Alex Pretti was a strong man. An ICU nurse at the VA, he showed up every day with courage and care, standing by veterans on the precipice of death. Brave, kind, generous, he had skills that could save lives and the presence to accompany people through the heaviest moments at the end of life. When not at work, he hiked the beautiful nature of Minnesota with a beaming smile. He was the kind of man every parent dreams of raising, the kind of neighbor who makes a community feel like home. He was a real man.

On Saturday, January 24th, when not on the job, Alex showed up to a protest to bear witness. Just weeks after Renee Nicole Good was murdered, and then smeared as a terrorist by the Trump administration despite video evidence of her peaceful protest, Alex knew that recording was essential. He understood what we all must: that witnessing is an act of patriotism, a constitutional duty to hold power accountable when they try to twist reality before our eyes. When he saw a woman accosted by thugs, he went to help her. He stood between her and the attackers, one hand in the air and the other holding a phone to record. He was pushed to the ground and shot ten times. He was murdered, executed publicly.

The thugs who pushed her down, who executed him in front of dozens of witnesses who recorded every second, they are not strong. They are cowards. The soulless man who sat on a toilet in a marble bathroom in the White House in the middle of the night spreading lies about Alex on social media is not strong. He is a coward. This is what cowardice looks like: destroying thousands of lives of public servants who maintain our quality of life, trampling on the Constitution repeatedly, throwing our global standing into uncertainty threatening war on allies, unabashedly brandishing Nazi ideology. These are the acts of the past year of Trump’s administration, not of strength, but of pathetic weakness. This backward, weak, unimaginative, soulless being is not a strongman. Trump is the weakest, most pathetic man this country has ever known.

Trump and any other leader who attacks communities that sustain our collective wellbeing are the weakest, most pathetic, spineless people in the world.

Stop Calling Cowards Strong

As we fumble for ways to understand the current global political moment, scholars and political analysts have guided our collective attention toward the "strongman" type of leadership. Putin, Orbán, Bolsonaro, Trump, and many others who follow ethics of domination and oppression are placed under this banner, this political framework. Given what we are seeing in the United States, I believe it is dangerous to keep using such a false descriptor of these dynamics of dehumanization. These men are not strong. Their violence is not power; it is the telltale marker of weakness. They resort to brutality because they possess no moral authority, no true courage, no capacity to lead through anything but fear.

Trump and any other leader who attacks communities that sustain our collective wellbeing are the weakest, most pathetic, spineless people in the world. Trying to understand what we are experiencing now through the language of "strongmen" is dangerous and inaccurate. We have to name reality with more intention. Men deserve better than this. People are raising boys into beautiful, strong men like Alex Pretti. In Trump, in Steven Miller, and the thugs who carry out their unconstitutional orders, we are seeing cowards who are so weak that they must destroy humanity because they cannot stand their own emptiness.

I Have Seen This Before, Many of Us Have

I think often about my childhood in Romania these days. My mom telling me about her beloved mentor who was disappeared because he held views that were dangerous to the dictator's fragile sense of self. I think about my dad who was tortured, whose body and spirit never recovered. I think about the pathetic leader who built monstrous palaces while his people starved, who paraded in fur coats while we scrounged for clothes from bins donated by German churches.

Ceaușescu turned neighbors against one another through a system of informants. Neighbors received special favors, maybe a bag of flour when no one else had any, to report any dissent in the neighborhood. A few people around Ceaușescu, the corrupt politicians, got richer and richer the more we were undernourished and the more our future was uncertain. They were untouchable. The Epstein files have made clear this too is a reality here: one system of justice for the powerful, another for the rest of us. Different rules. Different accountability. Different worlds.

Your neighbor who checks on the elderly woman next door every morning. Your co-worker who goes to immigration court to bear witness. The man at the grocery store who remembers everyone’s birthdays and makes them handmade cards. These are strong people.

My parents risked everything, my father's body and mind bore the scars of torture until his last breath, so that I could live in a place where I could speak freely, think freely, question power without fear. To see that precious dream of freedom, bought with their blood and sacrifice, now being crushed by what increasingly resembles the Securitate, Romania's secret police, is a betrayal beyond words. To live these things all over again, yet with more vivid brutality than I ever imagined, is unspeakably painful to describe. People are being disappeared. The pathetic, spineless monster is building his palaces while loving, generous neighbors are being murdered in the streets. ICE is recruiting people by offering bonuses, turning our neighbors into spineless thugs too, just as Ceaușescu's informants were recruited with bags of flour.

Ceaușescu was a spineless coward building his palace around him. My grandfather, who went into the fields every day and raised the chickens and pigs that kept me alive, he was strong, he was a strong man. My dad, who risked his life to escape authoritarianism because he believed that somewhere a place existed where I could speak my mind freely, he too was brave and strong. Your grandfather who worked double shifts so his children could go to college. Your neighbor who checks on the elderly woman next door every morning. Your co-worker who goes to immigration court to bear witness. The man at the grocery store who remembers everyone’s birthdays and makes them handmade cards. These are strong people. These are real men and women. This is what strength looks like.

What True Power Looks Like

Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist and philosopher, wrote that unless colonial structures are radically overturned, any decolonization that just swaps elites leaves intact a brittle, violent form of power built on the permanent dehumanization of the masses. This is what we see now: brittle, violent power terrified of true strength. Fanon understood that we cannot simply replace one set of elites with another, we must radically overturn the structures themselves. This is what we are called to do now: refuse to reinforce systems that reward spineless cowards with authority, and instead build the world Alex Pretti died protecting. A world where showing up for your neighbor is valued more than hoarding wealth. Where recording truth is patriotism. Where welcoming immigrants and refugees, people like my father, welcoming little boys like Liam Conejo Ramos, fleeing authoritarianism in search of freedom, strengthens rather than threatens our communities. Where offering sanctuary is recognized as the strength it is, not twisted into a crime. Where collective wellbeing matters more than individual domination. Trump and his thugs are terrified of this vision. They are terrified of Renee Good smiling instead of cowering. They are terrified of Alex Pretti walking toward thugs to make sure a woman is not brutalized by them. They are weak cowards.

Trump and his thugs, and other thugs like that anywhere in the world, are afraid of true power. They are afraid of our true power, our true strength. They are terrified of Alex Pretti, someone who embodied true strength, who was skilled, kind, and moral. Because true power exposes them for what they are: morally corrupt, spineless, empty, weak thugs.

Strongmen do not have power of over us. They are afraid of us. It is time for us as a collective to remember what true power is. We are strong. We, who care for each other, are strong. They are weak. They are pathetic. And they know it.

The strength we have, the strength we see in the community members who rush toward a 16-year old child who is abducted by ICE and thrown out of the van after being brutalized, the clergy who kneeled in protest at the airport, the strength we see embodied in Alex Pretti walking to protect a woman being brutalized by thugs, that strength is not rare, it is the fabric of our communities. It has always been here, quietly holding us together while cowards build palaces and spread lies. It is time we recognize this power for what it is: unstoppable, abundant, and ours. We are strong. We, who care for each other, are strong. This is real strength. And it is ours.

More focus is needed on the downsides of the AI “revolution,” which is better understood as a speculative bubble (built in part through shaky circular financing deals between chip maker Nvidia, cloud provider Oracle, and model builder OpenAI, among others) that’s liable to burst. If and when that happens, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s preemptive lobbying for a taxpayer-funded bailout is likely to pay off, leaving the public on the hook. That would be outrageous, of course, considering how much direct and indirect financial support tech giants have already received from federal and state governments, before and throughout the ongoing artificial intelligence frenzy. On the other hand, if AI “succeeds”—destroying millions of jobs, pillaging communities, and despoiling ecosystems in the process—working people will have subsidized our own subjugation. Widespread opposition to planned data centers across the political spectrum suggests that the public understands this.

Here’s a tangible downside: The prices of many essential goods are already rising as a result of the anti-democratic rush to build hyperscale data centers and the growing use of AI programs in numerous sectors. In what follows, we explain how the proliferation of both AI software (i.e., seemingly immaterial computational tools) and hardware (i.e., the resource-intensive and highly polluting infrastructure underpinning those tools) is driving up the costs of necessities now and in the future.

Skyrocketing Electricity Bills

Energy-hungry AI systems require immense amounts of computing power. That’s why tech giants like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are investing billions of dollars to expedite the construction of massive, primarily gas-powered data centers across the United States. This AI-driven surge in electricity demand, combined with the Trump administration’s ongoing attacks on renewable energy supply and battery storage, is putting increased strain on the power grid. The result? Higher utility bills.

According to a Bloomberg analysis published in 2025, “Wholesale electricity costs as much as 267% more than it did five years ago in areas near data centers. That’s being passed on to customers.” The rapid development of data centers connected to PJM Interconnection—the largest power grid operator in the United States, serving 67 million customers throughout the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic—increased the cost of procuring electricity by $9.3 billion from June 2024 to June 2025, with expenses only expected to rise further.

If this trend continues and data centers become the majority-users of a utility, then utilities may demand even deeper sacrifices from everyday ratepayers to keep their most powerful customers happy.

Residential ratepayers are shouldering this burden unfairly. As the beneficiaries of state-granted monopolies, for-profit utilities are subject to state regulation of prices. Public utility commissioners are supposed to set rates that enable customers to receive affordable power and utilities to cover operating costs and make enough profit to attract investors to fund infrastructure expansions and upgrades. For years, however, increasingly captured commissioners have been approving rate hike requests that pad the pockets of utility executives and shareholders (to the tune of $50 billion per year in excess profit, according to the American Economic Liberties Project).

Now, there’s mounting evidence that state regulators are subsidizing Big Tech’s out-of-control power consumption by forcing customers to fund discounted rates for data centers. This is a boon for investor-owned utilities, which profit from greater energy use. For the rest of us, it makes it harder to scrape by every month. If this trend continues and data centers become the majority-users of a utility, then utilities may demand even deeper sacrifices from everyday ratepayers to keep their most powerful customers happy.

Automated Health Insurance Denials, Home Insurance Rate Hikes

Earlier this month, the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) launched the so-called Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction (WISeR) Model. This pilot program allows six companies in six states to use AI to determine whether traditional Medicare enrollees’ requested medical care should be covered.

Reporting on this AI-powered prior authorization program last year, the New York Times noted that “similar algorithms used by insurers have been the subject of several high-profile lawsuits, which have asserted that the technology allowed the companies to swiftly deny large batches of claims and cut patients off from care in rehabilitation facilities.” Firms tapped to manage the WISeR Model “would have a strong financial incentive to deny claims,” the newspaper observed. “Medicare plans to pay them a share of the savings generated from rejections.”

An early warning that CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz is imposing “AI death panels” aimed at preventing seniors from accessing needed healthcare is apt. It’s also worth stressing that Medicare Advantage and private insurance plans have already been using AI-powered prior authorization, with costly and deadly effects for ordinary people.

Property insurers, too, are increasingly relying on AI to project—with zero transparency and questionable accuracy—climate risks, which is contributing to coverage withdrawals and rate hikes in communities around the United States. According to a recent report from McKinsey & Company, the insurance industry’s growing use of AI has led to “a 10 to 15% increase in premium growth.” While industry profits and executive compensation are on the rise, homeowners and renters alike are being hurt by the declining availability and affordability of home insurance. A climate and insurance-driven foreclosure wave, which would starve municipal budgets and could trigger a broader economic crisis, is a real possibility.

Algorithmic Price Gouging

Two shoppers could walk into the same grocery store at the same time and purchase the same product—and yet be charged different prices. This was the conclusion of a recent experiment conducted by Groundwork Collaborative, Consumer Reports, and More Perfect Union. The study, which focused on online grocer Instacart, found that nearly three-quarters of items tested were offered to customers at multiple price points, with an average difference of 13% between the lowest and highest prices.

What the hell are we doing building ruinous housing for super-computers when we could—and should—be building healthy housing (and clean energy and mass transit) for people?

How is this possible? Unfortunately, this increasingly common practice of “surveillance pricing” is the logical outcome of allowing rent-seeking firms to transform our personal data into an asset that can be endlessly mined. AI is turbocharging this phenomenon, from RealPage’s rent-gouging software to Delta Air Line’s use of Fetcherr, an AI-fueled pricing technology.

Negative Environmental and Health Externalities

AI is already wreaking profound havoc on public and environmental health. The rare earth elements used in the microchips that power AI systems tend to be mined in ecologically harmful ways. Data center construction implies habitat destruction, and completed facilities produce significant amounts of toxic electronic waste, which typically contains mercury, lead, and other hazardous materials. Data centers consume tremendous amounts of water, sometimes dispossessing local residents of access in the process. Making matters worse, Big Tech’s quest for cheap electricity is leading it to build data centers in all kinds of places, including drought-stricken states like Arizona and Nevada, compounding preexisting water shortages.

Moreover, most data centers are being powered by planet-heating fossil fuels, especially methane gas. In addition, forecasted AI-related energy shortfalls are leading utilities to keep aging coal plants running and even to revive particularly dirty “peaker” plants, while the use of on-site diesel generators is also growing.

On top of the fact that fossil fuel-powered data centers spew heat-trapping gasses into the atmosphere, research has shown that AI degrades air quality in other ways. Specifically, across its full lifecycle—from chip manufacturing to data center operation—AI contributes to the emission of fine particulate matter or soot, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide. These pollutants are linked to numerous adverse health impacts, including lung cancer, asthma, heart attacks, cardiovascular disease, strokes, cognitive decline, and premature mortality. One study estimates that data centers are on track to account for at least 1,300 premature deaths and $20 billion in public health-related costs per year in the United States by 2030. These deleterious consequences are poised to hit already-disadvantaged populations the hardest. That includes the low-income, predominantly Black neighborhoods currently fighting back against Elon Musk’s xAI data centers in South Memphis.

Deferred Green Economic Development Means Climate-flation

What the hell are we doing building ruinous housing for super-computers when we could—and should—be building healthy housing (and clean energy and mass transit) for people? The opportunity costs of supporting Big Tech’s AI data center buildout are striking.

A new analysis from the Rhodium Group estimates that for the first time in two years, US greenhouse gas emissions increased in 2025. The 2.4% uptick in national GHG pollution was driven in large part by data centers and crypto mining. This regressive form of economic development is destabilizing the climate and leaving people less materially secure. It is also being pursued as a reactionary alternative to green economic populism.

It seems clear that a major reason why the ruling class is so heavily invested in AI’s triumph is because they dream of burying organized labor and worker demands once and for all.

Despite recent efforts to decouple climate and affordability, the two issues remain inextricably linked. There’s mounting evidence that climate inaction is exacerbating the cost-of-living crisis. The best way forward is to fight for policies that would simultaneously decarbonize and democratize our society, to confront climate chaos and grotesque inequality at the same time.

Failing to do so, as we are now amid AI-mania, will only lock-in more fossil fuel pollution, thus aggravating extreme weather and with it, supply chain disruptions and price shocks. Current and future generations will be forced to endure a more brutish and expensive world full of economic insecurity and uneven, but rampant, suffering.

Endgame: Wage Repression, Tyranny, and Unlimited Rent Seeking

Some AI-related costs have not yet been realized. But if Silicon Valley oligarchs succeed in empowering firms all across the economy to eliminate jobs (and deskill further pockets of the workforce), skyrocketing unemployment would empower bosses to suppress wages. It seems clear that a major reason why the ruling class is so heavily invested in AI’s triumph is because they dream of burying organized labor and worker demands once and for all. Meanwhile, the collision of declining pay and rising prices would push more and more people closer to the brink.

