too, have found uses for NIMBYism. Rich neighborhoods have long mobilized against homeless shelters and low-income housing, just as rich countries have long outsourced their mineral needs and dirty manufacturing to poorer ones.

But even if you remove the right-wing funders and oil executives from the equation and assume the best of intentions on the part of organizations like Tri-City CARES—and there’s good reason to believe that the Washington activists genuinely care about hawks and Native American cultural property—the question remains: What sacrifices must be made to achieve the necessary transition away from fossil fuels and who will make those sacrifices?

Thanks to all the recent images of devastating typhoon and hurricane damage and record flooding, it’s obvious that much of the world’s infrastructure is not built to withstand the growing stresses of climate change. As if that’s not bad enough, it’s even clearer that political infrastructure the world over, in failing to face the issue of sacrifice, can’t effectively deal with the climate challenge either.

The Need for Sacrifice

The era of unrestrained growth is nearly at an end. In ever more parts of the world, it’s no longer possible to dig, discharge, and destroy without regard for the environment or community health. Climate change puts an exclamation point on this fact. The industrial era we’ve passed through in the last centuries has produced unprecedented wealth but has also generated enough carbon emissions to threaten the very future of humanity. To reach the goals of the 2016 Paris agreement on climate change and the many net-carbon zero pledges that countries have made, at a minimum humanity would have to forgo all new fossil-fuel projects.

Although the use of oil, natural gas, and coal has already produced a growing global disaster, those aren’t the only problems we face. The United Nations projects that, by 2060, the consumption of natural resources globally—including food, water, and minerals, those basics of human life— will rise 60% above 2020 levels. Even the World Economic Forum, that pillar of the capitalist global economic system, acknowledges that the planet can’t support such an insatiable demand and points out that rich countries, which consume six times more per capita than the rest of the world, will somehow have to tighten their belts.

In an era of unlimited growth, the political challenge was to determine how to divvy up the rewards of economic expansion. Today’s challenge, in a world where growth has run amok, is to determine how to evenly distribute the costs of sacrifice.

Alas, renewable energy doesn’t grow on trees. To capture the power of the sun, the wind, and the tides requires machinery and batteries that draw on a wide range of materials like lithium, copper, and rare earth elements. People in the Global South are already organizing against efforts to turn their communities into “ sacrifice zones” that produce such critical raw materials for an energy transition far away in the Global North. At the same time, communities across the United States and Europe are organizing against similar mines in their own backyards. Then there’s the question of where to put all those solar arrays and wind farms, which have been generating NIMBY responses in the United States from the coast of New England to the deserts of the Southwest.

These, then, are the three areas of sacrifice on Planet Earth in 2024: giving up the income generated by fossil-fuel projects, cutting back on the consumption of energy and other resources, and putting up with the negative consequences of both mining and renewable energy projects. Not everyone agrees that such sacrifices have to be made. Donald Trump and his allies have, of course, promised to “drill, baby, drill” from day one of a second term.

Sadly enough, almost everyone agrees that, if such sacrifices are indeed necessary, it should be someone else who makes them.

In an era of unlimited growth, the political challenge was to determine how to divvy up the rewards of economic expansion. Today’s challenge, in a world where growth has run amok, is to determine how to evenly distribute the costs of sacrifice.

Democracy and Sacrifice

Autocrats generally don’t lose sleep worrying about sacrifice. They’re willing to steamroll over protest as readily as they’d bulldoze the land for a new petrochemical plant. When China wanted to build a large new dam on the Yangtze River, it relocated the 1.5 million people in its path and flooded the area, submerging 13 cities, over 1,200 archaeological sites, and 30,000 hectares of farmland.

Democracies often functioned the same way before the NIMBY era. Of course, there’s always been an exception made for the wealthy: How many toxic waste dumps grace Beverly Hills? Or consider the career of urban planner Robert Moses, who rebuilt the roads and parks of New York City with only a few speedbumps along the way. He was finally stopped in his tracks in, of all places, that city’s Greenwich Village by architecture critic Jane Jacobs and her band of wealthy and middle-class protesters determined to block a Lower Manhattan Expressway. New York’s poorer outer-borough residents couldn’t similarly stop the Cross Bronx Expressway.

Whether it’s your unborn grandchildren or people living in the Amazon rainforest displaced by oil companies, the unsustainable prosperity of the wealthy depends on the sacrifices of (often distant) others.

Although a product of classical Greece, democracy has only truly flourished in the industrial era. Democratic politicians have regularly gained office by promising the fruits of economic expansion: infrastructure, jobs, social services, and tax cuts. If it’s not wartime, politicians might as well sign their political death warrants if they ask people to tighten their belts. Sure, President John F. Kennedy famously said, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country” and promoted the Peace Corps for idealistic young people. But he won office by making the same promises as other politicians and, as president, made famous the phrase “a rising tide lifts all boats,” an image of unrestrained growth that has become ominously prophetic in an era of elevated ocean levels and increased flooding.

In 1977, when President Jimmy Carter donned a sweater to give his famous “spirit of sacrifice” speech on the need to reduce energy consumption, he told the truth to the American people: “If we all cooperate and make modest sacrifices, if we learn to live thriftily and remember the importance of helping our neighbors, then we can find ways to adjust, and to make our society more efficient and our own lives more enjoyable and productive.”

Mocked for his earnestness and his sweater choice, Carter was, unsurprisingly, a one-term president.

Democracy, like capitalism, has remained remarkably focused on short-term gain, and politicians similarly remain prisoners of the election cycle. What’s the point of pushing policies that will yield results only 10 or 20 years in the future when those policymakers are unlikely to be in office any longer? Democratic politicians regularly push sacrifice off to the future in the same way that NIMBY-energized communities push sacrifice off to other places. Whether it’s your unborn grandchildren or people living in the Amazon rainforest displaced by oil companies, the unsustainable prosperity of the wealthy depends on the sacrifices of (often distant) others.

Sharing the Sacrifice

With its Green Deal, the European Union (E.U.) has embarked on an effort to outpace the United States and China in its transition away from fossil fuels. The challenge for the E.U. is to find sufficient amounts of critical raw materials for the Green Deal’s electric cars, solar panels, and wind turbines—especially lithium for the lithium-ion batteries that lie at the heart of the transformation.

To get that lithium, the E.U. is looking in some obvious places like the “lithium triangle” of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile. But it doesn’t want to be completely dependent on outside suppliers, since there’s a lot of competition for that lithium.

Enter Serbia.

Rather than a sign that the political system can accommodate minority viewpoints, NIMBY movements demonstrate that the political system is broken.

The Jadar mine in western Serbia has one of the largest deposits of lithium in the world. For the E.U., it’s a no-brainer to push for the further development of a mine that could provide 58,000 tons of lithium carbonate annually and meet nearly all of Europe’s lithium needs. In August, the E.U. signed a “strategic partnership on sustainable raw materials, battery value chains, and electric vehicles” with Serbia, which is still in the process of joining the E.U. Exploiting the Jadar deposits is a no-brainer for the Serbian government as well. It means jobs, a significant boost to the country’s gross domestic product, and a way to advance its claim to E.U. membership.

Serbian environmentalists, however, don’t agree. They’ve mobilized tens of thousands of people to protest the plan to dig up the lithium and other minerals from Jadar. They do acknowledge the importance of those materials but think the E.U. should develop its own lithium resources and not pollute Serbia’s rivers with endless mine run-off.

Many countries face the same challenge as Serbia. Home to one of the largest nickel deposits in the world, Indonesia has tried to use the extraction and processing of that strategic mineral to break into the ranks of the globe’s most developed countries. The communities around the nickel mines are, however, anything but gung-ho about that plan. Even wealthy countries like Sweden and the United States, eager to reduce their mineral dependency on China, have faced community backlash over plans to expand their mining footprints.

Democracies are not well-suited to address the question of sacrifice, since those who shoulder the costs have few options to resist the many who want to enjoy the benefits. NIMBY movements are one of the few mechanisms by which the minority can resist such a tyranny of the majority.

But then, how to prevent that other kind of NIMBY that displaces sacrifice from the relatively rich to the relatively poor?

Getting to YIMBY

Wyhl’s successful campaign of “no” to nuclear power in the 1970s was only half the story. Equally important was the “yes” half.

Alongside their opposition to nuclear power, the German environmentalists in the southeast corner of the country lobbied for funding research on renewable energy. From such seed money grew the first large-scale solar and wind projects there. The rejection of nuclear power, which would eventually become a federal pledge in Germany to close down the nuclear industry, prepared the ground for that country’s clean-energy miracle.

