Vice President Kamala Harris' recently announced "Medicare at Home" plan represents a crucial acknowledgment of America's caregiving crisis. However, it's a band-aid on a gaping wound—a wound that exposes the deep-seated inequities and systemic failures in our approach to elder care and support for family caregivers. I believe with some thoughtful adjustments, the proposal can lead to a more equitable elder care system in America.

The numbers are staggering: 53 million Americans provide unpaid care for aging or disabled loved ones, sacrificing their own financial security and well-being. By 2030, all Baby Boomers will be over 65, comprising 21% of our population. This demographic shift demands not just incremental change, but a radical reimagining of how we value and support care work in our society.

Harris' plan, while well-intentioned, risks perpetuating a broken care system that exploits caregivers—predominantly women and people of color—while failing to meet the diverse needs of families. By focusing on paying for "designated" Medicare aides, the current proposal supports only the high-cost portion of the market: the traditional for-profit home care agencies.

The current system is a microcosm of larger societal inequities.

That leaves behind many other care options that are vital to addressing our urgent care crisis. It ignores the reality that 78% of adults requiring long-term care solely rely on family and friends for support. And of those who can afford to pay for help, nearly a third rely on the “gray market” of informal caregivers. These groups—family caregivers and informal non-professional caregivers – should also be covered if Medicare were to pay for home-based care. Otherwise, the Harris proposal is favoring a for-profit home care agency system, at the expense of more affordable options, that the majority of people rely on.

Beyond affordability, many people actually prefer to not deal with the for-profit care market. One NIH-funded study on home care needs revealed a stark truth: patients value vouchers to pay for family and informal caregivers 50% more than agency-provided aides. This preference isn't just about familiarity. It's about dignity, cultural competence, and the recognition that care is deeply personal.

The current system is a microcosm of larger societal inequities. Unpaid family caregivers—mostly women, and disproportionately women of color—lose an average of $304,000 in wages and benefits over their lifetime. This is a form of structural inequality that perpetuates gender and racial wealth gaps.

To truly revolutionize home care, we must embrace a progressive vision that centers on equity, worker empowerment, and community-based solutions. Here's what that could look like:

1. A Universal Caregiver Benefit: Instead of means-tested programs, we need a universal benefit that recognizes caregiving as valuable work, regardless of who performs it. This would include payment to family members, friends, and community members, not just professional Medicare-designated aides. Such an approach would bring this existing "gray market" of family and informal caregivers into a more regulated and supported economy.

2. Technology for Social Impact: To truly transform home care, we must embrace innovation and flexibility. We can leverage technology platforms to create a more dynamic, responsive caregiver workforce. This can create flexible, well-compensated opportunities that benefit both caregivers and lower the costs for care recipients.

3. Community Care Cooperatives: Encourage the formation of worker-owned care cooperatives, empowering caregivers and ensuring that the benefits of their labor stay within their communities.

4. Comprehensive Training and Support: Provide accessible, culturally competent training for all types of caregivers, recognizing the diverse needs of care recipients and the varied skills of potential caregivers.

5. Intersectional Policy Approach: Recognize that caregiving intersects with issues of gender equality, racial justice, immigrant rights, and economic justice. Our solutions must address all these facets.

Critics may argue that this approach could compromise care quality. However, with proper oversight and community-based accountability mechanisms, we can create a system that's more responsive, more equitable, and more aligned with the values of dignity and self-determination.

The economic impact of this revolution would be profound. By recognizing and compensating currently unpaid care work, we could stimulate local economies, reduce gender and racial wealth gaps, and create a more robust social safety net for all.

We can create a level playing field where all care providers—from traditional care agencies to tech platforms to family caregivers and informal caregivers—can thrive while prioritizing the needs of care recipients and care workers.

Harris' Medicare at Home plan opens the door to a necessary conversation. Now, we must push it wide open and envision a care system that truly serves all Americans. We can build a society that recognizes the value of care work in all its forms.

Harris' Medicare at Home plan opens the door to a necessary conversation. Now, we must push it wide open and envision a care system that truly serves all Americans.

As we debate this plan, let's not lose sight of the broader struggle for social and economic justice. Reimagining home care for the 21st century is part of a larger project of creating an economy that works for all, not just the privileged few.

It's time for a care revolution that puts people over profit, community over corporations, and equity at the center of our policies. Harris has taken the first step—now let's march forward towards a truly just and compassionate care system for all Americans.

Katrina is the mother of three children, one of whom lives with major disabilities that require Katrina to spend most of her time as a caregiver. Katrina was already struggling to make ends meet, but then an unexpected car repair and reduced work hours caused her to fall behind on her rent.

Darren was hurt on the job and lost six weeks of pay. Now he is trying to put in as much work time as his employer will give him, but the pay is only about $17 an hour. Darren shares custody of two very young children, ages three and nine months, and he is desperately struggling to catch up on overdue rent.

Sheila‘s husband has been arrested and jailed for violently abusing her. Safe for the moment, Sheila has returned to work as a manager at a retail business. But she owes several months of back rent, plus late fees and court fees. It is more than she can pull together, so Sheila will have to move within the month. She is putting most of her possessions into storage. She is also packing a few trash bags of clothes to take with her to her new home—a friend’s unheated garage with no access to plumbing.

I teach a law school clinic in Indianapolis, where my students and I represent Katrina, Darren, Sheila and other clients in eviction court. They have a shared need, one that also applies to the nine million U.S. households that are behind on their rent right now:

They need money.

Katrina, Darren, and Sheila are among the three of every four households who qualify for subsidized housing, but do not receive it because we don’t fully fund the programs. They are forced to try to pay market-rate rent, which takes up most of their income even in the good times. In the bad times, the rent is more than what is coming in. So we see them in eviction court.

Turns out that some of the usual suspects—volunteer work, random acts of kindness—may not be as impactful as we hoped in delivering happiness. But what does work? You guessed it: money, especially for low-income folks.

We can do better than this. We know we can, because just a few years ago Katrina, Darren, and Sheila and almost everyone else we see eviction court now were safely housed. Emergency rental assistance, expanded child tax credits, maximized food stamps, and extended unemployment benefits prevented more than three million eviction cases, according to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. In fact, poverty rates actually dropped during the Covid pandemic.

Since then, researchers from Columbia University and City University of New York, CUNY, studied the impact of those benefits, and confirmed what we saw in our clients’ lives. “We find that direct cash payments were the single most useful tool for helping people ride out the pandemic and were first and foremost, used to cover basic needs, including rent or mortgage payments, utilities, and food,” they said.

That is powerful evidence pointing us toward what we can do to help. Add that to the pile of research showing that strings-free cash leads to dramatically positive outcomes. Specifically to housing, studies have shown that unconditional cash given to unhoused persons both reduced homelessness and saved money that would have been spent on government programs the recipients. Cash is so effective because this and other studies show that low-income people are far more likely to spend cash assistance on rent, food, and transportation than “temptation goods” like alcohol or drugs.