How are people supposed to enjoy the leisure time ostensibly provided by AI advancements if they can’t afford basic necessities? Is rapid access to information a net-positive no matter the quality of that information? Isn’t it more likely that society’s capacity for critical thinking will be further degraded? And if we deprive the next generation of literacy while immersing them in a poisoned information ecosystem, doesn’t that increase the likelihood that authoritarian demagogues will retain power?

That’s why billionaire techno-fascists are trying so hard to imprison us within their AI-dominated world. Whether by preempting regulation of AI inside existing borders or violently establishing new, regulation-free jurisdictions where they can impose their will, a tiny class of digital overlords and their political allies are seeking to end democracy so they can extract rents with no constraints. We can’t afford to let their dystopian vision become reality.

In 2022, my wife and I lost our first child. We named them June. They were deeply wanted and fiercely loved. In one fateful appointment, our entire worlds changed. We learned that June had a severe fetal bladder abnormality and was unable to produce amniotic fluid. Without it, their lungs would never develop. They would not survive.

We made the impossible decision to end the pregnancy—an act of compassion, love, and medical necessity.

At the time, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) had a total ban on abortion care and counseling.

No exceptions for rape. No exceptions for incest. Not even to save a veteran’s life.

Veterans and our families deserve futures built on compassion, justice, and love—not fear.

After our loss, the only way I felt I could keep breathing was to turn that grief into meaning. I shared our story with lawmakers to help reverse this dangerous policy so that veterans and their families could turn to the VA—no matter the circumstance or where they lived. That fall, the VA finally took steps to reverse the ban, signaling a long-overdue shift toward care, autonomy, and dignity.

But that progress was short-lived.

The VA just finalized a new abortion ban policy that, once again, excludes exceptions for rape or incest and offers only vague assurances that it will intervene if our lives are at risk. They initially implemented this enormous change in secret without telling veterans or their families.

In effect, it returns the VA to what was once the most extreme abortion ban in the country—an outright prohibition on care and counseling that applies to every VA facility nationwide, regardless of state law.

This isn’t just a rollback. It’s a deliberate erasure of rights that we fought for in the wake of deeply personal and collective loss.

And it is not happening in isolation. The same administration driving this ban is also working diligently to eliminate gender-affirming care, defund programs for minority and underrepresented veterans, and strip inclusive language and data collection from federal policy. The message is unmistakable: Some veterans count. Others don’t.

Veterans are not a monolith. We are a diverse community—LGBTQIA+, people of color, disabled, parents, caregivers, survivors, and yes, women too. Our community exists at every intersection of identity and experience, and our families serve alongside us. Our care cannot be conditional. Our humanity is not negotiable.

Policy is never just about one issue. It is intersectional—because our lives are intersectional.

Reproductive care cannot be separated from gender-affirming care, from disability access and mental health, from racial justice, or maternal health. Our needs don’t exist in silos, and neither do we. When one right is taken away, the loss reverberates across all the others.

I’ve seen what’s possible when we refuse to stay silent—how lived experience can reshape policy and expand care that has never existed before. And I know exactly what is at stake when care is denied. Pregnancy can change on a dime.

June’s life, though brief, transformed mine. Through their memory, I found purpose. I found a voice. And in their honor, I will continue working to ensure that no veteran or family ever has to face what we faced alone.

We should be building systems rooted in care, equity, and truth. We should be honoring the fullness of who veterans are, how we serve, and how we build our families. Instead, our fundamental rights are being stripped away—one policy memo at a time—and once again, we are being asked to fight for the right to make personal decisions about our health, our futures, and our families.

I will not allow June’s legacy to become another casualty of politics. Their life will be a call to care.

This moment demands more than endurance. It demands action.

The policies we pass—within the VA and beyond—shape the futures of veterans and the people who love us. Had my wife not been able to access critical care in her time of need—had we not been given the chance to make the most compassionate choice amid impossible circumstances—we might never have known the joy of raising our child today, a joy born from grief and shaped by love.

Veterans and our families deserve futures built on compassion, justice, and love—not fear.

Because in the end, we are all only human.

The Trump administration’s exercise in armed regime change in Venezuela should have come as no surprise. The US naval buildup in the Caribbean and the attacks on defenseless boats off the Venezuelan coast—based on unproven allegations that they contained drug traffickers—had been underway for more than three months. By the end of December 2025, in fact, such strikes on boats near Venezuela (and in the Eastern Pacific) had already killed 115 people.

And those attacks were just the beginning. The US has since intercepted oil tankers as far away as the North Atlantic Ocean; run a covert operation inside Venezuela; and earlier this month, launched multiple air strikes that killed at least 40 Venezuelans while capturing that country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife.

Both of them are now imprisoned in New York City and poised to face a criminal trial for narco-terrorism and cocaine importing conspiracies, plus assorted weapons charges. Even more strikingly, President Donald Trump recently told the New York Times that the US could run Venezuela “for years.” On how that would be done, he (of course!) didn’t offer a clue. Naturally, a Venezuelan government forged in the face of a possible US occupation would comply with the whims of the Trump administration—assuming that such a government, capable of stabilizing the country and earning the loyalty of the majority of its people, can even be pulled together.

Trump’s rush to war in Latin America is a phenomenon that, until recently, seemed long over. Its revival should raise multiple red flags, given the history of Washington’s failed efforts to install allied governments through regime change. (Can you spell Iraq?) In fact, given this country’s lack of success with such attempts since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it’s a good bet that regime change in Venezuela will not end well for any of the parties concerned, whether the Trump administration, the new leaders of Venezuela, or the people of our two countries.

Trump’s fixation on actually grabbing territory and his hyper-militarized interpretation of the 200-year-old Monroe (now, Donroe) Doctrine suggest that perhaps he wants to take America back to the 1850s.

In the meantime, Trump has already suggested that he might entertain the idea of launching military strikes on neighboring Colombia. After a White House phone call between that country’s president Gustavo Petro and him, however, Time Magazine speculated that, when it comes to “who’s next?,” it might not be Colombia but Cuba, Mexico, Greenland, or even Iran. What’s not yet clear is whether Trump and crew will use the US military, CIA-style covert action, economic warfare, or some combination of all of them in pursuit of their goals (whatever they might prove to be).

The one thing that should be clear by now is that pursuing such global regime-change campaigns would be sheer madness. Going that route would sow chaos and instability, while harming untold numbers of innocent civilians, all in pursuit of a futile quest for renewed US global supremacy.

When, long ago, President Trump first started using the term “Make America Great Again,” I assumed he was thinking of the 1950s, when a surge of post-World War II economic growth and government investment lifted the prospects of a select group of Americans (while pointedly excluding others). That period, of course, was when the efforts that produced the modern civil rights, women’s rights, and gay and trans rights movements were in their early stages. Prejudice was the norm then in most places where Americans lived, worked, or got an education, while McCarthyism cost untold numbers of people their jobs and livelihoods and had a chilling effect on the discussion or pursuit of progressive goals.

Such a return to the 1950s would have been bad enough. However, Trump’s fixation on actually grabbing territory and his hyper-militarized interpretation of the 200-year-old Monroe (now, Donroe) Doctrine suggest that perhaps he wants to take America back to the 1850s. If so, count on one thing: We’ll pay a high price for any such exercise in imperial nostalgia.

Intervention as the Norm: The History of US Aggression in Latin America

The Trump administration’s attempt to control Latin America and intimidate its leaders and citizens is, of course, nothing new. At the start of the 20th century, President Teddy Roosevelt announced his own “corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, which went well beyond the original pronouncement’s warning to European powers to avoid challenging Washington’s dominance of the Western Hemisphere. Roosevelt then stated that “chronic wrongdoing… may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.”

The Office of the Historian at the US State Department points out that, “[o]ver the long term, the [Roosevelt] corollary had little to do with relations between the Western Hemisphere and Europe, but it did serve as justification for US intervention in Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.”

In fact, there were dozens of US interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean in the wake of Roosevelt’s statement of his doctrine. Later in the century, there were US-aided coups in Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1964) and Chile (1973); invasions of Cuba (1961), the Dominican Republic (1983), and Grenada (1983); armed regime change in Panama (1989); the arming of the Contras in Nicaragua (1981) and death squads in El Salvador (1980 to 1992); and support for dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay in the 1970s and 1980s.

In all, according to historian John Coatsworth, the United States intervened in the Western Hemisphere to change governments 41 times from 1898 to 1994. Seventeen of those cases involved direct US military intervention.

In short, the Trump administration is now reprising the worst of past US policies toward Latin America, but as with all things Trumpian, he and his cohorts are moving at warp speed, and on several fronts simultaneously.

The Perils of Regime Change

Although Trump officials are no doubt celebrating their removal of Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela, the battle there is far from over. When the US drove Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces out of Kuwait in a six-week military campaign in 1991, there was a great deal of celebratory rhetoric about how “America is back” or even that the United States was the single most impressively dominant nation in the history of humanity. But as historian Andrew Bacevich has pointed out, the 1991 Gulf War was just the start of what became a long war in Iraq and the greater Middle East. In Iraq, the ejection of Hussein was followed by relentless bombing, devastating sanctions, and a 20-year war of occupation that ended disastrously.

Wishful thinking was rampant in the run-up to the Bush administration’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, with administration officials bragging that the war would be a “cake walk” and would cost “only” $50 to $100 billion. When all was said and done, however, that war would last 20 years at a cost of well over $1 trillion; hundreds of thousands of civilians would die; and hundreds of thousands of US military personnel would be killed, maimed, or left with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBI).

The Venezuelan debacle—which is surely what it will be considered once all is said and done—is but another sign that the Trump administration’s tough-guy rhetoric and bullying foreign and economic policies are, in fact, accelerating the decline of American global power.

The opportunity costs of America’s post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere have indeed been enormous. The Costs of War Project at Brown University estimates that the taxpayer obligations flowing from those conflicts exceeded $8 trillion. As the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies has noted, that $8 trillion would have been enough to decarbonize the entire US electrical grid, forgive all US student-loan debt, and triple the investment in green energy and related items initiated by the Biden administration under the Inflation Reduction Act (investments that have since been rolled back by the Trump administration).

Of course, that money is gone, but given the experience, you might think that this country’s leadership (such as it is) would go all in to avoid repeating such costly mistakes, this time in Latin America, by attempting to dominate and control the region through force or the threat of it. Consider it a guarantee that such a policy will never end well for the residents of the targeted nations. And count on this as well: It will also exact a high price on Americans in need of food, housing, education, a robust public health system, and a serious plan to address the ravages of climate change.

Why Venezuela? Oil, Ego, and the Quest for Dominance

The Trump administration’s original rationale for pursuing regime change in Venezuela was to stop the flow of drugs into the United States, a position that didn’t stand up to even the most casual scrutiny. After all, Venezuela isn’t faintly one of the more significant sources of drugs heading into this country and, in particular, it isn’t a supplier of fentanyl, the deadliest substance being imported.

Donald Trump has since stated repeatedly (as in a January 3 press conference), that the intervention he ordered was, in fact, about seizing Venezuela’s oil resources and developing them to the benefit of the US through the activities of American oil companies. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world,” he said, “go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”

Writing in The Nation, Michael Klare pointed out that upping Venezuela’s oil output would, in fact, be no simple matter. Trump’s comments, he suggested, were “imbued with nostalgia and fantasy” and “all this flies in the face of economic and geological reality, which stands in the way of any rapid increase in Venezuelan output and oil profits.” That country’s oil supplies are, in fact, mostly in the form of heavy crude, which is particularly difficult to extract, and its infrastructure for accessing such oil is decrepit, thanks to years of sanctions and neglect. As Klare points out, the London-based consultancy firm Energy Aspects has suggested that it would take “tens of billions of dollars over multiple years” to restore Venezuela’s oil production to the higher levels of years past.

Realism, however, has never been Donald Trump’s strong suit, and his dream that seizing Venezuela’s oil resources will be a piece of cake only reinforces that point. The same can be said for his assertion that the United States could rule Venezuela, perhaps for years, and that everything is bound to go smoothly. The disastrous consequences of the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, among other places, suggest otherwise.

Beyond oil, the intervention in Venezuela satisfies Trump’s personal will to power, advances Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s goal of weakening and perhaps overthrowing the government of Cuba (by denying it Venezuelan oil), and puts progressive governments in Latin America on notice that if they don’t bend the knee to US economic and political demands, they may be next.

Interventionism on Steroids: A Recipe for American Decline

Since the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and his wife in Venezuela, administration rhetoric about possible attacks on Colombia and the seizing of Greenland has only accelerated. At another moment in history, perhaps such claims could have been dismissed as the idle bluster of an aging oligarch. But the Trump administration has already acted on too many of its most outlandish policy proposals—with its attempt to seize and control Venezuela high on the list—for us to treat the president’s aggressive statements as idle threats.

The Venezuelan debacle—which is surely what it will be considered once all is said and done—is but another sign that the Trump administration’s tough-guy rhetoric and bullying foreign and economic policies are, in fact, accelerating the decline of American global power. The question is, given the administration’s costly and dangerous military-first foreign policy, how much damage will this country do to people here and abroad on the way down?

Were Washington to put down its sword and invest in the real foundations of national strength—a healthy, well-educated, unified population—it could play a constructive role in the world, while delivering a better quality of life and a more responsive government to the American public.

It doesn’t have to be this way, of course. There could be a shift from this country’s current addiction to war as a central feature of its interactions with other nations to a policy of restraint that would recognize that the days when the United States could presume to run the world are over. In truth, US dominance was always overrated, given fiascos like the interventions in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, where the US could not impose its will on much smaller nations with far fewer resources and far less sophisticated weaponry. Those experiences should have taught policymakers of both parties to proceed with caution, but the learning curve has, at best, been slow, painful, and erratic—and in the era of Donald Trump, seemingly nonexistent.

Warmed-over appeals to restore American greatness through the barrel of a gun are, of course, dangerously misguided, as our recent history has so amply demonstrated. It is long past time for us to demand better stewardship from our elected and appointed leaders.

Were Washington to put down its sword and invest in the real foundations of national strength—a healthy, well-educated, unified population—it could play a constructive role in the world, while delivering a better quality of life and a more responsive government to the American public. This would not mean eliminating the ability to defend the country by force if need be, but it would mean acknowledging that the need to do so should be rare, and that a more cooperative approach to overseas engagement, grounded in smart diplomacy, is the best defense of all. That, in turn, would mean a smaller military (and a far more modest military budget) that could free up resources to address urgent needs, from dealing with climate change and preventing new pandemics to reducing poverty and inequality.

At this moment in our history, the vision of a less militarized America may seem like a distant dream, but striving for it is the only way out of our current predicament.

Will a jury in Middle America’s flyover country care enough about the genocide in Gaza to acquit four protesters arrested for nonviolent civil resistance? Will it matter once they’ve seen “Bringing Gaza Home?”

That’s the question eight jurors will decide in Toledo a few weeks from now when they hear from four activists arrested October 3 for blocking the entrance to the local office of US Sen. John Husted (R-Ohio). They, along with the local peace movement, had run out of patience with Husted because of his continuing support for Israel’s genocide.