That’s not all. German activists realized that the mainstream parties, laser-focused on economic growth, would just find another part of the country in which to build their megaprojects. Environmentalists understood that they needed a different kind of vehicle to support the country’s energy transformation. Thus was born Germany’s Green Party.

In this new spirit of sacrifice, we should be asking not what the planet can do for us but what we can do for the planet.

One key lesson from the Wyhl story is the power of participation. NIMBY movements, when they battle corporate power, weaponize powerlessness. Residents demand to be consulted. They want a place at the table to create their own energy solutions. Rather than a sign that the political system can accommodate minority viewpoints, NIMBY movements demonstrate that the political system is broken. It shouldn’t be a Darwinian struggle over who makes sacrifices for the good of the whole. Decisions should be made collectively in a deliberative process, ideally within a larger federal framework that requires all stakeholders to shoulder a portion of the burden.

As in the 1970s, the political parties of today seem remarkably incapable of charting a path away from unsustainable growth and the imposition of sacrifice on the unwilling. The Green Party in Germany transformed Wyhl’s anti-nuclear politics into NIABY—not in anyone’s backyard. At this critical juncture in the transition from fossil fuels, it’s necessary to move from discrete NIMBY protests against offshore drilling and natural gas pipelines to a NIABY approach to all oil, gas, and coal projects.

The parallel expansion of sustainable energy will require new political models for distributing the costs and benefits of the mining of critical raw materials and the siting of solar and wind projects. Here again, Germany provides inspiration. The country’s first town powered fully by renewable sources, Wolfhagen, assumed control over its electricity grid and created a citizen-run cooperative to make decisions about its energy future. When communities are involved in sharing the benefits (through lowered energy costs) as well as the costs (the placement of solar and wind projects), they are more likely to embrace “Yes In My Backyard” or YIMBY. When everyone is at the table making decisions, the slingshot of NIMBY gathers dust in the closet.

In this new spirit of sacrifice, we should be asking not what the planet can do for us but what we can do for the planet. The planet is telling us that sacrifice is necessary because there’s just not enough stuff (minerals, land, water) to go around. Autocrats can’t be trusted to make such decisions. Conventional politicians in democracies are trapped in the politics of growth and consumption. The wealthy, with a few exceptions, won’t voluntarily give up their privileges.

It falls to the rest of us to step in and make such decisions about sacrifice at a community level. Meanwhile, at the national and international level, new political parties that are radically democratic, embrace post-growth economics, and put the planet first will be indispensable for larger systemic change.

If we can’t get to YIMBY and make fair decisions about near-term sacrifices, the end game is clear. When the planet goes into a carbon-induced death spiral, we’ll all, rich and poor alike, be forced to make the ultimate sacrifice.

Hurricane Helene decimated much of the southeastern United States last week, causing widespread destruction and claiming the lives of more than 230 people across six states after it made landfall in Florida. North Carolina bore the brunt of the damage caused by the climate change-intensified storm.

As North Carolina homeowners face a future of rebuilding, they are also staring down the barrel of an insurance crisis. Hurricane Helene exposed not only the vulnerability of communities to extreme weather but also the flaws in the U.S. insurance system.

The Deluge: Another Climate-Driven Disaster

Catastrophic flooding devastated western parts of North Carolina, destroying vital infrastructure and leaving tens of thousands of residents without power or running water more than a week after the storm.

This deluge is indisputably a result of climate change: global warming enables hurricanes to hold more water vapor, producing more intense rainfall. Hurricane Helene dumped some 20 trillion gallons of water on Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas, and Florida — 50 percent more rainfall than it would have without climate change, according to experts.

Hurricane Helene has demonstrated that no part of the United States is safe from the climate crisis. Asheville, North Carolina, was once seen as a climate haven — safe from the increasingly frequent and severe extreme weather events caused by global warming. Now, the bucolic town is inundated with murky brown floodwater, and its water supply system, which serves more than 150,000 people, is badly damaged.

As the floodwaters begin to recede, the staggering costs of rebuilding homes and communities are starting to come into focus. Homeowners in North Carolina may face even more financial pain if the state allows property insurance companies to raise their rates once again.

US Insurance System Failing Homeowners Amid the Climate Crisis

As if the destruction from Helene wasn’t enough, homeowners in North Carolina face the looming threat of skyrocketing insurance premiums. On October 7, a little more than a week after the storm, the state’s Insurance Commissioner, Mike Causey, began hearing arguments and evidence into a proposed 42 percent rate hike for homeowners insurance, with coastal areas facing increases of up to 99 percent if the increases requested by the North Carolina Rate Bureau (NCRB) are approved.

Insurers are claiming that rising costs mandate the massive premium increase. But in North Carolina, insurance has been profitable every year for the past decade, except for 2018. The current Insurance Commissioner has raised property insurance rates 16 times over the last eight years.

Many North Carolina homeowners and renters simply cannot afford the exorbitant premium payments. However, even those who do purchase property insurance may have no recourse to private insurance payments if disaster strikes.

Despite believing they had comprehensive insurance coverage — with policies marketed under names like “all peril” — many North Carolina homeowners and renters hit by Hurricane Helene will not receive an insurance payout. Catastrophe risk modeling firm Karen Clark & Company (KCC) confirmed that insured losses from Helene will be lower than anticipated because most damaged properties are not insured for flood. Only 1 in 200 homes in Western North Carolina, the area hardest hit by Hurricane Helene, have flood insurance, according to a Reuters analysis of federal flood insurance data and census data compiled by the University of Minnesota. The average homeowners insurance policy covers damage from wind but not flooding.

Increasingly, whether those facing losses from climate-driven storms will see a penny from insurers depends not on whether their homes are damaged but how. The damage caused by Hurricane Ian, with its record-high wind speeds, generated $63 billion in private insurance claims. In contrast, 2018’s Hurricane Florence primarily caused water — not wind — damage, leaving uninsured flood losses estimated at nearly $20 billion and letting private insurers largely escape liability.

Flood risk is typically left to the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). But despite climate change resulting in heavier and more intense rainfall inland, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) flood risk maps are limited to coastal or riverside areas and do not include rain-induced flooding like that caused by Hurricane Helene.

The Insurance Industry’s Hypocrisy

North Carolina’s proposed rate hikes highlight a broader issue: The insurance industry’s role in exacerbating the climate crisis and profiting from the industry driving it while shifting the burden of climate consequences onto policyholders. Insurance companies claim that they must raise premiums to cope with the escalating costs of extreme weather events, threatening to exit the home insurance market in areas vulnerable to climate hazards, as many have already done in California, Florida, and Louisiana.

Yet while insurers work to limit their own risks related to climate-induced weather events by raising premiums, reducing coverage, or pulling out of vulnerable areas, they continue to facilitate the worsening climate crisis — and profit from the industries driving it — by investing in and underwriting fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels are the overwhelming source of the greenhouse gases (GHGs) driving climate change. The production and combustion of fossil fuels have increased the concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere to its highest level in at least 800,000 years.These GHGs have caused global warming, increasing the average global temperature in 2023 to 1.45 °C (± 0.12°C) above the preindustrial average, and 2023 was the hottest year on record.

Nevertheless, U.S. insurance companies have investments of more than $500 billion in fossil fuel-related assets, including coal, oil, and gas. Globally, insurers received some $21 billion from premiums for underwriting fossil fuel projects in 2022, enabling those projects to move forward.

Time for Accountability

In assessing the NCRB’s request for a rate hike, Commissioner Causey should evaluate the insurance sector’s contribution to the climate crisis. No rate increase should be granted to insurance companies actively increasing the risks their policyholders face by continuing to invest in and underwrite the fossil fuel activities driving climate change. At a minimum, any concessions to the insurance sector should be contingent on insurers reducing their investments in and coverage of the fossil fuel industry.

Hurricane Helene is a stark reminder of the climate emergency’s staggering toll. Homeowners should not be forced to bear the brunt of both the physical destruction and the financial fallout from climate change. Insurers must stop profiting from the climate crisis they help fuel and start contributing to the solutions needed to mitigate future disasters.

When I saw the news of the October 7 events a year ago, I wasn’t surprised. I had spent the past decade writing about and advocating for an end to Gaza’s isolation. I was among the small number of people who consistently warned that if the policies and measures taken by Israel and its allies against Gaza were not addressed, an explosion would be inevitable. It wasn’t a question of if this explosion would happen, but rather a matter of scale, intensity, nature, and direction.

