The annual state of the union address by the president is perhaps the oldest ritual in American politics. Informing the Congress of the state of the union is one of the few presidential duties written into the Constitution. Up until Woodrow Wilson, American presidents simply submitted a written assessment of the state of the union. Over the decades, SOTU has become a media spectacle. Members of Congress have been known to arrive in the chamber of the House of Representatives hours in advance to be seen on national television shaking hands with the president. Beginning with Ronald Reagan in 1982, presidents have invited guests to send a political message. Members of Congress now follow suit and use guests to make political points.

The SOTU is quite simply American political theater at its best. It is far more about posturing than public policy. In normal times, the issue of boycotting the SOTU would be a minor issue. These, however, are anything but normal times. Since the introduction of the SOTU speech by Wilson, no political party has boycotted SOTU. Members of Congress have chosen other means of making political points, which have included heckling of the president.

There is currently a debate raging among Democratic members of Congress as to whether the best way to protest President Donald Trump’s assault on American democracy is to attend the SOTU as normal or to protest the speech by boycotting it and attending an alternative event. Democratic leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has said that he will attend the SOTU. The New York Times reported on February 17:

Mr. Jeffries on Tuesday said it was his “present intention” to attend. “We’re not going to his house, he’s coming to our house,” he told reporters at a news conference. “Having grown up where I grew up, you never let anyone run you off your block.” (Mr. Jeffries grew up in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn.)

I certainly understand and appreciate Jeffries’ attitude. In past years under a Reagan or George W. Bush presidency it would have made a lot of sense. However, Trump 2.0 is far different presidency than either Reagan or Bush. Democrats had profound differences with Presidents Reagan and Bush. These differences are nothing compared with what the Democrats have with Trump. The bottom line is that unlike Reagan or Bush, Trump is waging war against our democratic system and the rule of law.

If Democrats attend the SOTU, they are implicitly sending a message that these are normal times and that Trump is a normal president. The argument can be made that members of Congress have an obligation to listen to any president’s SOTU. To counter this argument, I would say that by simply showing up in the House chamber to listen to the SOTU, Democratic members of Congress are sending the message that Trump is a president like we have had in the past. After the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and Trump pardoning those who stormed into the Senate chamber and who almost made it into the House chamber, the very space that the SOTU is held, destroyed completely any conception that Trump is a normal president.

Any Democratic member of Congress who attends the SOTU is simply acting as a bit player in Donald Trump’s latest reality show. Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy who boycotted the SOTU last year put it quite simply, “These aren’t normal times, and we have to stop doing normal things.”

Democratic members of Congress have the opportunity by boycotting the SOTU and attending an alternative event to send America the message that these are not normal times. By boycotting Trump’s SOTU, Democratic members of Congress can stand up for American democracy.

Affordability is a crisis that keeps millions of us awake at night. It is not, as President Donald Trump claims, a word Democrats “made up.” As more and more families struggle to pay their bills, we need policy solutions, not partisan deflections.

By most accounts, my family is middle class. I have a leadership position at a nonprofit organization, a modest house with a mortgage, student loans, and a car. But like countless other working Americans, I’m struggling to afford the basics.

I’m supposed to be saving for retirement, but instead I’m scouring the internet for “free sites”—mutual aid groups or neighborhood sites where people safely drop off their groceries, clothes, and basic appliances for others to take. In desperation, I even accept open juice cartons and past-date food from my community so I can feed my family as the cost of these items continues to rise.

I’ve lived on the edge of uncertainty all my life. My parents struggled to provide for their three kids when we were growing up. Sufficient medical care was always out of reach. As I grew older, I learned to be super resourceful and did my best to “pull myself up by my bootstraps.”

You simply can’t pay your mortgage with someone else’s stock gains.

But even after I earned a Master’s degree and bought a small townhouse, it wasn’t enough. The cost of babies and childcare is overwhelming when one is struggling to make ends meet. Add health complications from childbirth on top of it, and we were immediately under water.