The final straw was when Husted refused to even make a statement supporting our friend and fellow Toledoan, Phil Tottenham, a former Marine, who was abducted in international waters by Israel during last fall’s Sumud Flotilla. That simply demanded the strongest nonviolent response we could make. We simply could not sit in comfort here in Toledo and watch this obscenity and simply hold a sign on a street corner to protest. We had to do more.

The other three people arrested were Al Compaan, professor emeritus of physics, University of Toledo; Nancy Larson, retired counselor-social worker; and Steve Masternak, retired industrial engineer. Two others were arrested but have since pled guilty and paid fines.

Our hope at trial is that our fellow citizens and neighbors will be as horrified by what Gazans have suffered as we are and decide it’s time to stand and be counted.

Information we will show the jury is included in the extensively documented Veterans For Peace report, Bringing Gaza Home. The report is compiled from information published by international news outlets such as the Guardian, Al Jazeera and Anadolu Agency, reporting on the effects of two years of Israel’s US-funded genocide in Palestine.

What makes it local to Toledo, county seat of Lucas County, Ohio, is comparing the destruction in Gaza to what Lucas County would be like after similar bombardment. The methodology simply compares Gaza’s area and population to Lucas County’s and calculates the comparable numbers.

We will hold up large photos and show videos of human casualties and physical destruction in Gaza, and describe to jurors what the effect would be in our own neighborhoods. We will tell the jury, “If this sounds utterly impossible or like a horror movie script, it’s neither. But for the grace of God this could be us instead of Gaza.”

• 27,292 county residents would be dead, including 350 medical personnel, 528 people seeking food aid from official sites, and 61 reporters and media workers;
• 93 people would have starved to death;
• 737 would be imprisoned without charges or trial;
• 450,170 tons of bombs would have been dropped on our county in two years—four times what was dropped on Dresden, Hamburg, London, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki combined in World War II;
• Over 34,300 people would be wounded; over half women and children;
• 324,520 people (75% of the county population) would be infected with disease from polluted water and open sewers;
• 384,500 people (90% of the population) would have endured severe lack of food;
• Over 90% of residential buildings would be destroyed and 92% of all schools would require complete reconstruction;
• 264,000 people (62% of the population) would have lost legal documentation for property ownership; and
• Over 340,000 unexploded bombs would lie buried in Lucas County.

Our hope at trial is that our fellow citizens and neighbors will be as horrified by what Gazans have suffered as we are and decide it’s time to stand and be counted, that blocking the entrance to a senator’s office is a minimal response to a genocide.

AI is being diffused throughout society under chatbots, models, and agents which are explicitly reactionary and create communicative and physical walls to defend the status quo.

Capitalism has elected AI as the next tool to distribute and dismantle labor, create a new power structure in the world, and repress social and political movements. Unchecked, it will bring us right up to a collapse brought on by war and climate chaos.

Forget about the Terminator stories of Artificial General Intelligence and Artificial Superintelligence. These are closer to sci-fi than to reality. We don’t need to speculate about things that don’t exist in the AI realm. What we do need to look at are the things that already exist and are being deployed massively.

The main objective of AI is the automation of historical automation itself. AI holds an irresistible promise for capitalist elites: to be able to automatically direct most of the instructions that guide human activity, reducing the power of social classes other than the owners of the algorithms. Complete economic and social planning for the rich. In particular, they want to reduce the power that the working class has exercised in the past, the power to push toward the future and gain the political, social, and economic transformations that reduce or eliminate inequality and injustice.

Data centers today are nightmare factories.

A key and complementary objective of AI is to create an overwhelming monopoly over knowledge, codified via Large Language Models, Computer Vision, Convolutional Neural Networks, and other Machine “Learning” models. This monopoly is being designed to utterly transform social relations and install a reactionary hegemony that widely surpasses neoliberal capitalism and feeds a far-right dystopia.

The third essential objective has to do with the control of violence and political repression. For that effect, AI provides different tools to be used in declared and now mostly-undeclared states of war. During the Gaza genocide, human targets were chosen with AI, its models were used to determine the biggest impacts for sequences of targets in order to achieve maximum infrastructure and human suffering consequences. Obviously, AI is used to maximize efficiency in all war logistics, calculating payloads, schedules, and material distribution. In Ukraine, most of the war is being conducted with drones, many of them autonomous and with self-selecting target capabilities powered by AI. Automated killing machines that don’t question orders or targets are not only available, but already deployed in different war fronts. On the other hand, automated political repression and persecution in the streets and protests is growing, though it is currently at the data gathering and training phase. In the USA, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is deploying different apps developed by companies like Palantir to maximize social disruption and to capture the most vulnerable people in the country.

There is huge pressure to prevent any meaningful regulation of AI, in particular for AI used by police and the military. Surveillance with facial (FRT) and body recognition is used outdoors to map out movements and participants in protests and actions. Mapping of movement connections and alliances can be done via online pattern recognition, as well as out in the streets. Automatic protest repression combined with purposeful miscommunication and disinformation might make the usual protests simply nonviable.

And of course, AI can is being used for hacking by private companies and states. Considering the hackable systems now in place throughout society and the economy—banking systems, social security, electric and transport systems, aviation and navigation systems, pension management, surveillance apparatus, healthcare systems and, of course, all the internet and the data in public and private servers—massively disruptive events at large or small scale are inevitable. Many political and social movements will be targeted. This can mean accounts erased, financial assets blockaded, and growing personal political repression via the suppression of communication capacities. This can also happen at a much bigger scale, targeting cities, countries or entire regions.

For the most important investments and political efforts, AI is being introduced as a labor replacement tool, a cultural hegemony monopoly creator, a military and surveillance weapon. Most of this is being done with people actively engaging and inviting the models into their everyday life (even more than it already was). The resistance to large data center projects is important and inspiring, but the overwhelming threat of AI goes well beyond its emissions, water consumption, and land occupation (although they plan on multiplying by many factors the current numbers, especially in Europe). Data centers today are nightmare factories.

So far, AI hasn’t been able to deliver on a key aspect: successfully automated processes that allow for the mass firing of people, substituted by effective algorithms. This is clear: 95% of all investment made by companies in AI has led to no profit, which is making capitalists nervous. But it hasn’t in any meaningful way stopped its spread.

When we say AI, we mean Machine Learning, Robotics, and Expert Systems. Currently AI is mostly a process of recognition, classification, and very high probability calculation, based on massive amounts of data with a good human interface. The interface is the most important trick for the general public. The public debate surrounding this issue is deeply anti-historical and anti-materialist, almost entirely it is white noise.

AI is not replicating or reproducing human intelligence. It is trying to encode human activities into repeatable procedures that can create reproducible algorithms. As it is not imitating our biological intelligence, it is trying to imitate what it can more or less “comprehend” about the previously referred algorithms—it is copying labor and social relations, their mechanisms and their predictable outcomes. Like other abstractions that rule our lives, such as money, algorithms produce real outcomes. AI ushers an irresistible promise for capitalist elites: to be able to automatically direct most of the instructions that guide human activity, reducing the power of social relations, in particular the power of the working class to impose political, social, and economic transformations that reduce inequality and injustice.

AI’s neural networks don’t mimic the human brain at all, but instead automate the “labor of perception,” classifying and interpreting written, numeric, and visual data and establishing associations. This creates a synthesis of knowledge, of the collective form of knowledge that comes from social cooperation. As explained before, another of its objectives has been to establish a monopoly over knowledge, scrapped from every website, database, online encyclopedia, and bite it is fed. It is then no wonder that Elon Musk and the far-right are going after Wikipedia.

These are some of the reasons why attempting to hard-code ethical rules or constraints into these models will not work, as they will not change the underlying political and economic functions of the data it is trained under and the algorithms generated and fabricated. Of course we understand that language itself is an algorithm, all the data as well and, of course, the internet as well. But with AI, we’re talking about a new level of control. The fundamental abstract purposes of AI as it exists now are the extension of quantification, control, and exploitation. The Labor Theory of Automation posits that AI is the result of a set of technological advancements that have abstracted automation to the point where it can automate itself. As we now have the technical ability to make such machines and capitalism has the economic incentive to massively deploy them, they want to use it to reorganize the division of labor even further in their favor. It is the apex of automation: Automation of Automation.

Facing such seemingly insurmountable odds, social and ruptural movements cannot but ask what to do about AI. There are basically two options: Drop out of the grid or acquire tech capabilities that allow us to resist the onslaught of these algorithms of collapse.

As a guest on the 2019 podcast “Post-doom with Michael Dowd,” terrestrial ecologist Tom Wessels agrees humanity is entering a “bottleneck,” a condition that can afflict any species that ceases to live in relationship and reciprocity. Ballooning populations get stuck trying to claim space in an un-expandable hole, and many die.

This is what’s going through my head as I idle in an impossibly long single line of traffic on the road into Mount Kisco, New York. My kids are in the back of the car, asking for snacks. It is three days since Renee Good’s murder, 10 days since the end of the deadliest month in the deadliest year for people in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody.

“No snacks,” I tell the kids, scanning for parking. “You should eat your meals. Then I wouldn’t have to throw away food and bring a buffet everywhere we go.”

Pedestrians pass our car with protest signs as car exhaust blows through the vents. I feel an unexpected pang of tenderness for our quiet kitchen table, its leftover bowls of cereal and uneaten peanut-butter toasts. I already know I’ll give in, as all mothers do, when they can, when their children want to eat.

This land is no one’s land. This land was not made for you and me. This land is part of us, as we are part of it.

“But we compost the food,” my 7-year-old says, “so it’s actually good for the Earth when we throw it away.”

Our eyes meet in the rearview mirror as I prepare a response, but then the car behind me beeps and I see a distant light has turned green.

We crawl past the demonstration and I honk in support. Upbeat `80s pop blares from a speaker, backdrop to the protesters’ screams, whistles, and bells. My three-year-old, already a musician, moves his head as close as his car seat will allow, trying to deconstruct the music and noises.

“Go again, mommy,” he says. But at that moment I find a miraculous spot, just down the street from the main event, open perhaps because of the one-hour limit on the meter. I claim the space anyway; lug the kids, coats, and backpack out of the car; lock the doors; fill the meter; and grab hands for the walk toward the protest.

A few steps into the journey, a woman asks if she can photograph my kids. I smile and say, "No thank you," covering their faces with my hands. Photos become a constant request over the next hour. Many people ask, but others just lift and click. My son picks up a sign in the grass and I read it to him: No Fascist USA. More phones point in our direction.

I survey the crowd and think of something Monique Cullars-Doty, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Minnesota, said on the news the other day. “America has never addressed its love affair with white supremacy,” she said, connecting the ICE murder of Renee Good to the state-sanctioned violence that has assaulted Black and brown communities for centuries.

It is one thing to agree with this assessment—that white supremacy made colonialism possible, slavery imperative, resource hoarding commendable, ecological collapse acceptable, and ICE inevitable. It is quite another to admit our complicity, to connect our daily transgressions—a need for the latest gadget, an idling tailpipe, a thoughtless unkindness—to the generations of violence that made all this possible.

I squat in the wet grass and dig through the backpack, dipping my fingers deeper until I hear crinkling plastic. The kids hold out their hands expectantly and whisper, “Yes!” when their favorite granola bars emerge from the bag.

The music stops abruptly, and a woman with a kind face speaks over a microphone. She is Woody Guthrie’s granddaughter, simply by association evoking a simpler time, a sepia time, a time of acoustic guitar and faith in good intentions.

Thinking of her grandfather makes me think of mine—a Jewish Romanian immigrant’s son who stood with Black neighbors in 1950s Milwaukee when other Jewish neighbors, newly minted “white” by America’s slippery standards, wanted to prevent more Black families from moving in. My grandfather now floats above the scene, a beloved figure whose own people’s history was weaponized as justification for more land grabs and violence.

Guthrie’s granddaughter begins to sing:

This land is your land; This land is my land

And my blue-eyed son who loves music, the child I’ve always somehow felt the need to remind people is technically Jewish despite his blonde hair and last name, drops his snack, steps forward into the circle, and opens his mouth to sing along. A hundred phones rise in unison to capture the image.

I resist the urge to cover his face, crouch next to him, and try to join in. But the words catch in my throat.

My land. Your land.

As far as I can tell, not a single Indigenous Lenape person, the first peoples who walked this place now called Mt. Kisco, is present.

This land was made for you and me.

Behind the song circle is a vast cement parking lot, and before it a busy road. The bear, wild turkey, wolves, birds, and aquatic species once so abundant as to be considered eternal, are nowhere to be seen.

From California to the New York island

Places unnamable and unknowable, claimed in this song that once defined a movement, but never created a path or vision for us all.

And yet, here is my son singing, somber, understanding that what he’s participating in is important. And there is my daughter, running around behind the crowd, feeling the joy of community together, the freedom of cool air on her skin. The wrongness and the beauty of it all seem too hard to untangle, and I wonder if this is one way the bottleneck shows up—as the end of the road for a fundamental myth.

In the 2019 interview, Wessels addresses this. He speaks with curiosity about what might come next. Communities for much of human history were “…actually emotionally quite rich,” he says. “They had vibrant relationships within their clan community, they had a vibrant relationship with Mother Earth, they had stories and myths that made that linkage even stronger… so life could have been physically hard, but might have been experientially rich.”

Is there a way for us to treat our past myths with tenderness, while still recognizing where they went horribly wrong? Can we compost rather than discard them, and maintain the parts that serve? Can we teach our children new myths to carry them to a richer, more vibrant, gentle, reciprocal, and inclusive world?

This land is no one’s land. This land was not made for you and me. This land is part of us, as we are part of it.

The song ends, and worries of a parking ticket push a new world’s mythologies from my mind. I grab my son’s hand and scan for my daughter, whose silhouette I spot immediately. She’s reaching for the branches of an ancient fir tree by the road, drawn in by its shade and pungent scent, as so many have been before.

As Trump’s violent dictatorial grip over America worsens, his violations of our Constitution, federal laws, and international treaties become more brazen. Only the organized people can stop this assault on our democracy by firing him through impeachment, the power exclusively accorded to Congress by our Founders. This is one of the few things that Trump cannot control. According to a PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute) poll, “A majority of Americans (56%) agree that ‘President Trump is a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy,’ up from 52% in March 2025.” Trump’s recent actions will only further increase this number.

In earlier columns, I discussed the potential power of 1) The Contented Classes; 2) The small minority of progressive billionaires; and 3) The huge potential of the four ex-presidents – George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, who detest Trump but are mostly silent, and are not organizing their tens of millions of voters angry about Dictator Donald’s attack on the rule of law.

A fourth formidable constituency, if organized, is retired military officers who have their own reasons for dumping Trump. Start with the ex-generals whom Trump named as Secretary of Defense (James Mattis), John Kelly, as U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security and White House Chief of Staff, and Mark Milley, who headed the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

A fifth constituency is the legal profession, and their bar associations at the national, state, and local levels. There are over one million Attorneys in the U.S. who, when they are admitted to the state bars to practice law, are designated as “officers of the court.” This status makes them quasi-official persons with a monopoly to represent clients in courts of law.

Bruce Fein and others have called on licensed attorneys to become “our first responders” to violations of the rule of law, especially by government entities.

So, what have they done? A tiny minority are bravely on the legal ramparts representing clients victimized by Trump and winning many cases at the federal district court level, only to be often stalled by the circuit courts of appeal and the U.S. Supreme Court.