It is impossible to treat the events of the past year as “history” or something that we might reflect on, because the genocide in Gaza continues. Every day, Palestinians in Gaza bury dozens of their relatives and neighbors. Much of the Gaza Strip still lies in ruins. Most of Gaza’s population remains displaced, living in temporary shelters and encampments that continue to be bombed and attacked by Israel.

At the beginning of this war, I was somewhat hopeful that it would stop, that genocide on the scale and intensity we’ve witnessed wouldn’t unfold. I don’t know if this was wishful thinking, given Israel’s brutality and its deep-rooted dehumanization of Palestinians, especially in Gaza. I understood early on that this war, this battle, this confrontation, was bigger than Gaza. It would expand and extend not only beyond the geography of the Palestine question and its century-long conflict with Zionism, but it would also become a battlefield for a clash of values and visions concerning the fate, existence, and collective dignity of the people of the region as a whole.

Do you know what it took to build that hospital? That university? Do you know what it took for someone like Refaat Alareer to become who he was?

It is utterly painful to search for meaning amid such massive loss. I lost friends and mentors. I witnessed the annihilation of Gaza as a place and as a memory. Streets I walked, places where I studied and worked, restaurants and cafés where my friends and I sat, chatted, and claimed brief moments of joy amid years of blockade and repeated aggressions—all gone. As a student of history, I used to marvel at places in Gaza that stood as evidence of the continuation of human existence and civilization for thousands of years, representing the diversity, richness, and transformations of a country and its people. I saw these structures, with all the deep meanings they carried, destroyed, bombed, and flattened by Israel’s bombs.

The scale of our loss as Palestinians from Gaza is unfathomable, even for us who come from there. What is especially painful about this loss is that life in Gaza was itself a fight. These semblances of life weren’t easily built; they were fiercely fought for, wrested from the grip of hardship despite the relentless challenges of making life happen in an isolated, impoverished, and de-developed place like the Gaza Strip.

Do you know what it took to build that hospital? That university? Do you know what it took for someone like Refaat Alareer to become who he was? It wasn’t easy. Gaza was all about attempts—repeated attempts—in the face of recurring aggression, destruction, and the nuclear-state-sanctioned sadism of “mowing the lawn.” So, when we mourn Gaza, life in Gaza, and those who lived in Gaza, we also think about these attempts at establishing and maintaining life against impossible odds, which makes the loss all the more painful.

Pain was synonymous with life in Gaza, as it continues to be. Most people knew that an explosion on an apocalyptic scale was only a matter of time, because even though they lived day to day, they were always troubled and burdened by the future—not in the long run, but in the immediate term. Questions about water and food security, Gaza’s population density and growth, and of course, the major issues of political exclusion and erasure faced by Palestinians in Gaza. Most importantly, there were constant questions about the future of Gaza amid a larger Palestinian future that was already being destroyed before our eyes.

In a way, there were those in Gaza who “found their answers” and decided to direct that explosion toward Israel, to bring the clash back to its origin, and to put an end to decades of dancing around the truth. After all, the schemes of population and crisis management were never meant to resolve the fundamental clash between Palestinians and Zionism, but to postpone it.

How can one see meaning through piles of corpses and rubble? The search for hope becomes almost shameful. How can you speak of hope if you haven’t experienced sheltering in a school for a year or had to look your children in the eyes, unable to protect them as Israel’s bombs fell around you? How do you make sense of it all when you are consumed by survivor’s guilt, knowing that while you sleep in a bed under a roof, eat a hot meal, and take a warm shower, your friends, neighbors, relatives, and community are deprived of all these things?

The past year has been a daily struggle between all these thoughts and feelings, yet the compass remains: a commitment to stop this war through deeds, actions, and words, and then to work toward rebuilding Gaza and healing the wounds of our people.

I recently had the honor of meeting several genocide survivors—young people who were injured or accompanied their injured relatives outside Gaza. It was my first time meeting people who had experienced the genocide for months and then managed to evacuate. They had different opinions about what had unfolded and what they had experienced, and in their Gazan way, they made sure to share and share, in ways that made me feel like I was finally home—sitting at the barber shop or with my friends in one of the cafés in Gaza City, where people would loudly complain about politics, the economy, and everything else, making sure everyone could hear them.

Meeting these survivors filled me with enough inspiration and determination to work for Gaza for years to come. It was a reminder that the battle for Gaza is far from over. Despite the profound loss Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere are experiencing, they continue to fight for life and dignity. We must aid them in their fight, which began long before this genocide unfolded. It continues today in spite of the ongoing devastation.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump has been found by a jury of his peers to have raped a woman. He’s a traitor who’s embraced foreign dictators, particularly Russian President Vladimir Putin, who just sentenced an American to prison while actively bombing a democratic American ally. He’s a convicted criminal who stole money from a children’s cancer charity and scammed students out of millions of dollars. He tried to end American democracy by force. Like Hitler justifying the Holocaust, he claimed some Americans are genetically inferior. And he’s a whisker away from the presidency.

How is this even possible?

You can trace it all back to dark money.

Ever since Citizens United legalized literally unlimited contributions to the new category of political action committees it created (SuperPACs), just in the 15 months from January 2023 to April of 2024 over $8.6 billion was raised for this year’s federal campaigns with over 65% of that money—$5.6 billion—running through PACs.

Nine years ago, former President Jimmy Carter said on my program:

It [Citizens United] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president… So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.

He's right. But it’s even worse than Carter imagined. Dark money—billions from the morbidly rich and giant corporations, often untraceable—has taken over the entire GOP and is the main weapon being used today against members of the Democratic Party.

It’s also badly distorting public policy.

For example, remember when Donald Trump was outspoken about banning TikTok from America because the app is owned by Chinese billionaires beholden to that nation’s communist government? In August of 2020, he signed an Executive Order that said, in part:

This data collection [by TikTok] threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans' personal and proprietary information—potentially allowing China to track the locations of federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.

Proving the old adage that even a broken clock is right twice a day, Trump was right about TikTok and its owner, ByteDance. Federal lawsuits blocked his ban so it never went into effect, but in the meantime a fellow most Americans have never heard of—Jeffrey Yass—either flew down to Mar-a-Lago and spent time with Trump or met him backstage at an Elon Musk event (media reports conflict).

Yass—the world’s 64th richest person worth an estimated $40 billion—owns Susquehanna International Group, a trading company that owned large blocks of stock in both ByteDance (TikTok’s parent) and Digital World Acquisition Corporation, the company that merged back in March with Trump Media & Technology Group just as that company was desperately running out of cash.

Reportedly, the merger not only prevented Trump’s Truth Social app from going bankrupt but also let Trump take the combined company public, putting an estimated $3 billion in his own personal pocket.

Even more interesting, given Yass’ holding $15 billion in ByteDance stock—the largest holding outside China, representing 7% of the company’s stock—after the Trump/Yass meeting the former president suddenly reversed his opposition to TikTok. As ABC News reported at the time:

[T]he former president has been rebuilding his relationship with a GOP megadonor who reportedly has a major financial stake in the popular social media platform.

And that megadonor has been busy.

While Pennsylvania-based Yass’ entire donation portfolio to Republican politicians was reported as a mere $78,000 in 2012, this year he’s the nation’s second largest political donor, reportedly having dropped more than $80,000,000 in support of Republicans over the past few months. He’s spent more in Pennsylvania than the top 10 corporate PACs combined, according to the All Eyes on Yass campaign.

You and I have one vote each, and are limited to giving a maximum of $3,300 to any one political candidate. Pretty much every penny after that falls into the simple category of dark money, or potential dark money.

And America’s billionaires and corporations are pouring billions of that dark money into PACs and SuperPACs that are, right now, flooding the nation’s airways with attack ads against Democrats.

How did it come to this?

In 2010, five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court made it super easy for billionaires to give lavish gifts and support to Supreme Court justices and members of Congress. Their Citizens United decision blew open the doors to a bizarre new era of dark money-driven oligarchy in America.

Right-wing billionaires are nearly in control of our government—and easily control the Republicans on the Supreme Court and in Congress—but now they want all of it. And they sure as hell don’t want to have to cough up the taxes to pay for our government.

A report from Americans for Tax Fairness details the damage these democracy-destroying decisions, made by SCOTUS members who, themselves, were at the time being groomed by billionaires, have done to our political system.

This is the brave new world Clarence Thomas’ tie-breaking vote brought America when the Supreme Court, in their 2010 Citizens United decision, legalized both political bribery and massive intervention in elections by corporations and billionaires.

Prior to Thomas’ vote on that decision, Harlan Crow—who helped finance the original Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry in 2004—and other billionaires had lavished millions on him and his family.