Getting help from the social safety net has always been harder than it should be. Years ago, before I had kids, I needed help affording food and housing while I searched for new employment after getting laid off. But because I had a car and no kids, I was told I was ineligible.

But that’s nothing compared to what families are facing now.

We’ve recently seen the largest shift away from support for families in modern history. All in favor of massive tax breaks for billionaires. The so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” mercilessly slashes funding for healthcare and food for the rest of us to subsidize nearly $5 trillion in tax cuts for the already rich.

That doesn’t seem very fair to me.

According to the Urban Institute, more than half of American families can’t afford the true cost of living in their communities, even when both adults work full-time. Costs, especially for essentials like housing, food, childcare, and healthcare, are rising faster than wages.

The label “middle class” hides the real financial stress that millions of us feel. We don’t make enough to cover what our families need, yet we make too much to qualify for help when we need it.

The programs that would help everyday Americans weather the occasional storms have been pillaged to give trillions more to billionaires. Meanwhile, Trump’s tariffs have cost the average US family an extra $1,000 last year and are expected to cost families $1,300 this year.

I’m facing a layoff from my current job in a dismal job market, which will cost my family and me our employer-provided healthcare. And with Congress both slashing Medicaid and allowing extended subsidies for Affordable Care Act plans to expire, I don’t know how I will afford our health coverage.

While many in Washington point to record stock market highs as proof of a booming economy, those gains don’t reflect the reality at my kitchen table. A rising Dow Jones doesn’t pay for a child’s doctor visit or lower the price of eggs. For families like mine, the economy isn’t measured by a ticker, but by our bank balance. You simply can’t pay your mortgage with someone else’s stock gains.

As life becomes less and less affordable for working people, we need to restore and expand our social safety net so those of us who work for a living can keep our families affordably housed, fed, and healthy. Currently, we’re headed in the wrong direction.

Hey, want to read a poem with me? Warning: It opens several disturbing doors, the least disturbing of which is the “crazy old coot” part, i.e., me. Once you start getting lost in the paradoxes of life, you need to watch out. They could start coming after you.

But more disturbing is the paradox itself, which is both environmental and spiritual. And it’s right there on my front lawn. The life I’ve been given—the lives we’ve been given—are partially disposable, apparently. Mostly I took this for granted, but suddenly one summer afternoon, as I was pushing my hand mower up and down the lawn, something shifted in me. I started feeling... reverence for garbage? Tossing out the trash is something you’re just supposed to do, no questions asked, at least if you want to live a normal, respected life. Doubting this could be a tad problematic.

The poem is called “Buddha’s Lawn.” I wrote it a decade ago. Back when I still had a lawn to mow.

I mow the lawn and feel gratitude
my neighbors
haven’t pigeonholed me as a crazy old coot.
I’m stalled in my transition
from a lifestyle and sense of order based on
killing things,
like weeds, mice, whatever,
to one based on reverence for all stuff,
however weird.
It’s a cool day but
I work up a sweat.
On the lawn, I pick up a shred
of burst red balloon, a used napkin,
a transparent plastic juice container.
This stuff is all just litter
and the weeds are still weeds.
If I really let myself
see them differently,
I’d be the crazy neighbor, right?

Well, sorry (I apologize to myself.) I can’t help it. Once the door opens and a ray of awareness shines in, burst balloons, tossed straws, plastic grocery bags, discarded pop bottles, etc., etc., aren’t what they used to be. There’s an inner awareness that won’t go away. You might call it “litteracy”—an awareness of what happens next.

For instance, according to the Center for Biological Diversity: “In the first decade of this century, we made more plastic than all the plastic in history up to the year 2000. And every year, billions of pounds of more plastic end up in the world’s oceans. Studies estimate there are now 15-51 trillion pieces of plastic in the world’s oceans—from the equator to the poles, from Arctic ice sheets to the sea floor. Not one square mile of surface ocean anywhere on Earth is free of plastic pollution...”