As far as the bar associations are concerned, during Trump’s first term of serial lawless actions (he said in 2019, “With Article II, I can do whatever I want as president”), they were largely silent and AWOL. Bruce Fein and I sent two letters to all 50 state bar associations calling for them to stand up for the rule of law over Trump’s regime. Not one responded to our letters. (See Letter to Bar Associations, February 14, 2025).

We informed these bar associations and the American Bar Association (ABA) of the courageous “white papers” issued in 2005-2006 by three task forces brought together under then ABA President Michael Greco. They charged the Bush/Cheney regime with three impeachable offenses. The task forces had liberal and conservative lawyers working together on these statements. (See the ABA White Papers).

Greco’s successor to the one-year presidency of the ABA told him she was not going to extend the ABA’s watchdog project on the lawless presidency. This abdication has continued to this day, with one exception. Both the ABA and many state/local bar associations took a collective position in March 2025 against Trump’s punishing law firms for representing disfavored clients. They called his “lawlessness” an attempt to “remake the legal profession into something that rewards those who agree with the government and punishes those who do not.”

In June, the ABA punctuated this charge with a federal lawsuit against the Trump regime. (Pending).

Going beyond protection “of the guild,” the New York City Bar Association released a report in late 2025 that called out the Trump Administration’s “ongoing abuse of presidential power and a grave breach of the public trust.”

Other bar associations signed a statement accusing the Trump administration of “treating [the law] as merely advisory, narrowly instrumental, mercilessly enforceable, or utterly irrelevant.”

It is not surprising that these actions by the bar associations received very little media coverage. They were not backed up with any further actions, testimonies, convocations, or alliances with grassroots groups to show the media that they mean business. There was no call for impeachment or even congressional hearings to expose these known, ongoing serial violations of the law, the Constitution, and treaties. (See Letter to President Trump – 22 Impeachable Offenses, April 30, 2025. New version to be released later.)

Reporters and others understand the difference between statements for the record and action on the ramparts. Words not followed by the exercise of these bar associations’ manifold status and power are largely ignored, especially when they are in legalese, and lacking conclusory judgments about Trump’s unfitness for office. Incredibly, Trump declared, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Not the Constitution or the laws of the land.

Trump is a shameless, arrogant bloviator who is self-indicting daily. Critics who want to deter his slanderous and absurd outbursts should use tough, accurate language to describe his vicious actions and autocratic control of the federal government. Words like “dictator,” “serial law violator,” “extortionist,” “inciter of violence,” “persecutor of innocents for purposes of vengeance or bigotry,” “racist,” “abuser of women,” “chronic egotistical liar about serious matters of state,” “shredder of safety and health protections” and constantly “delusional,” and so forth.

New leaders from the legal community (including prominent law professors) need to immediately come forth and jolt this largely AWOL profession into action, with all its unused powers for justice and the rule of law behind our constitutional Republic. Lawyers are called members of a learned profession. They operate within ethical standards. Why aren’t they seriously working to counter Trump’s assault on the administration of justice in America?

John Maynard Keynes famously wrote in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919): “There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of Society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”

The United States mastered this art of destruction by weaponizing the dollar and using economic sanctions and financial policies to cause the currencies of targeted countries to collapse. On January 19, we published “The US–Israel Hybrid War Against Iran,” describing how the United States and Israel are waging hybrid wars on Venezuela and Iran through a coordinated strategy of economic sanctions, financial coercion, cyber operations, political subversion, and information warfare. This hybrid war has been designed to break the currencies of Iran and Venezuela in order to provoke internal unrest and ultimately regime change.

On January 20, just one day after our article, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent publicly confirmed, without qualification, apology, or ambiguity, that our description is indeed the official US policy.

It is high time that the world’s nations face up to America’s rogue economic behavior... This lawlessness is illegal, reckless, harmful, destabilizing, and ultimately ineffective in achieving America’s own goals, much less global objectives.

In an interview at Davos, Secretary Bessent explained in detail how US Treasury sanctions were deliberately designed to drive Iran’s currency to collapse, cripple its banking system, and drive Iran’s population into the streets. This is the “maximum pressure” campaign to deny Iran access to international finance, trade, and payment systems. Bessent explained:

President Trump ordered Treasury and our OFAC division, Office of Foreign Asset Control, to put maximum pressure on Iran. And it’s worked, because in December, their economy collapsed. We saw a major bank go under; the central bank has started to print money. There is dollar shortage. They are not able to get imports, and this is why the people took to the street.

This is the explicit causal chain whereby US sanctions caused the currency to collapse and the banking system to fail. This monetary instability led to import shortages and economic suffering, causing the unrest. Bessent concluded by characterizing the US’ actions as “economic statecraft,” and Iran’s economic collapse as a “positive” development:

So, this is economic statecraft, no shots fired, and things are moving in a very positive way here.

What Secretary Bessent describes is of course not “economic statecraft” in a traditional sense. It is war conducted by economic means, all designed to produce an economic crisis and social unrest leading to a fall of the government. This is proudly hailed as “economic statecraft.”

The human suffering caused by outright war and crushing economic sanctions is not so different as one might think. Economic collapse produces shortages of food, medicine, and fuel, while also destroying savings, pensions, wages, and public services. Deliberate economic collapse drives people into poverty, malnutrition, and premature death, just as outright war does.

This pattern of suffering as the result of US sanctions is well documented. A landmark study in The Lancet by Francisco Rodríguez and colleagues shows that sanctions are significantly associated with sharp increases in mortality, with the strongest effects found for unilateral, economic, and US sanctions, and an overall death toll comparable to that of armed conflict.

Economic warfare of this kind violates the foundational principles of international law and the UN Charter. Unilateral sanctions imposed outside the authority of the UN Security Council, especially when designed to cause civilian hardship, are illegal. Hybrid warfare does not evade international law by avoiding bombing (though the US and Israel have also illegally bombed Iran, of course.) The illegality of US “economic statecraft” applies not only to Iran and Venezuela, but to dozens more countries being harmed by US sanctions.

While the US sanctions work in the short run to create misery, their incessant use is rapidly encouraging other economies to decouple from the US financial stranglehold.

Europe has perhaps begun to learn that being complicit in America’s economic crimes is no salvation, since Trump’s government is now turning on Europe in the same way, albeit with tariffs rather than sanctions. Trump has threatened Europe with tariffs for not turning over Greenland to the US, though he rescinded that threat at least temporarily. When Trump “invited” France to join Trump’s Board of Peace, he threatened to impose a 200% tariff on French wine if France declined the invitation. And on and on.

The United States can wage this kind of comprehensive economic warfare because the dollar is the key currency in the global financial system. If third countries don’t comply with US sanctions on Iran and Venezuela, the US threatens to impose sanctions on the banks of those third countries, specifically to cut them out of dollar-based settlements (known as the SWIFT system). In this way, the US enforces its sanctions on countries that otherwise would be happy to continue trading with the countries that the US is trying to drive to economic collapse.

While the US sanctions work in the short run to create misery, their incessant use is rapidly encouraging other economies to decouple from the US financial stranglehold. The BRICS nations, and many others, are expanding the conduct of international trade in their own currencies, thereby building alternatives to the use of the US dollar and thus avoiding these sanctions. The US ability to impose its financial and trade sanctions on other countries will decline soon, probably precipitously in the coming years.

It is high time that the world’s nations face up to America’s rogue economic behavior. The US has been waging economic warfare with increasing intensity, all the while calling it “economic statecraft.” This lawlessness is illegal, reckless, harmful, destabilizing, and ultimately ineffective in achieving America’s own goals, much less global objectives. Europe has been looking the other way until now. Perhaps now that Europe too is under threat, it will wake up and join the rest of the world to put a stop to America’s brazen and illegal behavior.

Affordability will remain a top issue in 2026, continuing to draw political attention and likely defining this year’s midterm election races. Among the principal contributors to the cost-of-living crisis are power bills. For millions, the cost of keeping the lights, heating, and cooling on feels like “a second rent,” a problem that the explosive growth in the development and use of AI and associated data center capacity appears poised to aggravate.

The nation’s capital is no exception. A quarter of residents in the District of Columbia are unable to pay their power bill and in debt to the city’s private electricity company Pepco, which prioritizes short-term profits over affordable service. In 2024, the utility sent disconnection notices to 187,000 customers, threatening to shut off their electricity if they did not pay their arrears in full and forcing them to choose between, for instance, keeping their home safe and comfortable and food fresh or making their car payment.

Thankfully, we have a proven alternative–public ownership of power–that has worked for decades in thousands of towns and cities and is being actively pursued in the District and other communities across the country.

Alongside rent, home prices, dining, and entertainment, our electric bills have shot upwards. The only difference? Our power rates are comprehensively regulated. To protect against the monopoly power of Pepco, we have the Public Service Commission (PSC): a three-person board that reviews Pepco’s costs when the company wants to raise rates. Officially, the PSC acts as our watchdog to protect consumers from being billed thousands of dollars each month and to ensure the lights stay on in an environmentally sustainable way. In reality, it’s a depressingly familiar story of corporate capture of government.

We Power DC, a local campaign for energy democracy, has a simple demand: replacing Pepco with an electric utility that belongs to the people of the District.

In just the past few years, Pepco has jacked up rates while slow rolling climate action and energy efficiency. According to a 2023 PSC report, Pepco obtained only 16% of its power supply from renewable energy sources, while it thwarted the adoption of rooftop solar across the city. In response to this bad behavior, the PSC rewarded Pepco: approving a $147.2 million dollar rate increase in 2021 and a $123 million dollar rate hike in 2023. These dollars flow out of the District and into the coffers of Pepco and its holding company owner, Exelon of Chicago.

Despite a wide-ranging outcry from the community, industry experts, and even landlords, the PSC in November 2024 largely approved Pepco’s latest proposed rate increase. Commissioner Richard Beverly wrote a blistering dissent in which he said the other two commissioners were essentially approving the case “because Pepco said so.”

The effects of the rate increase were immediate and expected. Following a cold winter, the additional 5% bump on bills slammed DC residents, with some customers seeing their bills double or triple. Public anger forced Pepco to suspend shutoffs for the first few months of 2025—but both bill collection and the rate increase stayed in place.

Meanwhile, Exelon flaunted the rate hike in DC as a major success, all the while an impending recession looms across the city and the country at large. Even in bleak times, the pursuit of profits by Pepco (and utilities like it) is relentless.

Unfortunately, the District is not an outlier: Regulators across the country rubber-stamp requested rate increases, despite the lack of economic logic. State regulatory agencies liberally reward utility shareholders even though they assume little risk by parking their money in a safe and stable industry.

Fortunately, there is an alternative for all of us. In towns and cities across the country, utilities are not controlled by shareholders—instead, they are governed by the communities that they serve and run on a not-for-profit basis. Public power is a proven model that altogether supplies electricity to about 55 million Americans in around 2,000 towns and cities across red and blue states, including Los Angeles, Nashville, and Seattle. On average, publicly owned utilities provide electricity that is cheaper and more reliable than their shareholder-controlled counterparts. Public power is not foreign or experimental but firmly established in the United States.

Affordable power is not the only argument in favor of public ownership. The urgency of the climate crisis means that we cannot rely solely on cajoling private utilities to remake our power grid. Despite the declining costs and rapid growth of wind and solar over the past 15 years, decarbonization of the American power sector is not happening quickly enough.

Furthermore, for the next few years, the responsibility of cleaning up the power sector will largely fall to state and local governments. Congress’ gutting of the Inflation Reduction Act in the One Big Beautiful Bill means that federal tax credits for wind and solar will soon dry up. Instead of trying to bribe the private sector to invest, we should take control of the climate transition through direct public investment. New York did exactly this in 2023 when it enacted the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA) and empowered the state-owned New York Power Authority to build large-scale renewable projects and lead a just transition to a clean electric sector.

Inspired by the successful movement behind BPRA and determined to end the unbearable burden of power bills for hundreds of thousands of residents, We Power DC, a local campaign for energy democracy, has a simple demand: replacing Pepco with an electric utility that belongs to the people of the District. A utility governed by us could provide reliable service at lower rates; provide high-quality union jobs; and be a leader, not a laggard, in the fight against climate change. On top of its grassroots organizing, We Power published a report describing in detail how DC would benefit from a publicly owned utility, and how we can get there. While the road to public power can be long, the report outlines key intermediate steps that DC should pursue, including commissioning a study on municipalization of Pepco, taking control of grid planning, and building and operating community solar projects.

We Power is accompanied by fights for public power in places as far flung as Ann Arbor, Michigan; Clearwater, Florida; and Tucson. Last month, a financial feasibility study found that power customers in New York’s Hudson Valley would save money right away by converting their private utility to a locally controlled public power authority. At a moment in which climate action and our political institutions are under full-frontal assault at the national level, We Power is one of many fights to build democratic and sustainable utilities.

Peace ecology considerations make it clear that a long-neglected aspect of armament and military activities is the massive environmental destruction caused worldwide by the military, especially during and after wars (Trautvetter 2021, Scheffran 2022, Moegling 2025). But even in its normal day-to-day operations and military exercises, the military is the largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases. In addition, the environmental destruction and emissions caused by the production of weapons must be taken into account. Emissions from the reconstruction of destroyed cities must also be considered.

The concept of peace ecology has high analytical value and normative appeal and should be used in the future as an important subfield of peace studies and research. Peace ecology addresses peace between people and societies, as well as peace between humans and their ecological context, and in particular the connection between these two perspectives. The point here is that the damaged planetary ecology can only recover if people and societies see themselves as an integral part of nature and live in peace with one another. Only through peaceful coexistence can the energy and necessary measures be generated to curb or reverse the environmental destruction that is already occurring.

Military Domination of Nature

The poisoning and destruction of the environment, with serious consequences for the biosphere, i.e., for the earth, air, water, humans, animals, and plants, is only now gradually coming to public attention on the fringes of the current protests by the environmental and peace movements. However, Norwegian peace researcher Johan Galtung already addressed this aspect in 2004 from a peace-ecological perspective:

One thing is the damage done to the ecosystem, another is the reinforcement of the general cultural code of domination over nature, which is also part of the rape syndrome. Countless millions of people are watching not only how people are being killed and wounded, but also how nature is being destroyed and going up in flames.

Wars not only kill and injure people and destroy infrastructure, they also destroy the planet's ecology in various ways. Wars are an extreme expression of the separation of ruling powers and warring states and groups from their natural environment. What humans do to nature—and thus to the conditions necessary for all life on this planet—is of little interest to the ruling circles that wage wars and attack other states.

The fact that they are destroying the conditions for the survival of future generations is of no concern to imperialist states and governments. And there is no difference between the US and Russia in this regard. Imperialist warfare and the ecological destruction it causes are, in an extreme way, a crime of generational selfishness.

And Vice Versa: If the Climate Collapses, so Does Peace

Peace ecology, as a newer subdiscipline of peace studies and research, makes it clear that wars are not only the cause of climate damage, but that the climate crisis that is already occurring is in turn a further cause of military conflicts and the destruction of political systems, especially in the poorer regions of the world, according to Michael T. Klare (2015), professor of peace and global security at Hampshire College in Massachusetts"

The strongest and richest states, especially those in more temperate climate zones, are likely to cope better with these stresses. In contrast, the number of failed states is likely to increase dramatically, leading to violent conflicts and outright wars over the remaining food sources, agriculturally usable land, and habitable areas. Large parts of the planet could thus find themselves in situations similar to those we see today in Libya, Syria, and Yemen. Some people will stay and fight for their survival; others will migrate and almost certainly encounter much more violent forms of the hostility that immigrants and refugees already face in their destination countries today. This would inevitably lead to a global epidemic of civil wars and other violent conflicts over resources.