More broadly, analysis in the Annual Review of Psychology reviewed multiple studies examining what actually makes human beings happier. Turns out that some of the usual suspects—volunteer work, random acts of kindness—may not be as impactful as we hoped in delivering happiness. But what does work? You guessed it: money, especially for low-income folks.

“A growing number of rigorous preregistered experiments suggest that such cash transfers and other forms of financial support can provide an efficient mechanism for enhancing happiness,” wrote Dunigan Folk and Elizabeth Dunn, professors of psychology at the University of British Columbia. “Cash seems to be as good or better than other interventions that carry similar costs, including psychotherapy and job training.”

This analysis matches what we see in court. Would Katrina and Darren and Sheila benefit from psychotherapy? Maybe. But for most clients it appears that their financial crises are causing their mental health struggles, more so than the other way around. Would job training help? Again, maybe. But these people are already doing work in the community—home healthcare, food, service, retail work, warehouse work, etc.—that is essential for our economy. So, shouldn’t those jobs pay a living wage?

As we evaluate presidential candidates’ responses to our housing crisis and the clamor over building more housing, it is worth keeping this simplicity in mind. Until and unless we create much more subsidized housing, which is the real solution to the crisis, what our clients need most is straight-up cash.

Considered Angola’s crown jewel by many, Lobito is a colorful port city on the country’s scenic Atlantic coast where a nearly five-kilometer strip of land creates a natural harbor. Its white sand beaches, vibrant blue waters, and mild tropical climate have made Lobito a tourist destination in recent years. Yet under its shiny new facade is a history fraught with colonial violence and exploitation.

The Portuguese were the first Europeans to lay claim to Angola in the late sixteenth century. For nearly four centuries, they didn’t relent until a bloody, 27-year civil war with anticolonial guerillas (aided by the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces) and bolstered by a leftist coup in distant Lisbon, Portugal’s capital, overthrew that colonial regime in 1974.

Lobito’s port was the economic heart of Portugal’s reign in Angola, along with the meandering 1,866-kilometer Benguela Railway, which first became operational in the early 1900s. For much of the twentieth century, Lobito was the hub for exporting to Europe agricultural goods and metals mined in Africa’s Copperbelt. Today, the Copperbelt remains a resource-rich region encompassing much of the Democratic Republic of Congo and northern Zambia.

Perhaps it won’t shock you to learn that, half a century after Portugal’s colonial control of Angola ended, neocolonialism is now sinking its hooks into Lobito. Its port and the Benguela Railway, which travels along what’s known as the Lobito Corridor, have become a key nucleus of China’s and the Western world’s efforts to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources in our hot new world. If capitalist interests continue to drive this crucial transition, which is all too likely, while global energy consumption isn’t scaled back radically, the amount of critical minerals needed to power the global future remains unfathomable. The World Economic Forum estimates that three billion tons of metals will be required. The International Energy Forum estimates that to meet the global goals of radically reducing carbon emissions, we’ll also need between 35 and 194 massive copper mines by 2050.

It should come as no surprise that most of the minerals from copper to cobalt needed for that transition’s machinery (including electric batteries, wind turbines, and solar panels) are located in Latin America and Africa. Worse yet, more than half (54%) of the critical minerals needed are on or near Indigenous lands, which means the most vulnerable populations in the world are at the most significant risk of being impacted in a deeply negative fashion by future mining and related operations.

Having lagged behind that country’s investments in Africa for years, the U.S. is now looking to make up ground.

When you want to understand what the future holds for a country in the “developing” world, as economists still like to call such regions, look no further than the International Monetary Fund (IMF). “With growing demand, proceeds from critical minerals are poised to rise significantly over the next two decades,” reports the IMF. “Global revenues from the extraction of just four key minerals — copper, nickel, cobalt, and lithium — are estimated to total $16 trillion over the next 25 years. Sub-Saharan Africa stands to reap over 10 percent of these accumulated revenues, which could correspond to an increase in the region’s GDP by 12 percent or more by 2050.”

Sub-Saharan Africa alone is believed to contain 30% of the world’s total critical mineral reserves. It’s estimated that the Congo is responsible for 70% of global cobalt output and approximately 50% of the globe’s reserves. In fact, the demand for cobalt, a key ingredient in most lithium-ion batteries, is rapidly increasing because of its use in everything from cell phones to electric vehicles. As for copper, Africa has two of the world’s top producers, with Zambia accounting for 70% of the continent’s output. “This transition,” adds the IMF, “if managed properly, has the potential to transform the region.” And, of course, it won’t be pretty.

While such critical minerals might be mined in rural areas of the Congo and Zambia, they must reach the international marketplace to become profitable, which makes Angola and the Lobito Corridor key to Africa’s booming mining industry.

In 2024, China committed $4.5 billion to African lithium mines alone and another $7 billion to investments in copper and cobalt mining infrastructure. In the Congo, for example, China controls 70% of the mining sector.

Having lagged behind that country’s investments in Africa for years, the U.S. is now looking to make up ground.

Zambia’s Copper Colonialism

In September 2023, on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in India, Secretary of State Antony Blinken quietly signed an agreement with Angola, Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the European Union to launch the Lobito Corridor project. There wasn’t much fanfare or news coverage, but the United States had made a significant move. Almost 50 years after Portugal was forced out of Angola, the West was back, offering a $4 billion commitment and assessing the need to update the infrastructure first built by European colonizers. With a growing need for critical minerals, Western countries are now setting their sights on Africa and its green energy treasures.

“We meet at a historic moment,” President Joe Biden said as he welcomed Angolan President João Lourenço to Washington last year. Biden then called the Lobito project the “biggest U.S. rail investment in Africa ever” and affirmed the West’s interest in what the region might have to offer in the future. “America,” he added, “is all in on Africa… We’re all in with you and Angola.”

Both Africa and the U.S., Biden was careful to imply, would reap the benefits of such a coalition. Of course, that’s precisely the kind of rhetoric we can expect when Western (or Chinese) interests are intent on acquiring the resources of the Global South. If this were about oil or coal, questions and concerns would undoubtedly be raised regarding America’s regional intentions. Yet, with the fight against climate change providing cover, few are considering the geopolitical ramifications of such a position — and even fewer acknowledging the impacts of massively increased mining on the continent.

In his book Cobalt Red, Siddharth Kara exposes the bloody conditions cobalt miners in the Congo endure, many of them children laboring against their will for days on end, with little sleep and under excruciatingly abusive conditions. The dreadful story is much the same in Zambia, where copper exports account for more than 70% of the country’s total export revenue. A devastating 126-page report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) from 2011 exposed the wretchedness inside Zambia’s Chinese-owned mines: 18-hour work days, unsafe working environments, rampant anti-union activities, and fatal workplace accidents. There is little reason to believe it’s much different in the more recent Western-owned operations.