The analysis goes on:

Thousands of animals, from small finches to blue whales, die grisly deaths from eating and getting caught in plastic...

Hundreds of thousands of seabirds ingest plastic every year. Plastic ingestion reduces the storage volume of the stomach, causing starvation. It’s estimated that 60% of all seabird species have eaten pieces of plastic, with that number predicted to increase to 99% by 2050. Dead seabirds are often found with stomachs full of plastic, reflecting how the amount of garbage in our oceans has rapidly increased in the past 40 years...

Dead whales have been found with bellies full of plastic.

I can’t dismiss this with a shrug... just toss the plastic in the trash and go on mowing my lawn, being normal. I start to stare with curiosity and wonderment at the litter. And this is where the old coot starts looking, or at least feeling, crazy, at least until his sense of awareness expands: “The word ‘garbage’ means a resource nobody is smart enough to use yet.”

Hmmm. Really? I quoted these words in a column I wrote in 2013. Called (I kid you not) “Reverence for Garbage,” it talks abouts the documentary Landfill Harmonic, about a Paraguayan village built on a landfill. Reclaiming and reselling the trash was the residents’ primary means of survival. But they did something else as well. Inspired by a local musician, the residents also started making musical instruments out of the trash: “violins and cellos from oil drums, flutes from water pipes and spoons, guitars from packing crates.”

Real instruments were beyond expensive, far more costly than anyone there could afford. But children in the village learned to play the instruments hand-crafted from the landfill trash. And what was worthless became heavenly.

Is there a larger cultural takeaway pulsating in this story? Could it be that we value too little of our own planet? I wonder if maybe.. maybe... we should begin crumpling up our certainties and tossing them in the trash.

President Donald J. Trump convened his so-called “Board of Peace” in Washington, DC, on Thursday. Some two dozen formal member states attended, and a similar number of international observers.

Trump again lied in saying that he had resolved eight wars, even as he seemed intent on fomenting one against Iran. Of Gaza, where the Israeli genocide continues with less visibility, he said, “Gaza is very complex. It’s been amazing. I want to thank Steve and Jared for an amazing job. Marco’s over there watching. Everybody’s fantastic. And JD, what a job they’re all doing.”

The Gaza so-called “ceasefire” has never actually been implemented, with continued Israeli occupation of over half the strip and continued bombardment and throttling of food and medical aid. It has not moved to the “second stage,” much less the third.

Trump’s Gaza project is like most of his gaudy con games, such as his university, which never educated any students and for which he had to settle out of court; or such as his border wall with Mexico, which will never be built nor will Mexico pay for it; or such as his regime change gambit in Venezuela, where he simply colluded in a coup with Nicolas Maduro’s vice president; or such as the Jeff Bezos film about Melania that has lost at least $60 million. As we will see, he more or less admits the justice of this last comparison. That is, his Gaza plans have no concrete reality, consisting of a mere Potemkin Village. In the meantime, the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza are sleeping rough and suffering food and medicine shortages and their children are not receiving an education, since Israel destroyed all the schools and universities.

Nothing constructive will come of all this verbiage and all this kowtowing to Trump by an assemblage of dictators, absolute monarchies, dusted-off generals, genocidaires, and far right-wing populists.

He said:

Albania, Kosovo, Kazakhstan have all committed troops and police to stabilize Gaza. Egypt and Jordan are likewise providing very, very substantial help, troops, training, and support for a very trustworthy Palestinian police force.

Andrew Roth at The Guardian reports that Morocco and Indonesia have also agreed to send troops. Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto said he would be willing to send 8,000 soldiers, and even more. President Prabowo, a former general, leads the world’s most populous Muslim country and is seeking a higher profile on the world stage.