In addition, those states that are at war with each other—but also those societies that feel threatened by this—will then use the resources necessary to combat the climate crisis to finance warfare and weapons systems. In particular, the huge sums of money within the European Union, but also in Germany, that will be spent in the future on special programs for the procurement of weapons systems will be lacking in a sensible climate policy—not to mention the enormous arms investments of the US and Russia and their unwillingness to combat the climate crisis.

Some Figures on Environmental Destruction Caused by the Military

The environment is destroyed by wars, but also by normal military operations in peacetime.

A study by Stuart Parkinson (Scientists for Global Responsibility) not only took into account direct carbon dioxide emissions from transport and exercises, but also emissions from weapons production, infrastructure construction, and supply chains. Parkinson calculated 340 million tons of CO2 equivalents for 2017 for the US military, by far the largest in the world, and this figure is unlikely to have decreased. For the global situation, Parkinson calculated that 5.5% of worldwide CO2 emissions are attributable to the military of all nations. This does not include wartime emissions. It can therefore be assumed that the percentage of global CO2 emissions caused by the military is significantly higher.

A study by de Klerk et al (2023) found that during one year of war in Ukraine, both sides of the conflict emitted approximately as much CO2 as Belgium did in total during the same year. This amounted to 119 million tons of CO2 equivalents.

Stuart Parkinson and Linsey Cottrell (2022) summarize their study on climate damage caused by the military and wars as follows:

If the world's armed forces were a country, they would have the fourth largest national carbon footprint in the world—larger than Russia's. This underscores the urgent need to take concerted action to reliably measure military emissions and reduce the associated carbon footprint—especially as these emissions are likely to increase as a result of the war in Ukraine.

Olena Melnyk and Sera Koulabdara (2024) estimate that approximately one-third of Ukrainian soil has been contaminated by toxic substances such as lead, cadmium, arsenic, and mercury as a result of the war. Soil and its fertile layer took thousands of years to form and have now been poisoned by the war within a few years, rendering it unusable for agriculture.

The war in Ukraine is leaving behind a devastated environment, for which the Russian Federation would have to pay billions of euros in reparations, although ultimately only the superficial damage could be repaired. The profound impact on human health due to inhaled emissions, drinking contaminated water, and exposure to radiation cannot be compensated for with money.

Hungarian climate researcher Bálint Rosz (2025) summarizes the CO2 emissions caused by the war in Ukraine in the first two years of the Ukraine war up to February 2024 and compares this with the annual emissions of 90 million vehicles with combustion engines.

Israel's campaign of destruction against the Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, as a disproportionate response to the brutal attack by Hamas, is also causing considerable environmental destruction, in addition to the appalling suffering of the Palestinians. For example, Neimark et al. (2024) estimated that the CO2 emissions from the necessary reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, destroyed by the Israeli military, would be so high that they would exceed the emissions of 130 countries and be comparable to the emissions of New Zealand.

These are just a few examples of military-induced ecological destruction. This anthropocentric madness could be illustrated with numerous other examples (Moegling 2025).

The Common Interest of the Peace and Environmental Movements

Global military activities can be both a cause and a consequence of environmental destruction.

The environmental and peace movements therefore have a substantial common ground in their understanding of peace ecology: The demand for an end to environmental destruction by the military and wars, combined with the demand for internationally coordinated disarmament, should be addressed by both the environmental and peace movements as central expectations of politics.

Furthermore, the analyses and research findings of peace ecology could help both the environmental and peace movements to take targeted action against planetary destruction based on facts.

Who Pays the Ecological Costs?

In this context, the question of financing the remediation of environmental damage caused by the military must also be addressed. In addition to the warring parties responsible, the producers in the arms industry should also be called upon to contribute. It is particularly unacceptable for the arms industry that the (considerable) profits are privatized while the costs are socialized and passed on to the state and taxpayers. Such externalization of costs and internalization of profits in the arms industry, which is typical of capitalist conditions, is no longer acceptable. It is completely incomprehensible why, for example, the manufacturers of landmines should not also pay for their removal and for compensation claims by the victims.

Above all, the exclusion of the military as a climate polluter from the Kyoto Protocol and the attempt to leave this non-binding in the Paris Agreements, particularly under pressure from the US at the time, further highlights the international dimension of the problem. The United Nations in particular is called upon to include environmental issues related to military activities and war missions more bindingly in international climate agreements. This should be easier for them if corresponding international civil society pressure were to be built up via interested governments and internationally coordinated NGO initiatives, e.g., via the Fridays for Future movement, Indigenous NGOs, ICAN, IPPNW, Greenpeace, and the traditional Easter March movement or other activities of the peace movement.

Peace ecology also makes it clear that the more peaceful societies are internally and externally, the more they can work to restore the destroyed ecological order. This is the common interest of the peace and environmental movements.

In April of 1945 a number of grand historical projects were simultaneously underway. In Europe, more than ten million battle-hardened soldiers were converging upon Germany, from the east and from the west, to drive the final nail into the coffin of the odious Nazi regime. (They succeeded on May 8th.) In Asia and the Pacific, a similar effort was underway to force Imperial Japan to accept “unconditional surrender.” (They succeeded on August 15th.) In the deserts of New Mexico and elsewhere in the United States, in total secrecy, thousands of scientists were laboring to invent a bomb that could destroy a city in a second, and give humanity for the first time the ability to bring about its own extinction by its own hands. (They succeeded on July 16th.)

And at the same time, hundreds of individuals were preparing to convene in San Francisco to invent a new global political body, which might – as the eventual United Nations Charter they produced boldly proclaimed – “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” (They succeeded, at least with the new international organization part, by signing that Charter on June 26th, and bringing the new United Nations into being on October 24th.)

But on April 12th the president of the United States died.

The conference opened as scheduled on April 25th. But just four days into their project the framers made a trek across the Golden Gate Bridge, to spend some time, in quiet and contemplation, among some of the oldest living things on Earth. And they set into the ground there a heavy metal plaque, which contained these words.

“Here in this grove of enduring redwoods, preserved for posterity, members of the United Nations Conference on International Organizations met on April 29th, 1945, to honor the memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Thirty Second President of the United States, Chief Architect of the United Nations, and Apostle of Lasting Peace for All Mankind.”

ARCHITECTURAL RENOVATION? MEET POLITICAL OBSTRUCTION

Now we have passed the 80th anniversary year of the United Nations. The scourge that apostle chose to confront is at least as acute today as it was eight decades ago. And a whole host of new challenges have emerged, ones not on anyone’s radar screen in 1945. So as abundant as our admiration for FDR and his fellow architects might be, the time has come to take a look at the structural integrity of that edifice for the challenges facing humanity in 2025 and beyond. As we will see, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the United Nations is long overdue for some renewal, renovation, and rejuvenation.

There’s only one problem. What in the world can we do, about the San Francisco Charter’s Article 109 Clause Two?

That provision decrees that anything that might come out of a conference to review that Charter must be approved by all five of the Security Council’s “permanent members” – France, Russia, China, the United Kingdom and the United States. These five states were already given the ability in Article 27 Clause Three to command the whole of humanity into inaction and impotence. This is “the veto,” which many observers have long asserted to be the greatest flaw in the San Francisco Charter. It degrades the democratic legitimacy of the entire construction. It insulates those five members from any kind of UN sanction (e.g., Russia regarding its war in Ukraine since 2022), as well as other states those five wish to protect from UN sanction (e.g., the United States regarding Israel’s actions in Gaza since 2023). And even when not actually cast, veto calculations dominate virtually every decision the Security Council makes, because it’s always necessary to get all five on board. It's what the late U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone, citing the renowned late political scientist Walter Dean Burnham, often called “the politics of excluded alternatives.”

And when we turn our view from Article 27 to Article 109, we learn that these five states can also veto any kind of modification to their unique perch overlooking the rest of humanity. In 1992, as similar conversations were brewing in anticipation of the organization’s impending 50th anniversary, The Economist magazine tossed a cold bucket of water on UN makeover enthusiasts, when it reminded them that “the vetoers would veto a veto veto.” Is there any way out of this enduring cul-de-sac of realpolitik?

THE CASE FOR REINVENTING THE UNITED NATIONS

Let’s take a look beyond the veto, at several other incongruities between the United Nations design of yesterday and the big questions of today.

The absence of any reference to climate or environment in the UN Charter, and the absence of actual success (by the UN or anyone else) in surmounting our looming climate catastrophes.

Piecemeal and insufficient national regulation of the multiple potential dangers from runaway artificial intelligence, which clearly won’t be enough to constrain this quintessentially global technology.

A funding system both inadequate and unreliable, dependent exclusively on voluntary national contributions. Sometimes they arrive. Sometimes they don't. But either way they give major donors the ability to bully and blackmail the recipient.

Pervasive gender oppression in many areas of the world, a country like Afghanistan openly depriving half its population of the right to education, and the outside world wholly impotent to do anything more than express outrage.

Perpetual poverty, inequality and injustice for billions, propagated by the globally unregulated might of global capital.

Lessons hopefully learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, which must now be incorporated into global public policy preparation for the next ones which are sure to come.

A UN General Assembly with three fundamental flaws. First, its basic operating principle – where India’s 1.45 billion and Vanuatu’s 327,000 people exercise the same “one nation one vote” – could hardly be more undemocratic or absurd. Second, it holds no power whatsoever to enact (let alone to enforce) binding international law. Finally, it provides no voice for anyone beyond “ambassadors” appointed by the executive branches of national governments – e.g., parliamentarians, the economically impoverished and other marginalized groups, and every single voter who did not support the current head of state.

The UN playing virtually no role in confronting what we might call “the scourge of perpetual preparation for war,” in forever newly-invented technologies of mass slaughter.

And if the looming competition between China and the United States increasingly emerges as the centerpiece of international relations in the second quarter of the 21st Century – a new and even more dangerous Cold War – one can confidently predict that the UN will most likely again be relegated entirely to the sidelines.

So a creative package of amendments to the UN Charter beckons to us as both practical necessity and moral imperative. Because many of these problems of the modern age are coming at us like a runaway freight train, brakes out, heading downhill. And in the immortal words of Neil Young, our Cadillac has got a wheel in the ditch and a wheel on the track.

VOX CLAMANTIS IN DESERTO

A number of civil society initiatives have emerged in recent years, aimed at inventing new tools of global governance that might help to slow down these multiple locomotives of future catastrophe.

One of these is the “Coalition for the UN We Need,” launched during the UN’s 75th anniversary year in 2020. Its name conveys its central conviction that the UN we got ain’t what we need. It focuses largely (but not exclusively) upon innovations that wouldn’t require Charter amendment – precisely because of the political realities this article explores. And its “coalition” consists today of 382 organizations, focusing upon a widely-differing array of issue areas themselves, from dozens of countries around the world.

Another is the “Article 109: For a Renewed UN Charter” coalition, launched just last year. Perhaps the most important word in its name is “a.” It does not push any specific “renewed Charter” complete in every detail. It argues instead that peace, justice, planetary protection, and widespread improvements in the human condition can be pursued by transforming the UN Charter – and that the provision included by the framers themselves for doing so is the vehicle to make that happen. It’s already been endorsed by hundreds of prominent global affairs thinkers and practitioners, more than 40 civil society organizations, and dozens of former diplomats, ministers, heads of state, and Nobel laureates.

And finally, in 2023 a transnational NGO known as the Global Governance Forum initiated a project to frame a “Second United Nations Charter.” This one also enlists a somewhat different group of former ministers, heads of state, and Nobel laureates among the framers. It offers a specific and comprehensive package of amendments, performing a line-by-line revision of the present Charter from beginning to end.

Some of their proposals, drawing upon longstanding conceptual ground tilled by others, are quite ingenious. One is an "Earth Systems Council," to address the health of our imperiled planetary biosphere. Another is a “UN Parliamentary Assembly,” to represent those left out of the present General Assembly and perhaps to encourage the emergence of transnational political parties. And another is a standing “UN Peace Force,” that could initially intervene in places like Bosnia and Rwanda yesterday, Sudan and Haiti today, and who knows where tomorrow – conflagrations where no states appear willing to put their own forces at risk for conflicts that have nothing to do with them – and eventually serve as the United Nations arm for peace enforcement.

In addition, in order to cultivate a sense of planetary patriotism, the framers decided to replace the opening line of the present Charter, “We the peoples of the United Nations,” with their own formulation, “We the People of the World.” The project seeks to strike just the right balance between optimal outcomes and contemporary political reality. Perhaps we might call this the Global Goldilocks Zone. A reimagined international organization not too hot (and thus politically unlikely to be realized), not too cold (and thus unlikely to make much difference surmounting big problems), but perhaps just right.

THE OBSTACLE OF 109 (2)

There is, however, sometimes an air of weary resignation among these global governance innovators. “A redesigned, democratized, and empowered United Nations could tackle so many of humanity’s problems! But we need to lower our sights. We’ll never get anything like that, because the P5 will forever block that.”

Or will they?

Article 109 Clause Two reads: “Any alteration of the present Charter recommended by a two-thirds vote of the conference shall take effect when ratified in accordance with their respective constitutional processes by two thirds of the Members of the United Nations including all the permanent members of the Security Council.”

But cold calculations of national self-interest might lead to P5 calculations beyond intractable opposition to change. The veto could only serve as a tool of absolute self-interest if it was held not by five states, but only one. The U.S. government, e.g., might benefit from its ability to block UN activities it does not desire. But it also suffers from Moscow’s and Beijing’s equal ability to put a stop to Washington’s pursuit of its own objectives through the United Nations. The benefits of the power to wield the veto must be balanced against the costs of one’s own initiatives being vetoable.

In addition, let’s consider the calculations specifically in Washington at perhaps its apogee of political and economic power. A Republican or Democratic administration just might conclude that the moment might be fleeting for the U.S. to shape and lead an emerging UN Charter review process. Better, perhaps, to seize that leadership role today, rather than letting China do so tomorrow.

And finally, surely someone inside the councils of P5 governments will someday make the case that the veto isn’t actually going to serve anyone’s national interest if the planet is on fire, if WWIII is over the horizon, if the killer AI robots are coming for us all.

And even in the face of implacable P5 opposition to change, civil society can ramp up the pressure upon them. When I talk to my buddies at the bar, most of them know vaguely that five countries can block the UN from doing pretty much everything, but none of them know those same five can also block the UN from ever changing anything about the UN. (More than once I’ve talked to global affairs professionals who don’t know that either.) Public education and civil society agitation about the monstrous unfairness of 109 (2) can surely turn up the heat on the P5.

Especially because there is more to Article 109 than its second clause.

THE OPPORTUNITY OF 109 (1)

The first clause of Article 109 reads: “A General Conference of the Members of the United Nations for the purpose of reviewing the present Charter may be held at a date and place to be fixed by a two-thirds vote of the members of the General Assembly and by a vote of any nine members of the Security Council. …” That word “any” opens up a universe of possibility. The summoning of a comprehensive UN Charter review conference is not, repeat not, subject to the veto. This is unlike almost everything of major consequence at the UN, where the P5 always seem to wield decisive influence. Here is one thing, of potentially infinite consequence, where they don’t. Even if all those five states vote nay, an Article 109 conference still might be called to order.