“Friends tell you that there’s a danger as they’re coming out of shift,” a miner who was injured while working for a Chinese company told HRW. “You’ll be fired if you refuse, they threaten this all the time… The main accidents are from rock falls, but you also have electrical shocks, people hit by mining trucks underground, people falling from platforms that aren’t stable… In my accident, I was in a loading box. The mine captain… didn’t put a platform. So when we were working, a rock fell down and hit my arm. It broke to the extent that the bone was coming out of the arm.”

An explosion at one mine killed 51 workers in 2005 and things have only devolved since then. Ten workers died in 2018 at an illegal copper extraction site. In 2019, three mineworkers were burned to death in an underground shaft fire and a landslide at an open-pit copper mine in Zambia killed more than 30 miners in 2023. Despite such horrors, there’s a rush to extract ever more copper in Zambia. As of 2022, five gigantic open-pit copper mines were operating in the country, and eight more underground mines were in production, many of which are to be further expanded in the years ahead. With new U.S.-backed mines in the works, Washington believes the Lobito Corridor may prove to be the missing link needed to ensure Zambian copper will end up in green energy goods consumed in the West.

AI Mining for AI Energy

The office of KoBold Metals in quaint downtown Berkeley, California, is about as far away from Zambia’s dirty mines as you can get. Yet, at KoBold’s nondescript headquarters, which sits above a row of trendy bars and restaurants, a team of tech entrepreneurs diligently work to locate the next big mine operation in Zambia using proprietary Artificial Intelligence (AI). Backed by billionaires Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, KoBold bills itself as a green Silicon Valley machine, committed to the world’s green energy transition (while turning a nice profit).

It is in KoBold’s interest, of course, to secure the energy deposits of the future because it will take an immense amount of energy to support their artificially intelligent world. A recent report by the International Energy Agency estimates that, in the near future, electricity usage by AI data centers will increase significantly. As of 2022, such data centers were already utilizing 460 terawatt hours (TWh) but are on pace to increase to 1,050 TWh by the middle of the decade. To put that in perspective, Europe’s total energy consumption in 2023 was around 2,700 TWh.

“Anyone who’s in the renewable space in the western world… is looking for copper and cobalt, which are fundamental to making electric vehicles,” Mfikeyi Makayi, chief executive of KoBold in Zambia, explained to the Financial Times in 2024. “That is going to come from this part of the world and the shortest route to take them out is Lobito.”

Makayi wasn’t beating around the bush. The critical minerals in KoBold mines won’t end up in the possession of Zambia or any other African country. They are bound for Western consumers alone. KoBold’s CEO Kurt House is also honest about his intentions: “I don’t need to be reminded again that I’m a capitalist,” he’s been known to quip.

In July 2024, House rang his company’s investors with great news: KoBold had just hit the jackpot in Zambia. Its novel AI tech had located the largest copper find in more than a decade. Once running, it could produce upwards of 300,000 tons of copper annually — or, in the language investors understand, the cash will soon flow. As of late summer 2024, one ton of copper on the international market cost more than $9,600. Of course, KoBold has gone all in, spending $2.3 billion to get the Zambian mine operable by 2030. Surely, KoBold’s investors were excited by the prospect, but not everyone was as thrilled as them.

“The value of copper that has left Zambia is in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Hold that figure in your mind, and then look around yourself in Zambia,” says Zambian economist Grieve Chelwa. “The link between resource and benefit is severed.”

Not only has Zambia relinquished the benefits of such mineral exploitation, but — consider it a guarantee — its people will be left to suffer the local mess that will result.

The Poisoned River

Konkola Copper Mines (KCM) is today the largest ore producer in Zambia, ripping out a combined two million tons of copper a year. It’s one of the nation’s largest employers, with a brutally long record of worker and environmental abuses. KCM runs Zambia’s largest open-pit mine, which stretches for seven miles. In 2019, the British-based Vedanta Resources acquired an 80% stake in KCM by covering $250 million of that company’s debt. Vedanta has deep pockets and is run by Indian billionaire Anil Agarwal, affectionately known in the mining world as “the Metal King.”

One thing should be taken for granted: You don’t become the Metal King without leaving entrails of toxic waste on your coattails. In India, Agarwal’s alumina mines have polluted the lands of the Indigenous Kondh tribes in Orissa Province. In Zambia, his copper mines have wrecked farmlands and waterways that once supplied fish and drinking water to thousands of villagers.

The Kafue River runs for more than 1,500 kilometers, making it Zambia’s longest river and now probably its most polluted as well. Going north to south, its waters flow through the Copperbelt, carrying with them cadmium, lead, and mercury from KCM’s mine. In 2019, thousands of Zambian villagers sued Vedanta, claiming its subsidiary KCM had poisoned the Kafue River and caused insurmountable damage to their lands.

The British Supreme Court then found Vedanta liable, and the company was forced to pay an undisclosed settlement, likely in the millions of dollars. Such a landmark victory for those Zambian villagers couldn’t have happened without the work of Chilekwa Mumba, who organized communities and convinced an international law firm to take up the case. Mumba grew up in the Chingola region of Zambia, where his father worked in the mines.

“[T]here was some environmental degradation going on as a result of the mining activities. As we found, there were times when the acid levels of water was so high,” explained Mumba, the 2023 African recipient of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize. “So there were very specific complaints about stomach issues from children. Children just really wander around the villages and if they are thirsty, they don’t think about what’s happening, they’ll just get a cup and take their drink of water from the river. That’s how they live. So they’ll usually get diseases. It’s hard to quantify, but clearly the impact was there.”

Sadly enough, though, despite that important legal victory, little has changed in Zambia, where environmental regulations remain weak and nearly impossible to enforce, which leaves mining companies like KCM to regulate themselves. A 2024 Zambian legislative bill seeks to create a regulatory body to oversee mining operations, but the industry has pushed back, making it unclear if it will ever be signed into law. Even if the law does pass, it may have little real-world impact on mining practices there.

The warming climate, at least to the billionaire mine owners and their Western accomplices, will remain an afterthought, as well as a justification to exploit more of Africa’s critical minerals. Consider it a new type of colonialism, this time with a green capitalist veneer. There are just too many AI programs to run, too many tech gadgets to manufacture, and too much money to be made.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump and GOP leaders continue to promote the insidious falsehood that noncitizen immigrants are voting. Democrats and pundits point to evidence in study after study showing noncitizens are not voting, except in exceedingly rare occasions.

Few talk about whether noncitizen immigrants should have voting rights. Although it may sound odd or outlandish at first blush, there are strong moral and practical reasons to consider the merits of immigrant voting rights:

First, it’s rational. Twenty-two million residents are noncitizens (about 1 in 14), both documented and unauthorized immigrants. They live in every state and virtually every town. They are teachers and students, physicians and nurses, musicians and construction workers. They raise families, send kids to schools, contribute billions in taxes, make countless social and cultural contributions, serve in the military, and even die defending this country. Despite Trump’s desire to deport them, immigrants make the operation of much of our economy and society possible. Yet they cannot vote on issues crucial to their daily lives.