Crow gave the group that Thomas’ wife, Ginni, started a half million dollars; he bought Thomas’ mother’s home and others in the neighborhood so she could live rent-free for the rest of her life; he put Thomas’ nephew through an expensive prep school. Another billionaire bought Thomas a quarter-million-dollar luxury RV.

It was a remarkably successful investment for Crow, his family, and his billionaire buddies. Just his own family’s political contributions went from an average of a few hundred thousand dollars a year during the decade preceding 2010 to multiple millions every year after Thomas’ vote. Americans for Tax Fairness calculated it at an 862% increase just for the Crow family.

(Graphic: Americans for Tax Fairness)

In 2010, the year of the Citizens United decision, all of America’s billionaires together spent a mere $31 million on elections: There were still substantial limits on dark money in American politics.

That number jumped to $231 million in the 2012 and 2014 elections, and over $600 million for both 2016 and 2018.

The dark money blowout came in 2020, when Trump was running for reelection and there was a very real chance the billionaires could seize complete control of our federal government.

They spent a total of $2,362,000,000 in that election, with $1.2 billion of it going to elect conventional politicians who would then be beholden to their patrons.

As Americans for Tax Fairness notes:

The report finds that almost 40% of all billionaire campaign contributions made since 1990 occurred during the 2020 season. Billionaires had a lot more money to give politicians and political causes in 2020 as their collective wealth jumped by nearly a third, or over $900 billion, to $3.9 trillion between the March beginning of the pandemic and a month before Election Day.

Billionaire fortunes have continued to climb since: as of October 2021, billionaires were worth $5.1 trillion, more than a 20-fold increase in their collective fortune since 1990, when it stood at $240 billion, adjusted for inflation.

These campaign donations are a profitable investment: They buy access to politicians and influence over tax and other policies that can save tycoons billions of dollars. While that $1.2 billion “investment” in 2020 was massive, it totaled less than 0.1% of billionaire wealth (and less than one day’s worth of their pandemic wealth growth), leaving almost unlimited room for future growth in billionaire campaign spending.

And this year will be far worse, once the dark money numbers come in this winter. As NBC News tells us:

Political ad spending is projected to reach new heights by the end of the 2024 election cycle, eclipsing $10 billion in what would amount to the most expensive two years in political history.

While Thomas Jefferson was still the U.S. envoy to France and living in Paris, just after the Constitution had been written but a year before it would be ratified, John Adams wrote him on December 6, 1778 arguing that Jefferson’s fear of a strongman president wasn’t as big a concern as Adams’ fear of rich people corrupting American politics:

You are afraid of the one—I, of the few. We agree perfectly that the many should have a full fair and perfect representation.—You are apprehensive of monarchy; I, of aristocracy.

Today, if Trump is reelected, we will have both.

Vice President Kamala Harris has made it clear that if she’s elected her first order of business will be to pass the For The People Act, which will overturn large parts of Citizens United and again regulate dark money in politics.

That’s probably why our airwaves are currently saturated with hit-piece ads against Harris and other Democrats—paid for by shady dark money PACs—that make George H. W. Bush’s Willie Horton ads seem tame.

Right-wing billionaires are nearly in control of our government—and easily control the Republicans on the Supreme Court and in Congress—but now they want all of it. And they sure as hell don’t want to have to cough up the taxes to pay for our government.

This election may be America’s last stand against this country becoming, like Hungary and Russia, a full-on oligarchy run of, by, and for a small, malevolent group of the morbidly rich. But, to paraphrase Jim Morrison’s 60’s protest anthem: They got the money, but we got the numbers.

And now we must turn out those numbers if our democracy is to survive this all-out assault by a handful of obscenely rich people who think, as does billionaire-funded Curtis Yarvin (JD Vance’s favorite philosopher) that we should just all “get over” our “dictator phobia.”

Vote!

Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States who turned 100 this month, has built a legacy of courage and moral clarity over his many decades in public service, fighting tirelessly for peace and human dignity at home and around the world.

Now, as he nears the twilight of his life, we must take the time to reflect on one of his most courageous stances: his unwavering commitment to Palestinian dignity and self-determination.

In 1996, President Carter stood with us, the Palestinian people, as we voted for our leaders for the very first time. Though the Oslo peace process had failed to deliver the independent Palestinian state we had hoped for, Carter believed that the act of casting our ballots was still vital – that it was a chance to build a future rooted in peace and justice.

His presence in Palestine during that first election underscored our hopes for a brighter tomorrow, despite the heavy shadows of occupation and displacement.

What makes Jimmy Carter’s stance on Palestine unique is not only his moral courage, but the fact that he was once the most powerful man in the world.

In 2003, as the separation wall began to snake across the West Bank, I met President Carter once again at The Carter Center’s first-ever Human Rights Defenders Forum in Atlanta, Georgia.

There, I told him about the stark realities faced by Palestinians in the West Bank city of Qalqilia – 40,000 people encircled by concrete, with only one gate allowing them access to farms, medical care and the outside world. A single gate that opened and closed at the whim of Israeli soldiers, sometimes remaining shut for days at a time. As I updated him on the situation in Palestine, I called it what it is: apartheid, the separation of two peoples based on ethnicity, with one dominating the other through systemic injustice. Carter listened, intently and without judgement.

Just two years later, in 2005, he had the opportunity to see the reality for himself when he returned to Palestine to observe the presidential elections, in which I was the leading independent candidate against Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas.

During this time, President Carter witnessed firsthand how Israel, rather than building bridges to secure peace, was constructing walls – walls that cut deep into Palestinian land, walls that annex settlements and water resources, walls that isolate Palestinians into enclaves. He also witnessed how, after a meeting we had in Jerusalem, the Israeli security service arrested me for no reason other than preventing me from talking to Palestinian voters there. It was during this visit, I believe, that it became clear to him that Israel was not preparing for peace, but instead consolidating control in ways that would make a two-state solution impossible.

In 2006, Carter published Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, a book that shook the American political landscape. In it, he laid out a simple truth: without Palestinian freedom and dignity, there could be no peace. He made the case not as an enemy of Israel, but as someone deeply invested in its survival. Yet, for daring to speak this truth, Carter was vilified. He was accused of being anti-Semitic and ostracized by many in the US and even his Democratic Party. But Carter never wavered. He continued to speak the truth about the realities in Palestine – not out of malice for Israel, but from a deep belief in justice.

He understood that the only way Israel could truly thrive was through a just peace with the Palestinians. He recognized that the Palestinian people, who have lived under brutal occupation since 1967 and experienced repeated displacement since 1948, were entitled to the same rights and dignity as anyone else. He recognized in later writings that it was my 2003 account of the situation in Qalqilia that made him understand the reality of apartheid in Palestine.

What makes Jimmy Carter’s stance on Palestine unique is not only his moral courage, but the fact that he was once the most powerful man in the world. As U.S. president, he tried to open the road to lasting peace. He could not secure Palestinian self-determination during his one-term presidency between 1977 and 1981, yet he refused to stop trying. In the decades since leaving office, he has turned every stone, searched for every possibility to bring about a just peace for Palestinians and all the people of the Middle East.

As we celebrate and reflect on Carter’s life and legacy, let us amplify his call for the U.S. to be a genuine force for peace and justice around the world.

Now, as he enters his 100th year and tributes pour in to honor his many humanitarian achievements, we must not forget that he was one of the most important truth-tellers of our time. Carter was willing to see the brutality inflicted on the Palestinian people and refused to remain silent about it. That is a rare kind of courage, especially for a former U.S. president, that should be recognized and remembered.

The best way we can honor Jimmy Carter, his bravery and unwavering moral clarity is to carry forward his commitment to equal human rights for all people.

The Palestinian struggle for self-determination is not just a political issue – it is a moral one. As Carter always emphasized, the U.S. has a special responsibility. Without American political and military support, Israel would not have been able to continue its ruthless occupation and apartheid against Palestinians or to commit the genocide in Gaza.

As we celebrate and reflect on Carter’s life and legacy, let us amplify his call for the U.S. to be a genuine force for peace and justice around the world. Let us recognize, as Carter wanted, that peace in our Holy Land will only come when the rights and dignity of Palestinians are acknowledged and respected. Only then will we truly be able to honor his legacy and the values he stood for so bravely.

The human cost from Hurricane Helene continues to rise, with over 230 people dead in six states and hundreds still missing within a 500-mile path of destruction. Helene has had a devastating impact on poor, low-income, and rural people in underserved communities, where access to food, water, and emergency services has been cut off.