My buddies at the bar (and some of those global affairs professionals) don’t know that either. Just as we should draw public attention to the inequity of Clause Two, we should do the same regarding the potential of Clause One. Because the call to activate Article 109 could become a powerful mobilizing force in civil society.

It can provide something tangible and specific to urge upon policymakers, while leaving open what might ultimately emerge from the process. It can bring together a wide variety of activist organizations already working on other issues, who could pursue imaginative planetary governance upgrades to advance their own particular agendas. It can assemble a broad coalition of supporters who might hold widely different visions of the human future, but who could all agree on pursuing the process laid out in the Charter itself to define the most appropriate vision for our unfolding 21st century.

All these calculations, regarding both Clause Two and Clause One, may eventually bring us to the stage of vote counting, where enough states are poised to vote yea for a “General Conference.” As momentum grows, from what we might call the “P188” states, from civil society pressure inside the five states, and from a surging world public opinion, it just might mobilize a grand global movement that the P5 will find impossible to resist.

And so they may show up to that General Conference, whether they had voted to summon it or not. And they may negotiate in good faith at that General Conference, rather than adamantly refusing even to discuss any diminution of their Article 27 special privilege. And if an imaginative world organization proposal emerges from that General Conference, one obviously more fit for present purposes than the present Charter, they may choose not to deploy their Article 109 special privilege to prevent its establishment.

Especially when they realize that the General Conference may not need their votes after all.

LET HISTORY BE OUR GUIDE

Has anything like this ever happened? Yep. Twice. (At least.) And the protagonists both times found a way to dodge their own veto dilemmas.

As every American schoolchild learns, when delegates from the 13 newly independent American states met in Philadelphia in 1787, their official purpose was to amend the 1777 Articles of Confederation. After they had invented their very new kind of government, it was assumed they would use the amendment process set out in those Articles to legally bring their new nation into being.

What was that process? It was unanimity. All 13 needed to agree on everything in order for anything to go forward. (Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs recently suggested that we might call them “the P13.”) So the American framers chose a different path. Their new document contained its own procedures for coming into force. When 9 of the 13 state legislatures had voted to join the new federation, the United States Constitution would take effect. That happened on June 21st, 1788, when New Hampshire voted yea. And on March 4th, 1789, a new thing in history was born.

Our second example is more recent and even more apropos. It is the invention of the United Nations. The framers in San Francisco might have set out to establish what they created via the amendment procedures set out in the League of Nations Covenant of 1920. That document required both a majority of its “Assembly” and unanimity from its “Council” for amendments. But the UN Charter instead contained its own procedures for coming into force. It required the approval of a majority of the San Francisco signatories, and all of the newly designated five permanent members. And when that requirement was met on October 24th, 1945, a new thing in history was born.

In addition, note well that in both cases the framers could have chosen a piecemeal revision of the old document. Instead, they wrote a new one from scratch. An Article 109 conference might adopt either approach. The reframers might choose to dive into the San Francisco Charter and make line-by-line revisions (the method chosen by the Second Charter Project). Or they might choose to draft a brand new document (the approach taken in Philadelphia in 1787 and San Francisco in 1945).

So let us imagine an Article 109 UN Charter review conference unfolding in much the same way as these historical precedents in 1787 and 1945. This isn't the only possible scenario, but it's certainly one scenario. The conference is convened - perhaps with the participation of all the P5 or perhaps with none. The conference produces a new document - perhaps with an elaborate package of amendments or perhaps written out on a blank sheet of paper. But that new document makes no reference to Article 109 (2). It contains its own rules for entry into force. And at some point, those criteria are met.

What might happen after that is anyone's guess. Yes, it's possible that after all that, all of the P5 will stand obstinately apart indefinitely. But perhaps it’s just as likely, as the far greater suitability of this new organization for our 21st Century world becomes apparent, that more and more states, eventually including the P5, will conclude that coming aboard will serve their individual national interests and the common human interest, will turn the tide from despair to hope, and will give homo sapiens a fighting chance to save ourselves from ourselves.

And then a new thing in history will be born.

HELP WANTED: ARCHITECTS AND APOSTLES FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

My buddies at the bar may not know much about Article 109, but they know the name of the President of the United States. And whenever I talk about this stuff with them (not often), it doesn’t take long before one of them says, “Trump’s not going to go for that.” But this work is not about this political hour. These are likely not immediate objectives, but instead a positive and hopeful vision of what humanity might do to build the future we need, desire and deserve. Someday, perhaps, the prevailing political winds will all be blowing together in the right direction. Maybe even before it’s too late.

So after you make your visit to that FDR plaque among those ancient and towering redwoods, make your way back to San Francisco, take the BART over to Oakland, climb aboard an Amtrak, and don’t get off until you arrive at Union Station in Washington, D.C. Then stroll over to the Tidal Basin and step inside the Jefferson Memorial. There you will find emblazoned upon the walls an abbreviated version of a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to one Samuel Kercheval in 1816. That was not 80 years, but only 27 years after the launch of the U.S. Constitution. But his sentiment about that document already?

“Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. … I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. … But I know also that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind … We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."

So let us now weave a garment of our own, one suitable for weathering the storms, exploring the vistas, and reaching for the promise of the 21st century. Let us now act as chief architects of a reinvented United Nations. And let us now serve as apostles of lasting peace for all of humankind, as we proceed on our endless journey from the caves to the stars.

The US is home to 17 million military veterans. About 1.3 million of them currently work in union jobs, with women and people of color making up the fastest-growing cohorts. Veterans are more likely to join a union than non-veterans, according to the AFL-CIO. In half a dozen states, 25% or more of all actively employed veterans belong to unions.

In the heyday of industrial unionism in the decades following World War II, hundreds of thousands of former soldiers could be found on the front lines of labor struggles in auto, steel, meatpacking, electrical equipment manufacturing, mining, trucking, and the telephone industry. Many World War II vets became militant stewards, local union officers, and, in some cases, well-known union reformers in the United Mine Workers and Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers.

The late labor organizer and author Jane McAlevey argued that the post-war union movement better understood the “strategic value” of veterans than organized labor does today. In her own advice to unions about contract campaign planning, she recommended enlisting former service members whose past “experience with discipline, military formation, and overcoming fear and adversity” could be employed on picket lines and strike committees.

In addition, the high social standing of military veterans in many blue-collar communities can be a valuable PR asset when “bargaining for the public good” or trying to general greater public support for any legislative or political campaign.

A D-Day Rally In DC

The wisdom of that advice has been confirmed repeatedly by the front-line role that veterans in the labor movement have played in resisting Trump administration attempts to cut government jobs and services and strip federal workers of their collective bargaining rights. At agencies like the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), more than 100,000 former service members have been adversely affected by these right-wing Republican attacks.

In response, the AFL-CIO’s Union Veterans Council brought thousands of protestors to a June 6 rally on the Mall in Washington, DC, where they heard speakers including now retired United Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts, a Vietnam veteran.

"We served our country, and now they’re breaking their promise to take care of us. We can’t accept that.”

With local turnout help from the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), National Nurses United, and the Federal Unionist Network (FUN), other anti-Trump activists participated in 225 simultaneous actions around the country, including in red states like Alaska, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Idaho, Kansas, and Kentucky. Some “watch parties,” organized for real-time viewing of the DC event, were held in local union halls to highlight the labor-vet overlap.

James Jones, a FUN member and Gulf War veteran from Boone, North Carolina, traveled all the way to DC on the 81st anniversary of D-Day because he wanted Congress to understand the importance of VA services to veterans like himself.

Jones now works for the National Park Service and belongs to AFGE. He’s urging all his friends who are vets, fellow VA patients, and federal workers to start “going to rallies, and join these groups that are really fighting back. The government needs to keep the promise it made to veterans. We served our country, and now they’re breaking their promise to take care of us. We can’t accept that.”

VA Not for Sale

Private-sector union activists have also been rallying their fellow veterans, inside and outside the labor movement.

Communications Workers Local 6215 Executive vice-president David Marshall, a former Marine, has joined rank-and-file lobbying in Washington, DC against Trump’s cuts in VA staffing and services, calling them “a betrayal of a promise to care for us.”

Marshall is a member of Common Defense, the progressive veterans’ group. Common Defense’s “VA Not for Sale” campaign is fighting the privatization of veterans’ healthcare, which many fear will destroy what Marshall calls the “sense of community and solidarity” that VA patients experience when they get in-house treatment, as opposed to the costly and less effective out-sourced care favored by President Trump. “Regular hospitals don’t understand PTSD or anything else about conditions specifically related to military service,” he says.

An AT&T technician in Dallas, Marshall was also a fiery and effective speaker at that city’s big “No Kings Day” rally last June, when he explained why he and other veterans in labor are opposing MAGA extremism, political and state violence, and related threats to democracy.

“We’ve seen peaceful protestors met with riot gear, and we’ve heard the threats to deploy active-duty Marines against American citizens,” he told a crowd of 10,000. “Let me be clear: Using the military to silence dissent is not strength; it’s tyranny. And no one knows that better than those who have worn the uniform.”

Veterans for Social Change

Marshall is a third-generation union member born and raised in southern West Virginia. His father and grandfather were coal miners; his grandmother Molly Marshall was active in the Black Lung Association that helped propel disabled World War II veteran Arnold Miller into the presidency of the UMW in 1972. During his own 25-year career as a CWA member, Marshall has served on his union’s safety committee, as a delegate to the national convention, and now as an officer of his local.

Marshall belongs to CWA’s Minority Caucus, the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, and the NAACP. Along with Britni Cuington, a Local 6215 steward and Air Force vet, he attended a founding meeting of Common Defense’s Black Veterans Caucus at the Highlander Center in Tennessee.

“We have to stay in lock-step with them and show everyone following the Constitution that we have their back.”

Both Marshall and Cuington have since lobbied against the redistricting scheme concocted by Texas Republicans to secure more House seats in the 2026 midterm elections. Testifying at a public hearing on behalf of the Texas AFL-CIO, Cuington pointed out that “minority veterans already face barriers to access to the services, benefits, and economic opportunities we have earned.” She condemned the state’s new districts as racial gerrymandering in disguise that will disenfranchise “veteran heavy, working class neighborhoods.”

In his role as a CWA organizer, Marshall has signed up 30 Common Defense field organizers around the country—almost all fellow vets—as new members of his local. He’s now helping them negotiate their first staff union contract. In addition, Marshall encourages former service members in other bargaining units to participate in the union’s Veterans for Social Change program, which has done joint Veterans Organizing Institute training with CWA.

One fellow leader of that network is Keturah Johnson, a speaker at the 2024 Labor Notes conference. After her military service, she got a job at Piedmont Airlines in 2013 as a ramp agent, and then became a flight attendant. A decade later, she became the first queer woman of color and combat veteran to serve as international vice president of the 50,000-member Association of Flight Attendants-CWA.

A National Guard Casualty

One CWA member, 24-year-old Andrew Wolfe, a Frontier lineman in Martinsburg, West Virginia, was seriously wounded in late November after being sent as part of the National Guard deployment to Washington, DC. A fellow Guard member was killed. (Their assailant was a mentally ill, CIA-trained former death squad member from Afghanistan, relocated to the US after the collapse of the US-backed government there in 2021.)

According to Marshall, “it’s shameful that they were ever put in that position”—by a Republican governor going along with Trump’s federalization of guard units for domestic policing purposes. “It’s all political theater,” he says. “They were just props, just standing around, with no real mission.”

Along with Common Defense, Marshall praises the six fellow veterans in Congress whose recent video statement reminding active duty service members of their “duty not to follow illegal orders” led President Trump to call them “traitors” guilty of “seditious behavior, punishable by death.”

“We have to stay in lock-step with them and show everyone following the Constitution that we have their back,” Marshall says.

This piece was first published by Labor Notes.

At the opening ceremony for Donald Trump’s so-called Board of Peace in Davos, Jared Kushner unveiled glossy images of his vision for a “new Gaza”: shining apartment towers, luxury developments, and sweeping views of the Mediterranean. There were no Palestinians at the ceremony—and none on the Board of Peace itself. In Kushner’s fantasy, Palestinians appear only as an absence, buried beneath the rubble of the real Gaza.

But how, exactly, are Palestinians to be “demilitarized” and pacified to make way for this Riviera of the Middle East? The assassination of Gaza’s Khan Younis police chief in a drive-by shooting this January offers a chilling clue. It was not an isolated act of lawlessness, but an ominous signal of what lies ahead. As Israeli-backed Palestinian militias openly take credit for targeted killings, the United States is reviving a familiar, deadly—and thoroughly discredited—playbook from Iraq and Afghanistan, in which death squads, night raids, and “kill or capture” missions are cynically repackaged as stabilization and peace.

Gaza is now being positioned as the next laboratory for this model, under the banner of Donald Trump’s so-called “peace plan,” with consequences that history has already shown to be catastrophic.

That strategy was laid bare on January 12th, 2026, when Lieutenant-Colonel Mahmoud al-Astal, the police chief of Khan Younis in Gaza, was assassinated by a death squad based in the Israeli-occupied part of Gaza beyond the “yellow line.” A militia leader known as Abu Safin immediately took credit for the killing, which he said was ordered by Shin Beit, Israel’s anti-Palestinian spy agency.

Another Israeli-backed militia, reputedly linked to ISIS, killed a well-known Gaza journalist, Saleh Al-Jafarawi, in October. That militia’s leader, Yasser Abu Shabab, was disowned by his family for running a pro-Israel death squad and was killed on November 4th, reportedly by one of his own gang.

These Israeli-run death squad operations follow a similar pattern to the targeted killings of Iraqi civil society leaders as resistance grew to the hostile US military occupation of Iraq in 2003 and 2004. But as they did in Iraq and Afghanistan, these targeted killings are likely to grow into a much more systematic and widespread use of death squads and military “kill or capture” night raids in the next phase of Trump’s “peace” plan.

President Trump has announced that the so-called “International Stabilization Force” (ISF) in Gaza will be under the command of US Major General Jasper Jeffers, who was, until recently, the head of US Special Operations Command. Jeffers is a veteran of “special operations” in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the US occupation responded to widespread armed resistance with death squad operations, thousands of airstrikes, and night raids by special operations forces that peaked at over a thousand night raids per month in Afghanistan by 2011.

But like Israel’s Palestinian death squads during the first stage of Trump’s “peace” plan, the US mass killing machines in Afghanistan and Iraq began on a smaller scale.

For an article in the New Statesman, published on March 15, 2004, British journalist Stephen Grey investigated the assassination of Abdul-Latif al-Mayah, the director of the Baghdad Centre for Human Rights and the fourth professor from al-Mustansariya University to be killed. Professor al-Mayah was dragged out of his car on his way to work, shot 20 times and left dead in the street. A senior US military spokesman blamed his death on “the guerrillas,” and told Grey, “Silencing urban professionals… works against everything we’re trying to do here.”

On further investigation, Grey discovered that it was forces within the occupation government, not the resistance, that killed Professor Al-Mayah. An Iraqi police officer eventually told him, “Dr. Abdul-Latif was becoming more and more popular because he spoke for people on the street here… There are political parties in this city who are systematically killing people. They are politicians that are backed by the Americans and who arrived in Iraq from exile with a list of their enemies. I’ve seen these lists. They are killing people one by one.”