Just as the civil rights movement extended the franchise to African-Americans who had been barred from voting, efforts to extend the franchise to new Americans similarly seek to advance their equitable representation and inclusion.

America’s experience of excluding African Americans, women, and young people points to the dangers of excluding groups from the political process. Discriminatory practices and public policy in housing, education, healthcare, welfare, and criminal justice are the inevitable by-products of political exclusion. As the age-old political maxim attests, if you are excluded from the vote, politicians can more easily ignore you.

Although highly heterogeneous, as a group immigrants rank at the bottom of the social order, scoring low on indicators of well-being, including income, education, housing, and health. One in four low-income children is the child of an immigrant, and one in four low-wage workers is foreign-born. Immigrant families are more likely to lack health insurance, have poor health, and be “food-insecure” than the native-born. Latinos, the largest group of immigrants, experience the worst conditions, and Mexicans, the largest group of Latinos, face the biggest obstacles. Social scientists have long established that immigrants’ lack of access to citizenship and patterns of low voter registration and participation are highly correlated with underrepresentation in government and biased public policy outcomes.

Just as the civil rights movement extended the franchise to African-Americans who had been barred from voting, efforts to extend the franchise to new Americans similarly seek to advance their equitable representation and inclusion.

Second, it’s as American as apple pie. Most people are surprised to learn that noncitizens legally voted in 40 states at some point in time between 1776 to 1926. Immigrants voted not just in local elections, but also in state and even federal elections, and noncitizens could run for office. “Alien suffrage,” as these laws were called, was seen not as a substitute for citizenship, but as a pathway to foster citizenship and immigrant integration. The notion that noncitizens should have the vote is older, was practiced longer, and is more consistent with democratic ideals than the idea that they should not. Curiously, this 150-year history has been largely eviscerated from American national memory. In fact, the U.S. Constitution still does not preclude noncitizen voting, and the courts—including the Supreme Court—have upheld voting by noncitizens.

During the 19th century, when immigrants comprised 10% to 30% of the population in many states, noncitizens voted in significant numbers, and factored into election outcomes on salient issues of the day, helping advance anti-slavery causes, pro-worker issues, and progressive policy. The abolition of alien suffrage in the early 1920s coincided with the enactment of literacy tests, poll taxes, felony disenfranchisement laws, and restrictive residency and voter registration requirements that disenfranchised millions of voters.

Third, it’s feasible. Immigrant voting rights are being restored. Today, noncitizens legally vote in 17 localities from coast to coast, and other jurisdictions are considering restoring immigrant voting rights.

The Civil Rights movement helped revive immigrant voting in New York City in 1968, followed by the Sanctuary movement in the 1980s in Maryland where 10 towns allow it, and more recently in three towns in Vermont during the 2020s (Montpelier, Winooski and Burlington); San Francisco (2016) and Oakland (2022), California; New York City (2021) and Washington D.C. (2022). Other jurisdictions have enacted local laws—or have considered restoring immigrant-voting rights—including five localities in Massachusetts, six in California, one in Maine and Ohio, and in state elections in Connecticut.

Some laws provide voting rights to all residents—both documented and undocumented immigrants (MD, SF, D.C.)—while other jurisdictions enfranchise only Legal Permanent Residents (LPRs) and those with work permits (NY, VT). In some jurisdictions, noncitizens have voted in significant numbers, electing diverse representative bodies and fostering improvements in schools and student outcomes.

Globally, at least 45 countries on nearly every continent have extended voting rights to noncitizens in local, regional, and even national elections during the past several decades. These laws seek to align democratic principles with democratic practice.

Immigrants are under attack today and need greater tools to defend themselves, so why not debate the merits of restoring immigrant voting rights? As Jamie Raskin, a Maryland congressman and law professor who wrote a seminal 1992 law review journal article about alien suffrage that spurred its revival, put it, “immigrant rights are the civil rights” of the day and “by that logic, noncitizen voting is the suffrage movement” of our time.

Today, our nation celebrates National Coming Out Day. This October 11, you may see a wave of brave stories from your friends or family members, right along with messages of support from corporations touting their inclusive environments. It is a day when many of us in the LGBTQIA+ community choose to share our true selves with our loved ones, our community, our co-workers, and the world. And it serves as a reminder of the progress that has been made and how fortunate we are that so many can now feel comfortable to live openly and out loud.

After centuries of battles, whether that be on the streets outside Stonewall or in the courtrooms across our country, it is comforting to know that the efforts of our elders have helped to create a society where more people feel comfortable enough to live as their authentic selves.

Yet, the progress that we see today can, if we are not paying careful attention, belie the reality that our communities—and the progress we've made—continue to be under attack. Coming out is a deeply personal choice—a choice that becomes more difficult without cultural acceptance, and without the promises of security and protection we have increasingly begun to expect. But these hard-fought protections are, sadly, now being stripped away by the anti-DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) movement and its pressure campaign pushing employers to backtrack on their commitment to inclusivity.

Now is the time to prove you respect your LGBTQIA+ employees as people, and that their personhood is not a fad that can be easily discarded when there is pushback.

Across the country we have been seeing a concerning trend of companies, both large and small, scaling back or eliminating their DEI commitments out of fear. One key measure of that is the number of companies withdrawing from participation in the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Corporate Equality Index, a long-time and widely used measure of companies' commitment to respecting the rights of their LGBTQIA+ employees. To maintain the progress we've made, it is important that we recognize and push back on these attacks.

National Coming Out Day was created in 1988 to commemorate the first anniversary of the 1987 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. Inspired by the visibility of that event, the day was meant to encourage individuals to live openly and make themselves visible at home, at work, and in their local communities—demonstrating the strength of the LGBT movement and promoting acceptance. By 1993, the National Coming Out Day organization had merged with the Human Rights Campaign Fund. HRC's Corporate Equality Index later grew from this sentiment and was developed to push for a world where gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer employees could be out at work without facing discrimination in hiring or on the job. This was a crucial tool for LGBTQIA+ employees at the time of its creation, and it still stands as an important resource for the community to this day.

When companies like Ford, Harley-Davidson, and Lowe's —all targeted by ultra-conservatives to sow division and fear—withdraw from participating in the Corporate Equality Index, they undermine a tool that has driven substantial progress for LGBTQIA+ employees over the past two decades.Today, the index is as crucial as ever. It's not just about acceptance or branded pride parade swag; it's about creating an environment where everyone—regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity—can thrive. And thriving requires that our laws and institutions guarantee that one's livelihood, healthcare, and chance for financial security are not put at risk by choosing to live openly and freely. LGBTQIA+ employees in many states are already feeling their human rights come under attack through hateful and discriminatory state laws. The last thing they need is to have their places of employment also turning their backs on them. How can individuals feel safe coming out when the very systems designed to protect them are under attack?