As the director of a national network of grassroots organizations, our members in groups like Down Home North Carolina and Hometown Action are on the ground in many of these small communities, connecting people with the help they need. It always warms my heart to see neighbors help neighbors in the wake of a natural disaster.

But the truth is, devastating floods and hurricanes like Helene, which destroy the lives of more and more people, are anything but natural. They are the direct result of the warming temperatures and rising sea levels which are caused by our dependence on burning oil and gas. And this dependence, in turn, is caused by the insatiable greed of fossil fuel companies.

If Donald Trump is elected president, our dependence on fossil fuels, and the climate disasters they cause, will get far worse.

For half a century, fossil fuel giants like ExxonMobil have denied the evidence that our burning of oil and gas warms the planet, causing storms, droughts, and wildfires. Indeed, when ExxonMobil’s own scientists warned them in 1977 that a climate disaster was comingdisaster was coming, executives suppressed the data to keep the truth from the public.

Scientists agree the only way to curb climate disasters like Helene is to end our dependence on fossil fuels, and to transition to cleaner sources of energy. The good news is wind and solar power get cheaper every year, and many nations have realized the transition to green energy improves their economy, too. Great Britain, where the Industrial Revolution was born, just shut down their last coal-burning power stationpower station, two years ahead of schedule.

But not the United States. Over 25% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions come from using coal and gas to produce electricity. And if Donald Trump is elected president, our dependence on fossil fuels, and the climate disasters they cause, will get far worse.

At a closed-door meeting with oil executives in April, Trump promised to gut the Biden administration’s environmental protectionsBiden administration’s environmental protections and allow oil companies to expand drilling, in exchange for $1 billion in contributions to his campaign.

This is not the first time Trump has scratched the backs of oil and gas giants: in his first term as president, Trump wiped out more than 125 environmental rules and gave massive tax breaks to energy companies. As a result, the United States now pumps more oil out of the ground than any country ever has, and companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron are reporting record profits.

But now these massive companies and their executives want even more profits, and they know Donald Trump will give them what they want, for a hefty price. But the real price of what Trump has promised—to remove environmental protections and increase our dependence on fossil fuels—will be paid for in lives, by you and me, and all of us who find ourselves in the paths of superstorms like Helene. This is one of the many reasons I cannot vote for Trump, nor should any person who cares about the future of our nation, our planet, and our families.

Livestock are a vital component of both the African food system and rural livelihoods. The continent has around 400 million cattle alone, and the livestock sector accounts for a significant 30-40% of the total agricultural gross domestic product across the continent.

Small amounts of meat, milk and eggs can have life-changing benefits in tackling malnutrition, and these animals also provide a reliable income source when alternatives simply do not readily exist.

Yet, from an environmental perspective, livestock are often perceived only as a problem, contributing to habitat loss, greenhouse gas emissions, and land degradation. This narrow view can hold back much-needed finance into the sector, yet it misses a much more nuanced reality.

International climate finance should prioritise support for sustainable livestock systems, recognizing their unique role in tackling broad environmental challenges while providing food, livelihoods, and economic growth.

As the United Nations prepares for three major environmental meetings over the next few months—on biodiversity conservation, climate change, and land management, respectively—it is important for the world to rethink how it perceives livestock in the context of development progress, and to begin to see such animals as cows, goats, camels, and pigs as “solutions with legs” in combating these intensifying climate and environmental crises at scale.

For countries like Kenya, where livestock is deeply embedded in livelihoods and culture, it is critical for U.N. meetings to see these farm animals from our perspective and help channel climate and biodiversity finance into their potential as a force for good.

Firstly, contrary to popular belief, livestock can be powerful agents of biodiversity conservation when managed correctly. Well-managed grazing systems help maintain ecosystems, control invasive species, and foster the regeneration of diverse native plant life in degraded areas. Pastoralist communities in Kenya, from the Maasai to the Samburu, have long understood this, using livestock grazing as a tool to balance ecosystems and promote biodiversity while providing essential sources of income and producing almost 20% of Kenya’s milk.

And in many conservancies, livestock are intentionally integrated into wildlife conservation strategies. Cattle are grazed rotationally, mimicking natural patterns seen in wild herbivores like zebras and gazelles. This approach helps prevent overgrazing, maintains healthy grasslands, and supports both livestock and wildlife populations.

Secondly, in terms of climate action, the role of livestock is often framed solely around their methane emissions, particularly in the case of ruminant animals like cattle. However, the potential for livestock to contribute to climate solutions is much broader, particularly in places like Africa.

In terms of mitigation, improved rangeland management and the adoption of climate-smart feeding practices can significantly reduce livestock-related emissions. For instance, integrating climate-resilient forages into grazing systems improves both productivity and environmental outcomes.

Moreover, sustainable grazing practices can play a crucial role in lowering the emissions intensity of meat and dairy production through carbon sequestration. Rangelands, often considered wastelands, are actually some of the planet’s largest carbon sinks. When managed properly, they store significant amounts of carbon in their soils, and proper management can contribute as much as 20.92 gigatons of climate mitigation by 2050.

On the adaptation front, livestock are a critical lifeline for communities facing increasing climate variability, including in Kenya’s arid and semi-arid lands. By moving their livestock across landscapes in response to rainfall variability, pastoralists effectively manage scarce resources while avoiding overgrazing.

This adaptive mobility, coupled with the use of Indigenous livestock breeds adapted to harsh climates, provides a critical buffer against droughts and other climate stresses—even more so when index-based livestock insurance is available. The East African Zebu cattle, for example, are better equipped to survive on limited, poor-quality forage in dry conditions, making them crucial to climate resilience in Kenya.

Lastly, as the global land degradation crisis worsens, it is becoming increasingly clear that sustainable livestock management can be a tool for land restoration and rehabilitation. Somewhere between 25% and 35% of rangelands globally suffer from some form of degradation. If left unattended, they become unproductive, reducing food security and driving people to abandon rural areas. Livestock systems can actually help reverse this trend by promoting soil health and regenerating landscapes.

Sustainable grazing practices, including rotational grazing and controlled stocking densities, allow grasslands to recover and restore soil fertility. By moving livestock strategically across the land, these practices prevent overgrazing and promote the growth of deep-rooted plants, which stabilise the soil and improve water retention. Furthermore, healthy rangelands support a wide variety of plant species, protect watersheds, and improve overall ecosystem resilience.

Which begs the question, if livestock are so critical to all these environmental issues, why does the sector receive so little funding? International climate finance should prioritise support for sustainable livestock systems, recognizing their unique role in tackling broad environmental challenges while providing food, livelihoods, and economic growth.

Livestock are not the enemy in this fight. Rather, they are an integral part of the solution, especially in places like Africa where pastoralist and livestock-keeping communities depend on them for survival.

Much of the world looks bleak in the fall of 2024.

Israel’s assault on Gaza, the world’s first live-streamed genocide, goes on unchecked, with material and diplomatic support from powerful countries. Emboldened by this support, Israel is now attacking Lebanon as well.

Large numbers of people in countries abetting the genocide are appalled at their own governments’ position, and are using a multitude of tactics to demand their governments stop supporting genocide, but their governments are stubbornly sticking to their position.

Even as the world heads towards climate catastrophe, governments of wealthy nations most responsible for the crisis are criminalizing resistance against fossil fuels.

This is also likely to be the hottest year ever recorded, with life-threatening heatwaves in Mexico and South Asia, devastating hurricanes hitting the Caribbean and the U.S. South, and unprecedented wildfires in Canada.

Governments of powerful countries are on the wrong side of this issue as well. They continue recklessly issuing permits for expanding fossil fuel infrastructure. Confronting fossil fuel barons is politically popular, but governments of self-proclaimed democracies ignore public opinion.

As with the Gaza genocide, people in these countries—and worldwide—are using creative protests to challenge the fossil fuel industry and its government and financial backers.

When governments ignore popular demands, people protest. In a democracy, they have a right to do so. Even when these protests break laws (for example, by blocking access to government offices), evolving norms of democratic rights recognize civil disobedience as a form of free speech that can lead to legal consequences but that should not be criminalized.

But the same Western democracies who claim to represent the “free world” have seen dangerous backsliding on the right to protest.

Erasing Palestine

Governments in Western democracies violate core protections for free expression when it comes to solidarity with Palestine. In Germany, this has included blanket bans on Palestine solidarity demonstrations (subsequently lifted after political pressure and legal challenges), and censorship and retaliation directed at critical voices.

Germany is not unique in this regard. Amnesty International notes a concerning trend of restrictions on Palestine solidarity activism across Europe.