A few months later, retired Colonel James Steele, a veteran of the Phoenix program in Vietnam, the US war in El Salvador and the Iran-Contra scandal, arrived in Iraq to oversee the recruitment and training of new Special Police Commandos (SPC), who were then unleashed as death squads in Mosul, Baghdad and other cities, under command of the Iraqi Interior Ministry.

Steven Casteel, who ran the Iraqi Interior Ministry after the US invasion, was the former intelligence chief for the US Drug Enforcement Agency in Latin America, where it worked with the Los Pepes death squad to hunt down and kill Pepe Escobar, the leader of the Medellin drug cartel.

In Iraq, Steele and Casteel both reported directly to US Ambassador John Negroponte, another veteran of US covert operations in Vietnam and Latin America.

Just as John Negroponte, James Steele and Steven Casteel brought the methods they learned and used in Vietnam and Latin America to Iraq, Jasper Jeffers brings his training and experience from Iraq and Afghanistan to Gaza, and will clearly bring other special operations and CIA officers with similar backgrounds into the leadership of the so-called International Stabilization Force (ISF).

The ISF, as described in Trump’s “Peace Plan,” is supposed to be an international force that would provide security, support a new Palestinian police force, and oversee the demilitarization and redevelopment of the Gaza Strip. But the Arab and Muslim countries that originally showed an interest in contributing forces to the ISF all changed their minds once they understood that this would not be a peacekeeping mission, but a force to hunt down and “disarm” Hamas and impose a new form of foreign occupation in Gaza.

Turkey wants to send troops, but so far, Israel has objected, and the other countries that have expressed interest, such as Indonesia, say there is no clear mandate or rules of engagement. And what Muslim country will send forces to Gaza while Israel controls over half of the territory and moves the “Yellow Line” even deeper into Gaza?

Even if some Arab and Muslim countries are persuaded to join the ISF, the most difficult and politically explosive job of actually destroying Hamas will most likely be in the hands of the US and Israeli Special Ops commanders, the mercenaries they bring in and the death squads they recruit.

We can expect to see General Jeffers and his team provide more training and direction to Palestinians already collaborating with Israel in death squad operations, and try to recruit more militia members from current and former Palestinian Authority security forces in the West Bank and from the Palestinian diaspora.

CIA and JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) officers with experience in death squad operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to oversee these operations from the shadows, using the same “disguised, quiet, media-free approach” that senior US military officers hailed as a success in Central America as they adapted it to the “war on terror” and the “war on drugs.”

For political reasons, Jeffers will probably use JSOC officers mainly for training and planning, and employ private military contractors to conduct night raids and other combat operations. Along with the huge expansion of US and allied special operations forces in recent US wars, there has been a proliferation of for-profit military contractors that employ former special operations officers from US and allied countries as unaccountable mercenaries.

These privatized forces have already been deployed in Gaza, notably by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Its food distribution sites became death traps for desperate, hungry people forced to risk their lives just to try to feed their families. Israeli forces and mercenaries killed at least a thousand people at and around these sites.

The tens of thousands of Americans and others who took part in night raids in Iraq or Afghanistan and special operations in other US wars have created a huge pool of experienced assassins and shock troops that Jeffers can draw on, with for-profit military and “security” firms serving as cut-outs to shield decision-makers from accountability. More routine functions, such as manning checkpoints, can be delegated to other ISF forces, military police veterans and less specialized mercenaries.

The appointment of General Jeffers to command Trump’s ISF, and Israel’s formation and deployment of Palestinian death squads during the first phase of Trump’s phony peace plan, should be all the red flags the world needs to see what is coming—and to categorically reject Trump’s obscene plan before it goes any farther.

Like Bush and Blair planning the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Trump is planning to systematically violate the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, and especially the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, which guarantees protection for civilians in war zones or under military occupation.

Tony Blair’s role in Trump’s plan is further evidence that the plan has nothing to do with peace and everything to do with the Western imperialism that keeps rearing its ugly head around the world, and which has bedevilled Palestine for more than a century.

Appointing Blair to any role in governing Gaza ignores not only his role in US and British aggression against Iraq, but also his lead role in the U.K. and EU’s decision, in 2003, to abandon earlier efforts to bring Palestinian factions together in the interest of Palestinian unity. Instead, they adopted a militarized, “counterinsurgency” strategy toward Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups. Blair’s failed policy helped pave the way for Hamas’s election victory in 2006, and for the endless, US-backed Israeli violence against Gaza ever since.

It is perhaps no wonder that Trump and Blair see eye to eye on Palestine, as they share the same ignorance, egotism and inhumanity, and the same disdain for international law. But the savage methods used by US special operations forces and US-trained death squads to kill hundreds of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq only fueled broader resistance, which ultimately drove U.S occupation forces out of both countries.

The same tactics will lead to the same failure in Gaza. But unleashing such horrific violence on the already desperate, starving, unhoused, captive people of Gaza is a policy of such gratuitous barbarity and injustice that it should compel the whole world to come together to put a stop to it.

President Donald Trump stepped into a major political landmine by picking Minnesota as the Democratic state he opted to savage with his Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents this time around. No one, anywhere, has ever regarded Minnesota as any kind of threat to any nation. Writer and former “Prairie Home Companion” radio personality Garrison Keillor often talked about the rock-steady courtesy and careful reticence of the hard-working and (once) stoic Minnesotans. “We Minnesotans believe in low key,” he quipped about himself and the other residents of his home state. Hardly the rampaging “paid political agitators” Donald Trump conjures up.

Minnesota consistently tallies among the lowest per capita crime stats in the nation. Yet there Trump’s jack-booted thugs are in repeated scenes on TV across the nation, hurling Minnesotans to the ground, kneeling on their backs, wrapping their beefy arms around their necks and squeezing, shooting them. This, despite the fact that Democratic California, along with the Republican states of Texas and Florida, have the highest number—millions—of undocumented immigrants in the nation. Yet Trump is focusing on the Midwestern state.

Nearby residents across the Minnesota’s border identify with their out-of-state neighbors. I grew up in Wisconsin, and considered Minnesota part of us, as I did Michigan, Iowa, and much of Illinois. If Trump thinks he carefully sidestepped red Iowa and Michigan, and purple Wisconsin (which went for Trump in 2024) in his targeted violence, he’s hugely mistaken. What happens in Minnesota is felt by all Midwesterners. Like me, other Wisconsinites have relatives over the border, they shop in Minnesota, and some have farms and businesses there. Minnesotans talk like us. We have the same accents, and some of us call drinking fountains “bubblers.” That kind of identification is something Trump, born and raised in Queens, will never get.

Even more problematic for Trump is that the great swath of middle Americans view Midwesterners as one of them. The country often dismisses the complaints and actions of the New York metropolitan area and the West (i.e. “left”) Coast. But they don’t take that attitude when it comes to Minnesotans, widely considered the salt of the earth by their fellow Americans.

It’s not so easy (or a genius political move) to remain popular as a vengeful president scapegoats a steady state from heartland America with combat-outfitted thugs.

Nevertheless, Minnesotans are being brutalized on the streets of Minneapolis: their “papers” demanded by ICE agents (which citizens are not required to carry), their car windows smashed and their bodies dragged over shattered glass, slugged when they dare lift their cell phones to record the violence. Yet the Minnesotans, a huge percentage of whom are hunters and own guns, remain nonviolent protesters against the brutality, steadfast and indomitable in their opposition, relying on whistles to alert one another to ICE violence, relentlessly recording the federal agents’ assault on the law despite threats from angry, threatening officers. Minnesotans have staged protest sit-ins in churches, at Hilton Hotels, where agents sleep, and at Target stores where masked men have kidnapped teenage US citizens working there. Protesters last month staged an all-night raucous anti-ICE “concert” to keep the agents awake as they tried to sleep in their Hilton Hotel beds.

It’s a lose-lose situation for Trump. Early poll results already hint that the president’s support in the wake of the violence in the Midwest—and nationally—is tanking. It’s not so easy (or a genius political move) to remain popular as a vengeful president scapegoats a steady state from heartland America with combat-outfitted thugs.

Even before news spread that ICE agent Jonathan Ross fatally shot Minneapolis mom and US citizen Renee Nicole Good in the face on January 7, a number of polls found increasing anger over Trump’s Minneapolis thugfest.

A national YouGov poll taken the same day of the shooting before word of the killing had been widely shared found that 52% of those surveyed already either somewhat or strongly disapproved of how ICE was doing its job (39% somewhat approved or strongly approved). Just 27% thought the agency's tactics were "about right," compared to 51% who labeled them"too forceful.”

Six out of ten of those surveyed said they believed a “war” or “conflict” is erupting in the streets of America.

A Reuters/Ipsos survey January 15 found Americans’ approval of Trump’s immigration approach was at its lowest point in his second administration. An AP-NORC poll found that just 38% of Americans approved of Trump’s immigration enforcement, down from a 49% high this spring. In addition, a majority of voters (51%) in a recent CNN/SSRS poll said ICE’s actions are making US cities less safe.

Trump’s net job approval rating slid to -14, YouGov pollsters reported Jan. 20 after the president’s immigration crackdown, the lowest of his second administration. The American Research Group reported Wednesday that Trump’s approval rating had cratered to -28.

“What’s happening in Minnesota right now defies belief,” Democratic Gov. Tim Walz said in a televised address last week. “News reports simply don’t do justice to the level of chaos and disruption and trauma the federal government is raining down upon our communities,” he added, characterizing the ICE attacks as a “campaign of organized brutality against the people of Minnesota by our own federal government.”

Trump thought Minnesotans would be pushovers and great “performance fodder” as televised victims of his version of macho violence. They may be quietly hard-working, and sometimes excruciatingly reserved, but they have spines of steel and they know what’s right.

We are all Minnesota.

Jonathan Ross, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, will not be brought to justice. Let that sink in. Ross is going to skate, because in Donald Trump’s America, his agency operates above the law. As Vice President JD Vance put it at a White House press conference the day after the shooting, Ross has “absolute immunity for doing his job.”

Vance’s comments shed light upon the larger legal design behind ICE’s newfound power. In Trump’s second term, the United States is rapidly devolving into what the late German émigré legal and political scientist Ernst Fraenkel called a “dual state,” in which acts of violence perpetrated against designated enemies of the regime are not only tolerated, but often celebrated as acts of valor and redemption.

A socialist attorney who practiced labor law in Berlin, Fraenkel fled Nazi Germany in 1938, eventually settling in Chicago. There he would write his most famous work, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship, a study of the legal system implemented by the Third Reich in the 1930s.

Fraenkel’s central thesis is that the Nazis did not dismantle the legal structure of the Weimar Republic all at once or entirely, but replaced it with a bifurcated system in which state functions were divided between a “normative” sphere—which operated according to set rules and regulations—and a “prerogative” sphere, where violence was permitted and traditional legal restraints did not apply.

The struggle against ICE and our emerging dual state is now approaching a critical inflection point.

To keep capitalism up and running, Hitler’s government had to maintain the façade of a stable “normative” legal system that permitted businesses and Christian Germans to engage in commerce and settle contract cases, employment disputes, landlord-tenant matters, and other civil issues in court. As University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq noted in a March 2025 Atlantic magazine essay, this duality allowed capitalism to “jog nicely alongside the brutal suppression of democracy, and even genocide.”

But as the judiciary surrendered its independence through a combination of cooptation and intimidation, the “prerogative” system came to dominate. “On any given day,” Huq explained:

… people or cases could be jerked out of the normative state and into the prerogative one. In July 1936, for example, Fraenkel won a case for employees of an association taken over by the Nazis. A few days later, he learned that the Gestapo had seized the money owed to his clients and deposited it in the government’s coffers.

The case was closed with no further appeals.

Fraenkel largely attributed the theoretical underpinnings of the dual Nazi state to the work of the German legal philosopher Carl Schmitt. Often referred to as the “Crown Jurist of National Socialism,” Schmitt joined the party in 1933 and went on to serve as president of the National Socialist Association of Legal Professionals.

Schmitt was an unrelenting critic of liberalism, decrying its weaknesses for embracing universal human rights and what he deemed its hypocritical and indecisive fixations on discussion, debate, negotiation, and compromise. As a counter to universalism, he promoted a “friend-enemy” concept of politics, insisting that all states necessarily distinguish between those whom it embraces as friends worthy of protection and those who are forever considered enemies, outsiders and invaders deserving of its wrath, retribution, and punishment.

As a complement to the friend-enemy concept, Schmitt promoted the idea of the “state of exception,” arguing that the sovereign in a well-functioning state must be vested with emergency powers to suspend the rule of law to maintain public order and ensure the survival of the nation. Soon after joining the party, he declared that the Enabling Act, which effectively made Hitler a dictator, had become the provisional constitution of Germany. He would go on to enthusiastically support the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, stripping Jews and other “enemies” of citizenship, and to defend Hitler’s right as sovereign to define the enemy as he saw fit.

All of this will sound eerily familiar to anyone who has been paying attention to the news. Since retaking the presidency, Trump has declared nine states of emergency on a range of issues stretching from the imposition of bloated tariffs on foreign goods to designating drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and proclaiming a national emergency at the southern border. The border proclamation, issued on January 20, his first day back in office, cited the now-familiar charge of an “alien invasion” of “criminal gangs, known terrorists, human traffickers, smugglers,” and laid the groundwork for both his mass-deportation program and for giving ICE the largest budget of any police agency in the country.

ICE is now a formidable paramilitary force, having hired 12,000 new agents in the past year, more than doubling its size, and ramping up to hire more. It has been deployed into American cities on orders from Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to root out the invaders. It has become the violent face of the country’s transformation into a new 21st-century dual state.

Undocumented immigrants remain ICE’s primary target, but citizens like Good are also in jeopardy. Good’s case stands out because she was white, and her killing was caught on video. But she is not alone. While there are no official figures that specifically track how many citizens have been victimized by immigration agents, ProPublica reported last October that it had found more than 170 cases where citizens were detained during raids and protests. According to the report:

Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased, and shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them. One of those women had already had the door of her home blown off while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem watched.

To date, not a single federal agent has been prosecuted for these incidents. Nor are any prosecutions likely.

In “normal” times, we could at least expect Agent Ross to face a rigorous Justice Department investigation. It is not true, to return to JD Vance’s comments, that Ross enjoys absolute immunity under existing law. It has always been difficult to prosecute federal law enforcement officials, but no such immunity exists.

But these are not normal times.

Trump, who now openly directs the Department of Justice and the FBI, has precluded the possibility of any serious federal investigation. Nor can we count on a state investigation conducted in concert with federal law enforcement. The FBI has announced it will exclude Minnesota authorities from participating in any fake pro-forma probe of Good’s death.

Perhaps most regrettably, we cannot count on the Supreme Court to hold Ross and other offending agents to account. The Supreme Court has endowed Trump with the powers of the unitary executive, holding in Trump v. United States that the president may exercise his pardon power however he pleases to excuse anyone from any federal prosecution.

The struggle against ICE and our emerging dual state is now approaching a critical inflection point. We can be heartened by the fact that the United States is not Germany in 1933, and Trump, for all his bluster and megalomania, is not Hitler. The country’s fate remains open, and dependent on the nonviolent and lawful collective action that we—all of us—take in the coming weeks, months, and years.