The rollback of DEI programs isn't just a moral issue; it's increasingly a legal one. Lawsuits have been filed against employers claiming that DEI initiatives that work to welcome and include people of color and LGBTQIA+ folks discriminate against white people and straight cisgender people. While these suits exploit existing tensions, they overlook an important fact—legal protections exist to support inclusive workplaces.

Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, employment discrimination in the United States on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity is illegal. This was made clear in 2020 with the Supreme Court's decision in Bostock v. Clayton County. This legal framework provides a foundation for companies committed to true inclusivity and is the starting point for them to showcase an authentic commitment to equality.

To the corporate leaders reading this, now is the time to stand firm and hold strong in your values. It's easy to support diversity in times of peace, but it's during times of challenge that true commitment is tested. Companies who were early allies in the fight for equality are still remembered and respected to this day. Now is the time to prove you respect your LGBTQIA+ employees as people, and that their personhood is not a fad that can be easily discarded when there is pushback.There are legal protections to ensure your commitment to the principles of equality and inclusion are bolstered against this wave of divisive political agendas. And it is your duty to ensure DEI is cemented into your institution's core values.

National Coming Out Day is a celebration of courage. It is a reminder of the progress that has been made possible by that courage, and that every person deserves the right to live openly without fear of retribution or exclusion. But this can only happen in an environment where safety and acceptance are firmly rooted in our laws and our institutions. This October 11, let's reaffirm our commitment to equality and stand up to this hateful and divisive anti-DEI rhetoric.

If you were a rich Wisconsinite striving to get even richer and you had little regard for intellectual honesty or the well-being of your fellow citizens, you would agree with Sen. Ron Johnson’s remarks at last month’s Senate Finance Committee hearing.

Otherwise, you’d find the senator’s views troublesome, to say the least.

I was a witness at that hearing. Johnson asked me to agree with him that having both an income tax and an estate tax is double taxation. As politely as I could, I pointed out that the income tax and the estate tax are two different taxes. The senator’s argument is no different than saying it is double taxation if an average American, after paying tax on her wages, pays federal excise tax at the pump when she purchases gas.

Unless and until Johnson’s face replaces Roosevelt’s at Mt. Rushmore, I’ll go out on a limb and say we should stick with the tax structure Roosevelt advocated.

Johnson undoubtedly knows better. America has had both an estate tax and an income tax for over a century now. They’re two different taxes. One is an income tax; the other is an excise tax on the transfer of substantial wealth. The specific purpose of the estate tax was to limit the size of America’s largest dynastic fortunes, lest we slip into an aristocracy. The lead advocate for the estate tax, President Teddy Roosevelt, recognized the necessity for both taxes: “The really swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size,” Roosevelt observed, “acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means.” Therefore, Roosevelt, a Republican like Johnson, advocated for both a “graduated income tax on big fortunes,” and “a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.”

At the hearing, Johnson was speaking in support of keeping one of the worst loopholes in the tax code, a provision commonly known as stepped-up basis. It allows the untaxed gains on the investment assets of mega-millionaires and billionaires to escape income taxation entirely, as long as they hold those assets until death. Jeff Bezos, for example, would avoid income tax on over $100 billion of gain on his Amazon shares were he to hold those shares until his death. And if ultra-rich Americans ever need cash, they don’t need to sell highly appreciated assets. Instead, they can borrow against the assets. It’s a strategy known as buy-borrow-die.

Johnson’s true goal isn’t really protecting the ultra-rich from double taxation, though. He actually wants to protect them from any taxation. That’s what the Death Tax Repeal Act of 2023, a bill Johnson and 41 other Republican senators have sponsored, would do. If that were to become law, Mr. Bezos, or any other billionaire, could pass his billions to his inheritors free of both estate tax and income tax on all those previously untaxed gains.

Unless and until Johnson’s face replaces Roosevelt’s at Mt. Rushmore, I’ll go out on a limb and say we should stick with the tax structure Roosevelt advocated. And that requires closing the stepped-up basis loophole.

At the hearing, Johnson did not limit his shilling for the ultra-rich to the stepped-up basis issue. While purporting to be concerned about income inequality, Johnson advocated for proposals obviously intended to benefit his rich benefactors and, worse yet, himself. Were it up to him, for example, our tax law would “index out” inflationary gains. Here’s how that would work for Johnson and his fellow real estate moguls: Say Johnson purchased a property for $10 million with $2 million in cash and an $8 million loan, using the property’s rental income to make the loan payments. Now, say inflation ran at 4% for 10 years and Johnson’s property kept pace. Under his plan, he’d be treated as if he paid $14 million for the property. And if he then sold the property for its $14 million value? He’d have no income tax to pay, but after paying off the loan, he’d have a $4 million profit. Yes, $800,000 of that profit would be attributable to inflation, but the other $3.2 million would be real profit, and it would escape tax entirely if Johnson has his way.

Johnson’s efforts to “address inequality”—yes, he really presented it this way at the hearing—aren’t limited to opposing stepped-up basis reform and advocating for indexing for inflation. He also insists that he and his rich patrons not be taxed on their massive investment gains until they sell assets so they have the “wherewithal to pay.” That would allow the country’s ultra-rich to continue to benefit from the tax-free compounding of their investment gains using the buy-borrow-die strategy. When you do the math, even when the ultra-rich sell long-held investments before they die and pay tax on their gains, the effective annual rate of tax on the growth in their wealth can be less than 5%. With Johnson’s plan to “index out” inflation added to his staunch support of buy-borrow die, that effective rate would be even lower.

There’s no need to guess about whether Johnson believes he’s advocating for good tax policy or is simply carrying water for his billionaire backers (and himself). The record is clear. In 2017, Johnson pushed hard for the so-called “pass-through deduction,” which allows owners of limited liability companies and subchapter S corporations to pay a 20% lower rate of tax on their income. He even threatened to withhold his vote for former President Donald Trump’s tax package unless the pass-through deduction was increased. In 2018, according to reporting by ProPublica, the pass-through deduction generated tax deductions of over $117 million for Dick and Liz Uihlein, the owners of Uline, and over $97 million for Diane Hendricks, the owner of ABC Supply Co. In 2022, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Hendricks and the Uihleins contributed at least $22.5 million to Wisconsin Truth PAC, a Johnson-supporting super PAC which spent $24 million on ads attacking Johnson’s 2022 opponent, Mandela Barnes.

Those massive contributions were entirely rational, in a depressing way that reeks of corruption. In 2018 alone, Hendricks and the Uihleins saved just under $80 million in tax as a result of Johnson’s handiwork. His efforts to continue the pass-through deduction past its scheduled 2025 expiration date could net them about $1 billion over the next decade. That $22.5 million they spent on Johson’s 2022 senate campaign may be categorized as a campaign contribution. But when $22.5 million has the potential to enrich you to the tune of $1 billion, it smells a lot more like an investment. And a highly profitable one; the kind only billionaires experience.