In the U.S., Palestine solidarity encampments on college campuses in the spring of 2024 were met with a heavy-handed response from university officials and law enforcement. Students faced suspension, evictions from university housing, violence from police and vigilantes, arrests, and serious criminal charges for actions such as sit-ins and building occupations, which have a long history in U.S. student protests.

Many U.S. colleges adopted highly restrictive policies to prevent protests before reopening for the fall semester, raising serious concerns about their respect for their students’ free speech rights.

Criminalizing Climate Protection

Even as the world heads towards climate catastrophe, governments of wealthy nations most responsible for the crisis are criminalizing resistance against fossil fuels.

Few examples are as egregious (and blatantly racist) as the Canadian states’ response to Indigenous Wet’suwet’en peoples protecting their traditional territories from a polluting gas pipeline they didn’t consent to. Protesters have faced harassment, surveillance, and militarized raids by law enforcement and the pipeline company’s private security force.

Amnesty International has declared Dsta’hyl, a clan chief of the Wet’suwet’en, to be the first prisoner of conscience in Canada because of his house arrest for resisting the pipeline. Canada attacks Indigenous peoples fighting for their futures (and all of our collective futures) even as it increases production of polluting tar sands oil.

South of the border in the United States, the world’s largest oil and gas producing country, environmental defenders have been targeted by laws criminalizing protest against fossil fuel infrastructure, now on the books in nearly half the states,

My former colleague Gabrielle Colchete and I found in a 2020 study that these laws were systematically pushed by fossil fuel industry interests, and introduced by legislators who were plied with campaign cash by the industry. We looked at case studies of three communities targeted by polluting infrastructure projects that benefited from these laws. They were Black, Indigenous, or poor white communities, with more widespread poverty than the national average. Clearly, these laws were intended to further restrict the ability of already marginalized communities to resist projects that would sacrifice their health and livelihoods yet again for corporate profit.

Meanwhile, in Australia, a major coal and oil producer, both the national and state governments are targeting peaceful climate activists with punitive laws. A recent study by Climate Rights International has documented this trend in eight countries (including the U.S. and Australia) in great detail.

What emerges is a chilling pattern of powerful, wealthy countries who have no intention of stopping their expansion of fossil fuel production, but are instead resorting to draconian crackdowns on growing public opposition. This bodes ill for the likely state response to popular desperation and anger in the not so distant future when heatwaves, wildfires, hurricanes, and food scarcity reach catastrophic levels, which they inevitably will if these countries don’t reverse course on fossil fuels.

Framing Dissent as Conspiracy

In the U.S. in particular, in addition to solidarity with Palestine and resistance to fossil fuels, the abolitionist movement against racist, militarized policing also faces extraordinary repression. The state response to the fight against a militarized police training facility in Atlanta best exemplifies this.

Authorities have killed a movement activist, Manuel Paez Terán (also known as Tortuguita), in what looks suspiciously like a targeted assassination, or at best a “friendly fire” accident, followed by an official cover-up. They have used overbroad conspiracy charges to target operators of a community bail fund, and about 60 other activists. The evidence cited for conspiracy and intent to commit crimes includes distributing flyers, social media posts, recording the police, writing legal support numbers on their arms, and using encrypted messaging apps such as Signal.

More recently, the conspiracy charges against the community bail fund collective have been dropped. It’s likely the state knew all along that the charges were baseless, but prosecuted them anyway, with the goal of intimidating activists.

This is the real criminal conspiracy: the State of Georgia and the City of Atlanta are conspiring to thwart expression of the popular will through official channels, and to criminalize protests.

The police training center, dubbed “Cop City” by activists, is broadly unpopular in Atlanta. City Council hearings on the subject have generated hours of public testimony, overwhelmingly in opposition to the project. Opponents of the training center have collected twice as many signatures as required for a ballot initiative to stop public funding for the center, only to be stymied by bad-faith legal maneuvers by the city to keep the measure off the ballot.

This is the real criminal conspiracy: the State of Georgia and the City of Atlanta are conspiring to thwart expression of the popular will through official channels, and to criminalize protests, effectively closing off all avenues for the public to have a say in a project that impacts them.

Creeping Authoritarianism

Authoritarian governments are on the rise worldwide, in Russia, India, Hungary, and elsewhere.

But increasingly, authoritarianism isn’t a feature of overtly authoritarian governments alone. Nominally liberal democracies are turning to authoritarian methods to crush popular dissent against the status quo favored by the elite. This status quo includes support for a belligerent, lawless Israel to uphold Western geopolitical interests in the Middle East, and unwavering loyalty to the powerful, politically connected fossil fuel industry.

This is highly relevant to our organizing today. Keeping overtly far-right political parties out of power (as French voters did recently) is essential, but insufficient. Recent events in France, where President Emmanuel Macron is refusing to honor the election results, confirm the ongoing threats to democracy even when the far right is not in power.

Movements for democracy need to understand, name, and confront creeping authoritarianism in so-called free countries, regardless of who is in power.

In the heart of the Southern Appalachian Mountains, the impending arrival of Hurricane Helene transforms the serene landscape of Asheville and Marshall, North Carolina into a battleground against nature's fury. As heavy rains pour down, rivers swell to dangerous levels, the catastrophic winds from Helene down power lines and crash into houses, residents brace for the worst.

In the aftermath, we are now all grappling with the realities of a climate that have made such extreme weather events increasingly common. This personal account delves into the chaos and uncertainty brought by Helene, offering reflections on resilience, community service, and human connection in a region caught in the throes of a climate disaster.

Wednesday, September 25

Heavy rain begins to fall in the Asheville/Marshall area of North Carolina, where I have lived for 17 years. A cold front, slowed by the high mountains, has brought a flood of precipitation ahead of Hurricane Helene's arrival.

The city of Asheville, situated along the French Broad River, is known for its many yoga studios, artists, and exotic restaurants. Tiny Marshall (population 796), also located along the river, is known for its organic farms, Appalachian music, and the Civil War massacre in Shelton Laurel in 1863.

I imagine a grotesque sight: The Swannanoa River flooding through the windows of Andaaz, my favorite Indian restaurant. The water is a mixed soup of mud, plastic bottles, and pieces of wood.

I stock up on extra candles, a new flashlight, oil for the old-fashioned oil lamps, extra dry food, and fill up about 100 liters of drinking water in anticipation of life without electricity. At midnight, Asheville Airport reports over four inches (10 centimeters) of rain. I imagine that creeks and rivers have already reached record-high flood levels and sleep only a few hours at a time. We had flooding on an island in the middle of the river in 2021, but I know it has never rained so much in such a short time before. I anticipate the worst.

Thursday, September 26

Climate hurricane Helene rages up the mountains from the unusually warm waters off the Florida coast. Precipitation and winds intensify. The neighboring county of Yancey experiences over 8.5 inches (22 cm) of rainfall in just over a day. The rivers, especially the French Broad River, swell dangerously with water from rushing creeks and smaller rivers.

I talk on the phone with my 89-year-old mother in Norway. But suddenly we lose contact. A few minutes later, I go out on the porch and see that a large pine tree has fallen over the power lines. Without electricity, there's no Wi-fi and no water from the well for drinking, cooking, showering, or flushing the toilet.

In the evening, after not being able to call or write to my wife on a study trip in India, I read the classic travel book To a Mountain in Tibet by Colin Thubron by the light of two candles. As I go to sleep, I worry about my mother worrying about me.

Friday, September 27

Helene crashes through the forest around the house with heavy rainfall and strong winds. In the afternoon, I nervously drive down to the French Broad River and see rooftops, car parts, and plastic pipes violently streaming by.

A few days later, I read that Asheville Regional Airport lost communication after recording 13.8 inches (35 cm) of rain in less than 72 hours. That resulted in major flooding in the lowest parts of Asheville and many surrounding villages.

I imagine a grotesque sight: The Swannanoa River flooding through the windows of Andaaz, my favorite Indian restaurant. The water is a mixed soup of mud, plastic bottles, and pieces of wood. I envision Marshall completely underwater, the frozen food section in Madison Natural Foods store submerged in chocolate-colored water and industrial sludge.

I wake up after only an hour's sleep and listen to the strong wind and heavy rain drumming on the roof. I sleep restlessly for the rest of the night. Branches occasionally falling onto the roof. What if one of the large oak trees outside will come smashing through the bedroom ceiling?

Saturday, September 28

In the morning, the wind has calmed down somewhat. I make a primitive oven from flat stones and cook breakfast with pancakes and a compote of berries over the fire. The floodwater in the French Broad River has begun to recede, and the extent of the destruction becomes clearer.