Let’s put Immigration and Customs Enforcement and, indeed, war itself—the smugly violent certainty of militarism—into the largest perspective possible. I suggest this as the only way to maintain my sanity: to believe that we, that our children, actually have a future.

This is one planet. Every living being, every pulse of life, every molecule of existence, is intertwined. I’m not in any way suggesting I understand what this means. I simply see it as our starting point, as we acknowledge and embrace the Anthropocene: the current global era, basically as old as I am, in which natural and human forces are intertwined. The fate of one determines the fate of the other.

If that’s really true, we have to start thinking beyond the mindset that brought us here. We are truly creating the future by what we do. Our lives are no longer about simply exploiting the present for our limited self-interests or perpetrating us-vs.-them violence on what amounts to ourselves.

I began by mentioning ICE because it’s so blatantly in the news these days, exemplifying the minimalist thinking of US (and global) leaders, as they claim exclusive ownership of bits and pieces of the planet.

The Trump administration is in a weird way proclaiming its belief in “one planet,” but this planet includes only them: basically white, politically obedient Americans.

As Julia Norman writes, for instance, the Department of Homeland Security is in the process of accumulating industrial warehouses around the country “...in an effort to expand the administration’s capacity to execute its mass deportation agenda—a system Secretary Noem recently aptly described as ‘one of the most consequential periods of action and reform in American history.’"

“After the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ allocated an additional $45 billion specifically to ICE for building new immigration detention centers through 2029—a budget 62% larger than the entire federal prison system—DHS gained unprecedented financial capacity to expand its system of terror on a massive scale.”

She adds: “Private contractors such as GEO Group continue to operate facilities housing the vast majority of ICE detainees, positioning themselves to make substantial profit as the administration moves to double detention capacity to 100,000 beds with tens of billions in federal spending. GEO Group and CoreCivic have already reported soaring revenues under Trump’s second term, with executives describing the expansion as ‘pivotal’ and ‘an unprecedented growth opportunity.’ In this system, human confinement has been transformed into an investment strategy.”

There’s an enormous irony here. The Trump administration is in a weird way proclaiming its belief in “one planet,” but this planet includes only them: basically white, politically obedient Americans. What recognizing “one planet” really means is showing a wide-open reverence for everything and everybody on it, including everything we don’t understand.

As I wrote in a column nearly a decade ago, the Anthropocene has come about by a combination of extraordinary technological breakthroughs and cold indifference to their consequences: human evolution, you might say, outside the circle of life. But here we are nonetheless.

The primary causes of the geological shift, according to the Guardian, are the radioactive elements dispersed across the planet by nuclear bomb tests, along with such things as plastic pollution, soot from power stations, concrete, and even the bones left by the global proliferation of the domestic chickens.

“None of this is good news,” I wrote. “Short-sighted human behavior, from nuclear insanity to agribusiness to the proliferation of plastic trash, has produced utterly unforeseen consequences, including disruption of the stable climate that has nurtured our growth and becoming over the last dozen millennia. This is called recklessness. And mostly the Anthropocene is described with dystopian bleakness: a time of mass extinctions. A time of dying.”

But dystopian bleakness is not the spiritual endpoint here. As Our Planet tells us: “The habitats that make up our planet are connected and reliant upon each other. The astonishing diversity of life on earth depends on these global connections."

“This is a critical moment for our planet. We have changed it so much we have brought on a new geological age—the Anthropocene. The age of humans. For the first time in our history, the global connections that all living things rely upon are breaking. But if we act quickly, we have the knowledge and the solutions to make our planet thrive again.”

There is, in the collective human soul, a deep love for the planet. I understand how naïve it will sound if I just cry: "C’mon, world! No more war!"So I’ll hold off on that and simply address, well, the media, the antiwar protesters, whoever might be reading this. Yes, we should abolish ICE, defund and think beyond militarism, question the sanctity of the imaginary lines (aka, borders) all across our planet. But we should not do so merely out of fear. Let’s do so, rather, in the deep (dare I say religious?) awareness that humanity and Planet Earth are evolving together. And we’re hovering at a moment of extraordinary change.

Let me know what you think: What should we do next? What are we already doing right?

The top 15 wealthiest people in America are part of a very, very exclusive club: those with over $100,000,000,000 in net worth. After double checking those zeroes, we can confidently say that yes, there are 15 centi-billionaires living among us.

And, according to a new Institute for Policy Studies analysis of data from the Forbes real time billionaire list, the combined wealth of that 12-figure club grew from $2.4 trillion to $3.1 trillion over the course of 2025.

For context, that 30.3% rate of growth outpaced both the S&P 500 (16%) and billionaires in general (20.8%) over the last year. To put it succinctly, the wealthiest Americans are accumulating capital faster than everyone else.

The top 15 wealthiest billionaires aren’t the only ones doing well for themselves. Our analysis found that the number of US billionaires increased from 813 with combined wealth of $6.7 trillion at the end of 2024 to 935 US billionaires with combined assets of $8.1 trillion.

The top five wealthiest billionaires all saw huge wealth jumps in 2025.

• Elon Musk of Tesla-X and SpaceX with $726 billion, up from $421 billion a year ago.
• Larry Page of Google, with $257 billion, up from $156 billion a year ago.
• Larry Ellison of Oracle fame with $245 billion, up from $209 billion a year ago.
• Jeff Bezos of Amazon with $242 billion, up from $233.5 billion a year ago.
• Sergey Brin of Google with $237 billion, up from $148.9 billion a year ago.

The three wealthiest dynastic families in the US hold an estimated $757 billion, up from $657.8 billion at the end of 2024, a 16% gain. These are:

• Walton: Seven members of the Walton Family with combined wealth of $483 billion, up from $404.3 billion a year ago.
• Mars: Six members of Mars family with combined wealth of $120 billion, down from $130.4 billion a year ago.
• Koch: Two members of the Koch family have a combined wealth of $154.8 billion, up from $121.1 billion a year ago.

As we predicted it would at the time, the Covid-19 pandemic drastically accelerated wealth concentration.

On March 18, 2020, for example, Elon Musk had wealth valued just under $25 billion. A little over five years at the end of 2025, Musk’s wealth is $726 billion, a dizzying 2,800% increase from before the onset of the pandemic.

Jeff Bezos saw his wealth rise from $113 billion on March 18, 2020 to $242 billion at the end of 2025.

Three Walton family members—Jim, Alice and Rob—saw their combined assets increase from $161.1 billion on March 18, 2020 to $378 billion at the end of 2025.

The extreme concentration of wealth that our continued analysis of billionaires underscores is deeply concerning for the future of our country. These ultra-wealthy individuals have outsized influence on our democratic system—and have actively worked to undermine it. And these spectacular riches comes at the expense of workers, the ones who are actually generating wealth. Social services are being cut while tax burdens are eased on the rich.

Fighting back against wealth concentration will take a two-pronged approach. We have to empower the working class, strengthening unions and improving living conditions. We also have to raise and taxes and close wealth accumulation loopholes, or else billionaire power will only grow.

The so-called “Board of Peace” being created by President Donald Trump is profoundly degrading to the pursuit of peace and to any nation that would lend it legitimacy. This is a trojan horse to dismantle the United Nations. It should be refused outright by every nation invited to join.

In its Charter, the Board of Peace (BoP) claims to be an “international organization that seeks to promote stability, restore dependable and lawful governance, and secure enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict.” If this sounds familiar, it should, because this is the mandate of the United Nations. Created in the aftermath of World War II, the UN has as its central mission the maintenance of international peace and security.

It is no secret that Trump holds open contempt for international law and the United Nations. He said so himself during his September 2025 speech at the General Assembly, and has recently withdrawn from 31 UN entities. Following a long tradition of US foreign policy, he has consistently violated international law, including the bombing of seven countries in the past year, none of which were authorized by the Security Council and none of which was undertaken in lawful self-defense under the Charter (Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and Venezuela). He is now claiming Greenland, with brazen and open hostility towards the US allies in Europe.

So, what about this Board of Peace?

It is, to put it simply, a pledge of allegiance to Trump, who seeks the role of world chairman and the world’s ultimate arbiter. The BoP will have as its Executive Board none other than Trump’s political donors, family members, and courtiers. The leaders of nations that sign up will get to rub shoulders with, and take orders from, Marco Rubio, Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner and Tony Blair. Hedge Fund owner and Republican Party mega-donor Marc Rowan also gets to play. More to the point, any decisions taken by the BoP will be subject to Trump’s approval.

If the charade of representatives isn’t enough, nations will have to pay $1 billion for a “permanent seat” on the Board. Any nation that participates should know what it is “buying.” It is certainly not buying peace or a solution for the Palestinian people (as the money supposedly goes to Gaza’s reconstruction). It is buying ostensible access to Trump for as long as it serves his interests. It is buying an illusion of momentary influence in a system where Trump’s rules are enforced by personal whim.

The proposal is absurd not least because it purports to “solve” a problem that already has an 80-year-old global solution. The United Nations exists precisely to prevent the personalization of war and peace. It was designed after the wreckage of two world wars to global base peace on collective rules and international law. The UN’s authority, rightly, derives from the UN Charter ratified by 193 member states (including the US, as ratified by the US Senate in July 1945) and grounded in international law. If the US doesn’t want to abide by the Charter, the UN General Assembly should suspend the US credentials, as it once did with Apartheid South Africa.

Trump’s “Board of Peace” is a blatant repudiation of the United Nations. Trump has made that explicit, recently declaring that the Board of Peace “might” indeed replace the United Nations. This statement alone should end the conversation for any serious national leader. Participation after such a declaration is a conscious decision to subordinate one’s country to Trump’s personalized global authority. It is to accept, in advance, that peace is no longer governed by the UN Charter, but by Trump.

Still, some nations, desperate to get on the right side of the US, may take the bait. They should remember the wise words of President John F. Kennedy in his inaugural address “ those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.”

The record shows that loyalty to Trump is never enough to salve his ego. Just look at the long parade of Trump’s former allies, advisers, and appointees who were humiliated, discarded, and attacked by him the moment they ceased to be useful to him.

For any nation, participation on the Board of Peace would be strategically foolish. Joining this body will create long-lasting reputational damage. Long after Trump himself is no longer President, a past association with this travesty will be a mark of poor judgment. It will remain as sad evidence that, at a critical moment, a national political system mistook a vanity project for statesmanship, squandering $1 billion of funds in the process.

Ultimately, refusal to join the “Board of Peace” will be an act of national self-respect. Peace is a global public good. The UN-based international order, however flawed, should be repaired through law and cooperation, not replaced by a gilded caricature. Any nation that values international law, and the respect for the United Nations, should decline immediately to be associated with this travesty of international law.

Every single moving mouth and face I see in the media seems to be obligated to stress the barbarity and illegitimacy of the Maduro government to establish some acceptable moral clarity even before they can carry on with any analysis of the current political situation, or the current political conditions in the world. Likewise, each personality seems obligated to make similar statements as a prerequisite to speak on the Iranian regime and the religionists controlling the country. Each is evil they must claim, and that they expressively disagree and denounce them in all shape and form. Each is beyond the specter of acceptable civilization, they must state. Each has no inkling of morality, but is simply obsessed with power and control.

This was the same in any discussion of Hamas in Gaza. Every political critic was required to denounce the various regimes and point out their flaws without spelling out the historical influences that helped to create the regimes and set them into motion. Anyone who has ever spoken up for peace and credible reflection knows what it’s like to be baited or accused of being an apologist for the bad guy. But this is not necessary and distracts from full and meaningful analysis.

I am not going to seek acceptability by engaging in some litmus test of morality regurgitating a litany of flaws and how I don't agree. I believe that there is a collective of people so tired of the moral denunciations that they are able to look past my refusal to criticize and denounce and hear what I am trying to say.

The reflections of the flaws of other places and countries is namely a reflection of us and on us...

I am reminded, from my experiences with my work in the drug and alcohol recovery community in Roxbury, Massachusetts and the very poignant but grassroots logic and moral challenge that often flowed from that recovery community. People would remind us that when we were so busy pointing fingers at others that there were four fingers pointing back at us. This means that when we point out the deficiencies, the cruelty, the lying, the racism, and the hatred of others it is not all in them, but it also resides in us. We are not exempt and we are not free from all the dismissive political distances that we try to create.

The hypocrisy is when people go through all of the denunciations of the other over legitimacy and brutality, over legalities and dictatorship, and fail in acknowledging this mirror that reflects back on this country first and foremost.

There is some Nicolas Maduro in us. There is some Ali Hosseini Khamenei in us. Vladimir Putin is in us. We find that Hamas is in us and has always been part of who we are. We find that Palestinian dismissal resides in so many of us as it does in Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump. We need to quell our objections and realize in so many instances there is a mirror that projects a reflection onto ourselves, and we discover them is in us.

I am astounded that given all of the vigorous and vehement denunciations and dismissal of Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, or denunciation of Hamas there are still four fingers pointing back at us. If we look closely enough, we find all of the criticisms and flaws that we recognize in the other and our strong objections are mirrored in this government and in this historical moment in this country.

Murders do not just happen with the brutality of other governments but happens in Minneapolis with the killing of Renee Good. That murder happened not too far from where George Floyd was also killed. As we point out the roundup of people in other countries we must remind ourselves of the undocumented immigrants and US citizens that the Trump administration has arrested. More than 328,000 have been disappeared in the illegal and unconstitutional sweeps carried out by the administration. 327,000 have been deported. At least 22 have died in ICE custody. Most of the facilities are operated by private corporations that have raked in huge profits like the GEO Group.

Just as this administration is obsessed with crushing Tren de Aragua, a notorious gang with reaches from Venezuela into the US, the parallels are frightening with the US reaching into Venezuela creating a vassal state, stealing oil and other resources, claiming that they have a right to do so, and arrogantly stating that they are running the government. There are four fingers pointing back at us.

The sheer arrogance of demanding that Greenland be controlled by the US the hard way or the easy way points to the rogue status of the US. There are many other examples of racism, hatred, cruelty, brutality, the looting of other countries, the demanding of rare earths, and in general street racketeering but on a broader scale. The expression of this current moment with the US government is that it is expressed in theft, fear, bullying, and simple old street protection and racketeering. There are four fingers pointing at this government and this country.

The Fellowship of Reconciliation-USA, the oldest peace and justice nonviolent organization in the country, embraces this hard truth. They are us, and we urge that we move away from the paradigm of the other and, almost in confession, that leads to contrition that what the country claims as the other is us, and four fingers are pointing back upon us. Our humanity demands that we cease with claiming the evil in others without recognizing it in ourselves.

The hypocrisy is when people go through all of the denunciations of the other over legitimacy and brutality, over legalities and dictatorship, and fail in acknowledging this mirror that reflects back on this country first and foremost. Our claims of deep immorality, where objections are strongly expressed, belong to us. If we are going to denounce any place to gain credibility in our analysis or criticisms, then the talking heads and the experts need to state that this is us in all of the shapes and forms of political repression and immorality. They are us, and our denunciations begin at home—stating that we are strongly opposed to what is happening in the US, and that we do not agree with the images and political agenda in the US just like we do not agree with what is happening abroad. The reflections of the flaws of other places and countries is namely a reflection of us and on us, and four fingers are pointing back at us.