With Washington filled with politicians like Ron Johnson, we need more patriotic millionaires. A lot more. To paraphrase our Vice Chair, Stephen Prince, we need more wealthy Americans to step up and say that while they like being rich, they recognize that our tax system has been rigged in their favor for far too long. And we need more politicians fighting to unrig our tax system, not rig it further. We’ll never change the mindset of Ron Johnson and his ilk. The only way to fix this mess is to elect politicians who will outvote them.

The famous rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel, was once asked by a journalist why he, as a religious leader, had come to a demonstration against the war in Vietnam. Heschel answered: “I am here because I cannot pray... Whenever I open the prayer book, I see images of children burning from napalm”

Now, as we approach this evening's Yom Kippur, the day when Jews traditionally reflect on the past and repent, I see the horrifying photos of Israeli and Palestinian children, women and men, who have been killed over the past year. The images of the dead and the brutal way in which they were killed, haunts me and I feel called to pray through protest as Rabbi Heschel once did.

The first anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel was just five days ago and tonight we will remember the over 1100 Israelis who were killed, the 247 who were taken hostage, and the 97 Israelis still held as hostages in Gaza. It is not new for Jews to mark tragedies. But, this year, for the first time in more than 3,000 years of Jewish history, Jews will observe Yom Kippur as Israel continues a year long attack on Gaza that the International Court of Justice ruled is plausibly a case of genocide. Scholars like Raz Segal and Omer Bartov, and Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on Occupied Territories, agree.

“Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods.” —Rabbi Heschel

I was raised in a passionately Zionist community in Apartheid South Africa. My father was a leader of the Jewish community and the Judaism that I learned from him, in my Jewish Day school, and my Zionist youth movement, inspired deep loyalty to Israel no matter what decisions its leaders made. Despite this, I began to question Zionism. In 2003, I was one of the founders of Rabbis for Human Rights North America. In that role, I learned first-hand about the systemic injustice of daily life in Palestine, by trying to stop Israeli home demolitions. I also learned from Israeli and Palestinian activists about the Nakba, when thousands of Palestinians were displaced from their homes in 1948.

Today, I know that I’m complicit in Israel’s war as both a rabbi and an American. However I am not alone. All Americans are implicated in today’s atrocities. The United States has sent more than 50,000 tons of armaments and military equipment to Israel since October 7th. More than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed. Recently, reports of mass terror, rape, and abuse in Israeli detention centers have been added to the list of war crimes and atrocities. Israel has also destroyed schools, mosques, cultural centers, libraries, important historical heritage sites and more throughout Gaza.

As Americans, we must face the truth of our complicity with this horror. And, like Rabbi Heschel we must take bold action to end it, instead of simply praying for change. As Heschel said, “Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods.”

In the wake of October 7, I have followed Rabbi Heshel’s example, and prayed through protest, at several actions organized by Rabbis for Ceasefire and If Not Now. Here are four suggestions for how we can all take action in this new year: 1) Educate ourselves about the history of the Palestinian people, especially about the Nakba in 1948. 2) Support calls for an immediate ceasefire. The violence on both sides endangers everyone. 3) Demand an immediate arms embargo to end the supply of American bombs that have enabled the genocide. 4) Support a negotiated settlement that guarantees freedom, equality and justice for all who live in Israel and Palestine.

As the Palestinian journalis Ahmed Moor writes, “Hope for the future, such as it is, is fixed in a vision that requires the end of Jewish supremacy in Palestine.” May our prayers on this Yom Kippur be in the streets. May we end the genocide and advocate for equality, freedom, justice, and safety for all who live in Israel/Palestine.

After U.S. President Joe Biden was shuffled off stage on trumped-up charges of senility, I started thinking seriously about the weaponization of old age in our world. Who gets credit for old age and who gets the boot?

At 86, I share that affliction, pervasive among the richest, healthiest, and/or luckiest of us, who manage to hang around the longest. Former President Donald Trump is, of course, in this same group, although much of America seems to be in selective denial about his diminishing capabilities. He was crushed recently in The Great Debate yet is generally given something of a mulligan for hubris, craziness, and unwillingness to prepare. But face it, unlike Joe B., he was simply too old to cut the mustard.

It’s time to get real about old age as a condition that, yes, desperately needs and deserves better resources and reverence, but also careful monitoring and culling. Such thinking is not a bias crime. It’s not even an alert for ancient drivers on the roads. It’s an alarm for tolerating dangerous old politicians who spread lies and send youngsters to war, while we continue to willfully waste the useful experience and energy of all ages.

Once you’ve accepted that you’ll look, feel, and be treated differently in old age, you’re also ready to accept the fact that you can be the master of your attitude and response.

We have to weaponize old age for good causes. We have to shake a mindset that allows us to warehouse people because their presence is an inconvenience while covering up for those with money and power. Out of shame or guilt or that feeling of elder helplessness, even smart old people all too often go along with arbitrary cut-off dates. I remember my dad, at 75 and retired, inveighing against the “dead wood,” especially in his field (education) that blocked progress and discouraged young energy and innovation. By 75, he maintained, people were sliding downhill, which was his way of justifying being shelved himself. He became increasingly depressed and listless, not because he was too old but because he had been made to feel useless.

Then, at 76, he was given the chance to help other old people with their tax returns and, ultimately, their confrontations with local government. He promptly perked up and became an active advocate for elder rights until his accidental death at 100.

My old friends and I talk constantly about our aging, how to suffer it, outwit it, gang up on it, or even strategically give in to it. We’ve decided that nobody in power is doing anything meaningful about it because, beyond exploitive eldercare, they haven’t figured out how to turn a profit.

Meanwhile, the really rich coots like Rupert Murdoch, at 93, are still tomcatting around and fussing with succession plans, while Warren Buffet, at 94, is cagily toying with his billions to avoid inheritance taxes.

Those old boys are anything but role models for me and my friends. After all, they’ve been practicing all their lives how to be rich old pigs, their philanthropy mirroring their interests, not the needs of the rest of us. In my pay grade, we’re expected to concentrate on tips from AARP newsletters on how to avoid telephone scams and falls, the bane of the geezer class. And that’s important, but it’s also a way of keeping us anxious and impotent.

Those Falls

This screed isn’t just the product of my stewing over old age. An incident in the parking lot of a big box store on the day after The Great Debate set me off.

Here’s what happened: An elderly man in the car beside mine stepped out of the driver’s seat, lowered his cane to the concrete, and pitched over flat on his face. His wife immediately ran to him from the passenger’s seat. I got there next, phone out, and asked her if I should call an ambulance. She was adamant: No! Within two minutes there were six of us, including four elderly gents, helping him turn himself over and sit up. There was no blood on his face, just one skinned kneecap.

He shook off attempts to help him stand, looking angry, humiliated, and embarrassed. I finally rolled a shopping cart next to him and he used it to clamber to his feet. Even with his cane planted on the concrete, he still seemed shaky, but he got right back in his car with his wife and hurriedly drove off. The rest of us looked at each other and wordlessly drifted away.