From a friend, I hear that the muddy water reached the roofs of many buildings in downtown Marshall. Some wooden houses were smashed to pieces by the strong currents. I drive around the neighborhood and see that several metal structures from an asphalt company have been swept into the river along with a wooden house. Further downstream, a whole row of houses and trailers have been crushed or swept away by the violent river. Some people chose not to evacuate and disappeared downstream along with their houses. One woman was later found in the neighboring state of Tennessee.

In the afternoon, electricity and running water return to Prama Institute, the retreat center where I work, but not to my home or my neighbors'. (It would take nearly two weeks before power was restored.) Our neighborhood of about 30 adults and children gathers for a warm lunch, the first in several days. I can finally check email and occasionally make phone calls. I receive an email from my Norwegian friend Trond Øverland: "You must be experiencing both tragedy and great solidarity in your area right now."

"Good summary of the situation," I write back.

Sunday, September 29

The radio reports that the death toll has risen to 30, but 600 are still missing. A neighbor tells me that our friend Tom has lost his house in Chimney Rock, a place known from scenes in the movie The Last of the Mohicans with Daniel Day-Lewis. Like many of the other houses, it was swept into Lake Lure.

Over 70 roads are destroyed, and Asheville is only accessible by car from South Carolina. The damage to houses and roads is, according to a politician, "post-apocalyptic." Thousands of anxious, hungry, and thirsty people are without electricity, water, and mobile coverage. On the radio, I hear that tap water may not be available for several weeks, perhaps months in some areas.

Rich or poor, we are all fast becoming climate victims.

I take my first shower in several days, and I feel the guilty pleasure of privilege. As tragic as it is everywhere around us, we are among the lucky ones. We, up here in the now quiet, sunny forest.

Monday, September 30

Governor Roy Cooper inspects the damage from the air and on the ground, calling it "unlike anything ever seen in western North Carolina." The government organization FEMA begins registering residents for assistance as the long rebuilding process starts.

Anthony, a friend from Shelton Laurel, stops by with his truck. Despite a large oak crushing the kitchen in his new house, and his parents' home in the mountain town of Hot Springs now floating down the French Broad River, he is willing to help. He knows of a place in Tennessee where we can buy food and gas.

Later that day, I try my luck locally. But the lines are long at Ingles supermarket, and you need cash. With no open banks, I drive home disappointed. In the afternoon, some neighbors go to Marshall with shovels and rubber boots. They shovel half-meter thick mud out of Madison Natural Foods store and Zadie's restaurant.

Tuesday, October 1

Anthony finally returns from Tennessee with his truck full of vegetables and fruit. We have plenty of rice and beans stored, so we start cooking and serving hot meals to people in need outside our neighborhood.

In the afternoon, I check the propane tank for the kitchen stove; it's only 35% full. With the amount of food we're now cooking, this will only last just under a week. Then we learn that Southern State Gas Company, where we get our propane from, is closed due to flood damage.

We are tired from all the cooking, serving, and the thick mud. We are filled with tragic and despondent feelings from all the destruction. We wonder if we can handle such physical and mental pressure for another day. But what else can we do? We must just keep on keeping on.

Wednesday, October 2

We cook hot food at the retreat center and serve 150 people in an apartment block in Asheville. They are mostly low-income retirees and partially disabled. They are victims of an unevenly distributed economic system and a failed healthcare system. Now they are also climate victims.

I read the following on CNN's website: "Asheville was touted as a climate haven, a place to escape the worst ravages of extreme weather. But Hurricane Helene's deadly path of destruction reveals this North Carolina city, like any in America, was never safe—it's just that memories are short, and the reach of the climate crisis is consistently underestimated."

Rich or poor, we are all fast becoming climate victims.

Thursday, October 3

I listen to a NASA climate scientist, prerecorded from a few days ago and speaking on his own behalf on the news program Democracy Now! He says that none of the news reports have mentioned the connection between Helene and climate change. Well, that's because they've been too busy reporting on the destruction and human suffering. And rightly so.

But today I read the following on Salon.com: "The destruction after Hurricane Helene in Asheville confirms that we cannot hide from climate change. The city in North Carolina was meant to be a climate refuge."

That's true. Since the mid-1990s, hippies, artists, environmentalists, organic farmers, musicians, and yogis have arrived in the area to find Shangri-La. I was one of them. Over the last 10 years, this liberal, progressive, and colorful cultural area was discovered by the more well-to-do from New York and California.

Now the area has become too expensive to live in for many. The restaurant, Airbnb, hotel, and tourism industry dominate the economy. Some talk about wanting to escape to another haven. But as we have painfully experienced in recent days, there are certain problems we cannot escape from. And certainly not from the effects of climate change.

Friday, October 4

Some last thoughts. You may still wonder why our area was so hard hit by what is termed Hurricane Helene. Because we were not just hit with Ms. Helene; we were hit by two weather systems. We had already had days with heavy rain before Helene hit us.

A "perfect storm" of circumstances led to this catastrophe. The ground was already waterlogged before Helene arrived. Thus, two storm systems stalled over the area, unleashing an extraordinary combination of hurricane winds and rain in a relatively small geographic region.

Then the mountainous terrain funneled this massive volume of water into the valleys below. This combination of preexisting saturation, extreme rainfall, challenging topography, and extreme winds toppling trees and power lines created the "ideal" conditions for this devastating disaster.

In this time of crisis, we discovered our capacity to rise together, transforming challenges into opportunities for connection and service.

But why were we not better prepared: You don't prepare for hurricanes in the mountains any more than you prepare for snowstorms in Miami. But that should not be an excuse for not preparing better, for not becoming less dependent on the electrical grid, for example.

During the climate change era—with severe droughts there and rainstorms over here—erratic and extreme weather patterns have become the new normal. According to climate scientists, never-before-seen weather patterns, or extreme ones experienced once every 100 years or so, may now take place every 10-20 years. Or even more frequently.

So, what can we do to combat climate change? Business as usual offers quick-fix solutions through schemes such as carbon capture. But there are no quick fixes. From a larger systems perspective, we need to rapidly move away from economies designed like extractive machines focused on maximum profit and production. Instead, we need economies emerging from and supporting the ecosystems of people, nature, and cultures.

We need political systems supporting regenerative and cooperative communities and regions. While recognizing that humans have basic needs to be met, we must align our economies with nature's processes to support dynamic balance and biodiversity.

In our own, small systems community, we have learned that we should have installed that solar well pump we talked about long ago. It would have saved us from going without water for over a week. It has now been ordered, and it will be installed soon.

We also need more solar generators in our homes to produce electricity for fridges and computers. While some of us already have whole-house solar power, we need to expand that capacity as well.

In this time of crisis, we discovered our capacity to rise together, transforming challenges into opportunities for connection and service. As the storms of the outside world intensified, we turned inward, nurturing our resilience through daily meditation and yoga. These practices became our anchors, helping us avoid the pitfalls of burnout and despair while serving the community at large.

Change on a systemic level requires a holistic approach, one that embraces transformation both large and small, collective and individual. It is about fostering well-being not just for small, exclusive groups, but for the entire community, weaving individual growth into the fabric of collective change and resilience.

The Biden administration is not only endorsing but also on the verge of actively assisting a new Israeli armed attack on Iran. National security adviser Jake Sullivan says that the United States is working directly with Israel regarding such an attack. “The United States is fully, fully, fully supportive of Israel,” declares President Joe Biden.

The projected attack serves no U.S. interests. The attack perpetuates a broader pattern of escalating violence in the Middle East that also serves no U.S. interests. The Iranian missile salvo to which the coming Israeli attack is ostensible retaliation was itself retaliation for previous Israeli attacks. Retaliation for retaliation is a prescription for an unending cycle of violence.

The United States is facilitating an attack on a nation that does not want war and has been remarkably restrained in trying to avoid it, in the face of repeated Israeli provocations. A sustained Israeli bombing campaign against Iranian-related targets within Syria elicited a response only when it escalated to an attack on a diplomatic compound in Damascus, killing senior Iranian officials. Even then, the Iranian response, in the form of an earlier salvo of missiles and drones in April, was designed and telegraphed in a way to make a show of defiance but — with most of the projectiles certain to be shot down — to cause minimal damage and almost no casualties.

The United States is facilitating an attack on a nation that does not want war and has been remarkably restrained in trying to avoid it, in the face of repeated Israeli provocations.