I then sat in my car trying to sort out what I had just experienced. On the one hand, the quick response of a largely elderly crew was thrilling proof that we were still up for the game, that we could still help each other. But I found the embarrassed, almost hostile response of the fallen man—and the wife who obviously knew what he wouldn’t stand for—discouraging. Why hadn’t he acknowledged our desire to help him? Why had he driven off so brusquely without even checking himself out?

And why should he have felt so obviously mortified by a common accident? Because it was such a marker of old age? Why hadn’t the rest of us, me included, tried to be more persuasive about helping him? Were we too inappropriately understanding of old age’s sense of vulnerability, weakness, helplessness? The seeming diminution of manhood? Would a woman have acted differently?

I then mentioned it to a woman—my wife Lois and she promptly asked me, “Did it remind you of your fall?”

How had I forgotten that?

Just last winter, while walking the dog, my legs had slid out from under me on my icy driveway. I was suddenly flat on my back. I thought about inching down the driveway to a fence where I might be able to pull myself up. It would be a long trip, but…

A voice suddenly boomed out behind me. “You alright?”

“I’m fine, thanks,” I said as cheerily as I could.

“Yeah, right. It’s Jim Read.”

The local chief of police! I felt embarrassed. Strong hands boosted me up, guided me down the driveway to safe ground, and frisked me for broken bones. I barely had a chance to say thanks, before he was back in his patrol car, pulling away.

A few months later I ran into him. He shrugged off my thanks, as if he either didn’t remember my fall or considered it too commonplace to dwell on.

Role Models

Those incidents stay in my mind as symbolic of how routinely we oldsters shrink from confronting our vulnerabilities. And then I thought about two people I had once known and one I still see who faced them head-on

My prime role model, my dad, helped form my attitude toward aging and, in my own old age, he—or at least his memory—lives with me still. Above all, he taught me not to be afraid of the whole process. The second crucial figure—remember for years I was a sports reporter for The New York Times—was New York Yankee and then New York Mets manager Casey Stengel who showed me how aging could be used, for better and for worse. And my current inspiration, the 95-year-old artist Jules Feiffer, continues to offer me a blueprint for having a late working life. What they’ve all taught me is this: Once you’ve accepted that you’ll look, feel, and be treated differently in old age, you’re also ready to accept the fact that you can be the master of your attitude and response.

I met Stengel in 1962 at the first spring training of the New York Mets. He was then 71 years old, incredibly old to the 24-year-old sportswriter Robert Lipsyte. (And remember that “old” started much sooner then.) He was bitter at having recently been fired after a long and historic winning career with the Yankees. “I made the mistake of getting old,” he would tell me.

It does seem that old age almost always arrives at a bad time and it’s hard to kick the bad guys in the butt when you can’t raise your knee.

Most sportswriters readily accepted the decision of the Yankees and treated Stengel as a comical figure, too old to manage effectively. They wrote him off as “the ol’ Perfesser” and his rambling monologues as nonsensical “Stengelese,” when all conversation with him required was careful attention. (Mind you, I’m not innocent here. More than 60 years later, I still cringe at descriptions in articles I wrote then of his “pleated face” and scuttling, crab-like gait.)

Stengel could be cruel. One spring, he called a press conference and trotted out the two least talented rookies in training camp. He regaled the sportswriters with predictions about their potential and how they represented the future of the brand-new Mets. National and local press and TV outlets featured them. A few days later, they were cut from the team and never heard from again, corollary casualties of Casey’s revenge on the media.

At the time, I felt sorry for those young players. But even as one of the victims of his nasty prank, I couldn’t help appreciating how he had used our ageism against us. We swallowed his story. After all, how could that old coot bamboozle us?

But there was another side to Casey. That same first season with the Mets, on a muggy night in Houston during pre-game batting practice, I watched him respond to a middle-aged man, dragging a sullen-looking teenage boy, who beckoned from the stands. “I wonder if you remember me, Case,” he said, mentioning his name. “I pitched against you in Kankakee.” (He was referring to a pre-World War I minor-league team in Illinois at the start of Stengel’s long playing career.) The teenager kept trying to pull his father away.

Casey read the situation. He said, “The old fireballer himself. Why I was sure glad when you quit that league, I never could hit you a-tall.” Casey kept talking until it was time to manage the game.

The man and the boy returned to their seats, grinning, shoulders bumping. When I caught up to Casey, he just shrugged and then admitted he had no memory of who the man was.

Later, I told the story to one of the “Stengelese” sportswriters and he suggested Casey had staged the scene to impress The New York Times’ soft-hearted, liberal rookie reporter. “You should write that,” I responded. “It’s another way of looking at him, proves he’s still pretty sharp.”

“It’s not what the fans and the editors want,” the older sportswriter said. “They like the nutty old-fart stuff. It sells.”

The nutty old-fart stuff still sells—in the case of Joe Biden as a way to diminish, dismiss, or even demonize him. Soon after his debate debacle with Donald Trump, a stylish young editor at GQ asked me to write an old man’s take on the president’s situation, a welcome nod to experience. The first thing I thought of was how hard it is for any of us to give up what I call “the warm,” that cheering spotlight of attention. I thought of heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali, who I had ever so long ago covered as a reporter and how, in his final fights, he was humiliated because he couldn’t acknowledge getting older, losing strength and power, stuck as he was in the victory culture male’s sense of power and triumph, of never surrendering.

Biden must have shared that until he committed what functionally was political suicide, even if it was acclaimed as a selfless sacrifice.

My current inspiration, my friend and former neighbor Jules Feiffer, the famed Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, is seriously hearing- and sight-impaired and can barely walk. But he can still think, laugh, and draw. Every day.

Jules is one of those “shining examples”—especially after his first attempt at a graphic novel for middle-graders, Amazing Grapes, just got a rave review in The New York Times and tons of attention (“mostly because I’m so old,” he assured me). But it’s his spirit, often mislabeled as “youthful” instead of humane, that offers hope. Even as he admittedly struggles to hang on to what’s left of his Bronx-born American dream in the Age of Trump, he never gives up on himself or his ability to keep nudging his readers toward their own sense of possibility and change. His nearly completed next book—yes, there already is one!—will be an illustrated commentary on his (and our) strange times.

Okay, so where do I go from here? In fantasy, Dad, Casey, and Jules would make a fine team to deal with this increasingly disturbed and disturbing world of ours. If only. But how exactly do we put such a team together? We’re all short-timers, no matter how old we get, but we can’t let the bad guys wait us out. We need to treat old age as an identity and ourselves as part of an ethnic-style group deserving attention.

Yes, it does seem that old age almost always arrives at a bad time and it’s hard to kick the bad guys in the butt when you can’t raise your knee. And somehow the shining examples of individual super seniors like Dad, Casey, and Jules tend to remain just that—shining examples—rather than models for small-scale collective action.

But consider this my call to (old) arms. After all these years, haven’t we earned the right to be loud and obstreperous?

A Gang of Elders

As the former president of my town’s senior citizen organization let me tell you this: Old age is just a wrinkled extension of who you’ve always been, whether you end up frolicking in a golf cart at a luxury retirement community or waiting in semi-darkness for Meals on Wheels.

The board of my group was made up of a dozen oldsters who variously worked remarkably hard or were remarkably lazy, proved innovative or simply obstructive in distinctly alert or zombie-like modes—pretty much, I thought, as they must have acted all their lives. The nice ones could be passive, the mean ones relentless. Institutional memory was generally a good thing, but all too often presented itself as numbing anecdotage. Those seniors I dealt with then defined themselves by class, education, or economic position, but rarely age. Beyond creaky joints, treated with wry humor, and recommended doctors, old never seemed to be a shared identity.

Why not? Maybe because we didn’t have a clear social mission. The group’s main job was supporting—by fundraising and lobbying—the town’s senior services, mostly nutritional and logistical. We did that well, from buying an $85,000 wheelchair-accessible bus to renovating the local church kitchen that serves much of the food at senior events. But we could never get it together for the next major step—creating a political force. Maybe we could get seniors out on election day, but we couldn’t get them to vote for the candidates that might serve their immediate interests, much less help deal with climate change, water quality, community housing, medical and healthy food accessibility, and the like.

We couldn’t mount a resistance. We couldn’t recapitulate the spirit of the Gray Panthers, the group formed in 1970 to combat forced retirement, reform nursing home practices, and protect social security. Founder Maggie Kuhn said: “Old age is not a disease—it is strength and survivorship, triumph over all kinds of vicissitudes and disappointments, trials and illnesses.”

The Gray Panthers were created to be an intergenerational group although its energy came from the anger and experience of its older members. The Gray Panthers exist, working for peace and equal rights. Understandably it’s not a commercially sexy group and doesn’t get a lot of publicity. Still, in the age of Donald Trump, go join them anyway and remind the world that he is not what it means to be old, although statistically he would be our oldest president if the worst-case scenario occurs in November.

Or start your own club. Be a club of one. Register old people to vote and drive them to the ballot box. Don’t be shy. What have we got to lose? They can’t eat us, can they? Sharpen the end of your cane, affix spurs to the front of your wheelchair. Die trying.

While you’re at it just try not to fall. And if you do, let someone help you up.

“There would be much more violent weather – more storms, more droughts, more deluges.”

That prophecy isn’t from the Book of Revelation, but from a confidential 1989 Shell Oil memo the company commissioned to better understand what global warming could mean for their business in the decades to come.

Today, the sentence reads like a daily weather report. In the last few weeks, we’ve seen the devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene, a “deluge” that wiped out entire towns and sent homes and semi-trucks spiraling down rivers of mud, and now Hurricane Milton, one of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded. In Nepal, extreme flooding there has claimed over more than 200 lives and left parts of the capitol underwater. Meanwhile, the Amazon is facing its “worst drought on record,” further endangering what scientists have referred to as the “lungs of the world.”

“Civilisation could prove a fragile thing,” wrote the authors of the 1989 Shell memo. Indeed. As we’ve seen over the last few months, even supposed climate havens, like Asheville, NC, have been undone by extreme weather. We’ve entered an age where our civilization, no matter where we live, will likely be in need of constant upkeep and repair in the face of ever worsening climate disasters. Rebuilding our communities, and strengthening them for the challenges ahead, will be an ongoing struggle for generations to come.

For more than 70 years the fossil fuel industry has continued to rake in profits without paying a single dollar for the damage they knew their product was causing to our climate and communities.

Which raises the question: how are we going to pay for all of this? Early estimates put the damage of Hurricane Helene at over $200 billion and Hurricane Milton at $175 billion, astronomical figures that still can’t begin to calculate the cost of the lives lost and communities upended. That’s on top of the more than $150 billion a year the US government estimates Americans are already paying for extreme weather events. And that’s a low end estimate. According to a study released earlier this year in Nature concluded that the cost of climate damages to the global economy could reach $38 trillion a year by 2050.

Right now, those costs are coming out of one place in particular: our pockets. Even if your home hasn’t been washed away by a flood, you’re likely paying more for your home insurance due to others that have. Even if your farm hasn’t been wrecked by drought, you’re now paying more for your groceries at the supermarket. The dollars your town had set aside for a new school? They’re now being spent to rebuild roads or repair a bridge that got wiped out by yet another “100-year” flood.

Faced with these ever mounting costs, some local leaders are turning to a different solution: making polluters pay their fair share for the damage they’ve done. After all, that 1989 Shell memo isn’t the only example that fossil fuel companies knew exactly the consequences of the ongoing use of their product. As early as the 1950s, oil and gas companies knew about the dangers of global warming, but instead of warning the public and moving to clean energy, they went on to spread lies and disinformation to protect their profits.

Put another way, for more than 70 years the fossil fuel industry has continued to rake in profits without paying a single dollar for the damage they knew their product was causing to our climate and communities. Instead, they’ve very intentionally “externalized” those costs onto the rest of us, not only in the form of climate impacts, but in terms of our health, local environments, and more.

Now the bill is coming due. This May, Vermont became the first state in the country to pass a Climate Superfund Act that will make oil and gas companies pay into a fund that can be used for climate adaptation and disaster response. Five other states are debating similar legislation, including in New York, where legislators passed a climate superfund bill in June and are now waiting on Governor Kathy Hochul’s signature (last week, activists delivered more than 127,000 signatures to the Governor’s office demanding she stop dragging her feet and sign the bill into law). In September, Senator Van Hollen and Representative Jerry Nadler introduced a federal Climate Superfund bill that would collect $1 trillion from oil and gas companies to be used for relief and resiliency efforts nationwide.

The push for state and federal climate superfund bills is running in parallel to the now dozens of city, state, county, and Tribal governments who have filed lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry for climate lies and damages. These lawsuits could recoup even more money from oil and gas companies for damages, as well as uncover yet more evidence of their ongoing fraud and deception. In addition to these civil cases, some experts and attorneys are now proposing bringing criminal charges against oil companies for the “wrongful deaths” associated with extreme weather events (expect to hear more about climate homicide in the months ahead).

The devastation caused by Hurricanes Helene and Milton, and similar climate disasters around the world, demands more of a response than the “thoughts and prayers” offered by politicians still in the pocket of Big Oil. Recent polling shows that 70% of US voters support making oil and gas companies pay their fair share for climate damages. It’s time for our leaders to answer that call and make polluters pay.

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

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

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

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

That’s it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We need to teach Democrats a lesson.”

Arguably, Democrats have already learned that lesson.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

None of this is inevitable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scholasticide.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Need for Sacrifice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Democracy and Sacrifice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sharing the Sacrifice

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

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

Enter Serbia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting to YIMBY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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