When Israel assassinated visiting Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in a government guest house in Tehran in July — the sort of attack that would elicit a quick and forceful response by the U.S. or Israel if it happened in one of their capitals — Iran did nothing until last week. It finally acted only after yet another Israeli attack — this time an assault on residential buildings in a suburb of Beirut that killed a senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard officer along with Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah. Far from being motivated by any grandiose ambitions of regional dominance or desire to destabilize the region, Iranian leaders believed that they were getting killed by a thousand cuts from Israel and that they had to respond to the repeated Israeli attacks lest they lose the confidence not only of their own people but of regional allies. The missile firings that constituted Iran’s retaliation, like the ones in April, again caused minimal damage or casualties.

By cooperating with Israel in a new attack, the United States is assisting a state that has been responsible for most of the escalation and the vast majority of death and destruction in the Middle East for at least the past year. Although Hamas’ attack on southern Israel last October is commonly seen as the starting point of the subsequent mayhem in the Middle East, the question of who is responding to whom could go back farther than that. For example, the 1,200 deaths from that Hamas attack, horrible to be sure, were fewer than the number of Palestinians that Israel had killed in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip just from the day-to-day operations of the occupying Israeli army, supplemented by settler violence in the West Bank, during the previous eight years.

Since the Hamas attack, the devastating Israeli operation in the Gaza Strip has gone far beyond anything that can be construed as defense, or even as a response to Hamas, and has brought suffering to innocent civilians that is orders of magnitude greater than anything Hamas or any other Palestinian group has ever done. The still-rising official death toll exceeds 41,000, with the actual number of Palestinian deaths probably much higher and likely into six figures. Much of the Strip has been reduced to rubble and rendered unlivable.

After Hezbollah fired rounds into Israel last October in a show of support for the Palestinians in Gaza, the story of conflict along the Israeli-Lebanese frontier has mainly been one of repeated Israeli escalations. Israeli attacks in Lebanon have far exceeded Hezbollah attacks on Israel, in number but especially in physical effects, with almost no casualties within Israel apart from a few military personnel at the border. The rapidly rising toll of deaths in Lebanon from Israeli attacks has now passed 2,000, with about 10,000 injured and about 1.2 million people displaced from their homes. As in the Gaza Strip, civilians constitute much and perhaps most of that toll, including as a result of Israeli airstrikes that have demolished residential buildings in densely populated neighborhoods.

As a growing Israeli ground assault in Lebanon accompanies the aerial bombardment, Israel has told people in almost the entire southern third of Lebanon to move north, even though Israel already has been conducting lethal aerial attacks throughout Lebanon, including as far north as Tripoli. This also is reminiscent of the pattern in Gaza, in which residents are told to move, only to be bombed again in their new location.

The offensive Israeli actions that figure into confrontation with Iran — including the aerial and clandestine assassination operations in Lebanon, Syria, and the heart of Tehran — also have each constituted escalation. Those operations appear designed at least in part to goad Iran into entering a wider war, preferably one that also involves the United States.

Other motives behind the Israeli escalation are multiple and vary with the specific target. The deadly assaults on the Palestinians — in the Gaza Strip and increasingly also in the West Bank— are part of a long-term effort to use force to somehow make Israel’s Palestinian problem go away, through a combination of outright killing, inducing exile by making a homeland unlivable, and intimidation of any who remain.

Israel’s officially declared objective for its attacks in Lebanon is to permit a return home of the 70,000 temporarily displaced residents of northern Israel — whose numbers constitute less than six percent of the Lebanese who have been driven from their homes so far by the Israel offensive. That objective is genuine, but an escalating war along Israel’s northern border only places the objective farther out of reach. The Israeli operations also clearly are designed to cripple Hezbollah as much as possible, although they sustain and heighten the sort of anger that led to Hezbollah’s establishment and growth in the first place.

An Israel that is the strongest military power in the Middle East and is throwing its armed might around in seemingly every direction but the Mediterranean Sea is a nation drunk on the use of force and stumbling into still more use of it with little or no apparent attention to any long-term strategy for achieving an end state, other than living forever by the sword. Each tactical success, including the killing of a prominent adversary such as Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, only seems to deepen the inebriation.

Beyond this, one gets into a mixture of motivations that are specific to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and ones shared with other Israeli policymakers. It is widely recognized, including by Netanyahu’s domestic opponents, that he has a personal stake in continuing and even escalating Israel’s wars. This is partly because of the usual rally-round-the-flag effect that attenuates the political problems of a wartime leader. It is also more specifically because Netanyahu is dependent on the support of the most extreme members of his right-wing ruling coalition to hold that coalition together, thereby keeping Netanyahu in power and delaying the day he has to confront fully the corruption charges against him.

An armed attack on Iran would extend the Israeli policy— not unique to Netanyahu, although he has been its most prominent exponent — of stoking maximum hostility toward, and isolation of, Iran. That policy serves to weaken a rival for regional influence, to place blame for everything wrong with the region on someone other than Israel, to inhibit any engagement with Iran by Israel’s patron the United States, and to divert international attention away from Israel’s own actions.

The diversion seems to work. The international attention to what may come next in the confrontation with Iran, in addition to the escalating operations in Lebanon, has meant less attention than would otherwise have been given in newspapers and the airwaves to the continued carnage in the Gaza Strip that claims civilian lives, such as Israeli attacks within the last few days on a girls’ school and an orphanage that several hundred displaced persons were using as shelter.

The U.S. presidential election provides another motivation for the Israeli government to escalate regional warfare. Netanyahu certainly would like to see a second term for Donald Trump, who gave Israel just about anything it wanted during his previous time in office, with nothing in return except political support for Trump. This relationship is part of a broader political alliance between the Republican Party and Netanyahu’s Likud Party. To the extent an escalatory mess in the Middle East causes problems for the Biden administration and thereby hurts the election chances of Vice President Kamala Harris, that is a bonus from Netanyahu’s point of view.

Netanyahu is more likely to enjoy that bonus and the other fruits of ramping up conflict with Iran to the extent that the United States gets directly involved in that conflict. Such involvement not only makes the politically costly mess for the Biden administration all the messier, but also enables Netanyahu to claim credibly that he has the United States fully at his side in his government’s lethal activities.

None of these Israeli objectives are in the interest of the United States. Several of the objectives, such as hamstringing any U.S. diplomacy that involves Iran, are directly and manifestly opposed to U.S. interests.

Israel’s regional warfare — and more specifically a U.S.-backed attack on Iran — would harm U.S. interests in several additional ways.

Closer association with Israel’s lethal operations increases the chance of reprisals, including terrorist reprisals. It also worsens U.S. isolation in international politics.

Supporting or participating in an Israeli attack on Iran would further undermine U.S. claims to be in favor of peace and observance of a rules-based international order. It would mean attacking the country that in this confrontation has exercised restraint in the interest of avoiding war and is firmly in support of ceasefires on each of the fronts seeing combat. It would mean aiding further attacks by the country that in the same confrontation has inflicted far more death and destruction, and done more to promote escalation of the violence, than any other in the region.

In the absence of any willingness to employ the leverage that U.S. material aid to Israel represents, all the bear-hugging and expressions of support have only reassured Netanyahu that he can continue to prosecute his wars and ignore American calls for restraint without losing that aid.

An attack on Iran would roil the oil market and cause economic dislocations that would reach the United States, especially but not solely if such an attack targeted Iranian oil facilities.

An attack would set back any chance for fruitful diplomacy involving Iran on matters such as security in the Persian Gulf region.

An attack would increase the chance that the Iranian regime would choose to develop a nuclear weapon. Nothing would be better designed to strengthen the arguments of those in Tehran willing to take that step than armed attacks demonstrating that Iran does not now have a sufficient deterrent.

Israel has already entrapped the United States to a large degree in its lethal ways in the Middle East, and the entrapment threatens to become deeper with the anticipated new attack on Iran. The entrapment would not have been possible without mismanagement of the U.S.-Israeli relationship on the Washington end. President Biden’s approach of holding Netanyahu close in the hope of influencing his policies has failed. It also has been counterproductive. In the absence of any willingness to employ the leverage that U.S. material aid to Israel represents, all the bear-hugging and expressions of support have only reassured Netanyahu that he can continue to prosecute his wars and ignore American calls for restraint without losing that aid.

It is refreshing to see reports that at least within the Department of Defense there is some recognition that the policy has been counterproductive by emboldening Israel to escalate. It is perhaps unsurprising that the department whose personnel would be on the front line of any expanded warfare involving the United States is more willing than others to recognize the nature and sources of the violence plaguing the Middle East and the need to deter or restrain Israel rather than embolden it. One can only hope that this willingness will spread more widely in policymaking circles.