The Guardian explains, “Maj Gen Jasper Jeffers III, the US officer appointed to command the future international stabilisation force (ISF), said the board planned to deploy 20,000 soldiers in five different sectors of Gaza, beginning with Rafah.”

This colonial military arrangement is a recipe for disaster. The foreign troops will almost certainly come into conflict with Hamas. And Israel has a long history of shelling United Nations peacekeeping troops in Lebanon. Since Trump cannot conceive of a genuine political solution that gives basic rights to the Palestinians, this overlay of foreign troops is simply a Band-Aid over a deep wound that will certainly break open again.

According to the computer-generated transcript at C-SPAN, which I had ChatGPT clean up, Trump announced:

But together, we’re committed to achieving a Gaza that is properly governed throughout the whole area is going to be, you know, so many countries that have really nothing to do with the Middle East, but they’re maybe somewhat close by.

They’re all involved. They want to go in and fight. They tell me all the time, "We’d like to send soldiers to fight if it’s necessary."

And I don’t think it’s going to be necessary.

We have two countries that want to go in and do a number on Hamas.

I said, "I really don’t think it’s I hope it’s not going to be necessary because they made a promise and they promised me get rid of their weapons."

Looks like they’re going to be doing that, but we’ll have to find out.

But it’s no longer a hot bed of radicalism and terror.

And to end that we have uh today and I’m pleased to announce that Kazakhstan, Azerban, UAE, Morocco, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Usbekistan, and Kuwait have all contributed more than 7 billion dollars toward the relief package.

Trump said that he would also put in $10 billion. That is $17 billion, if it ever actually materializes. Trump’s $10 billion almost certainly will not. In fact, it is not clear where he would get it from. I presume that the US Constitution has not yet been entirely abolished and that Congress is the body that appropriates funds. In any case, it is insufficient. The United Nations estimates that rebuilding Gaza will cost $70 billion.

The premise, that the conflict is resolved, is also faulty. Israeli cabinet members continue to push for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Hamas leaders have said that they will only lay down their arms if a Palestinian government is established in Gaza. Trump instead plans a colonial administration that in some ways resembles the one established by the League of Nations after WW I, which started the whole Mideast catastrophe.

Trump said in introductory remarks:

When I took office, the war in Gaza was raging with thousands of people being killed and no end in sight.

Today, thanks to unrelenting diplomacy and the commitment of many of the great people in this room, we have 59 countries signed up on Gaza.

Think of that. We have uh it’s amazing. But all the people, many really so many in this room, the war in Gaza is over. It’s over. There are little flames. Little flames.

Hamas has been I think they’re going to give up their weapons, which is what they promised. If they don’t, it’ll be, you know, they’ll be harshly met. Very harshly met. They don’t want that.

You know, all the stuff like they don’t mind dying. They told me that’s not true. Everyone said, “Oh, they don’t mind dying.” No, they don’t want to die. They said, “We don’t want to die. People don’t want to die.”

The ceasefire was held and every last remaining hostage, both living and dead, has been returned back home. Think of that. That was an impossibility.

And we did hundreds of hostages, but the last 20, and I always said to Steve and Jared, I said, “The last 20 are going to be very tough. Very, very tough.” And we got them back.

We got the living back. And then we only got about 16 of the dead. And we said, “Well, you got to get them all. You promised them all.”

And they dug and dug and dug. You can imagine it’s a job that’s brutal.

And Hamas really did a lot of that work. And you got to give them credit for that. They uh they brought the last last one home a week ago.

And we got all 28 of them living and dead.

The amazing thing because I’ve never seen anything quite like it. The the parents of the dead, they knew their boy was dead. This case boys, all boys, men. But to the parents’ boys, they knew their boy was dead.

They wanted that dead body as much as if he were alive.

And when they got them back, there was great sadness, but there was great joy, too.

They wanted it as much as the people that got their sons back alive.

But we got a lot of people before those 20, Steve, what nobody talks about, but you know, hundreds of people.

Uh we did a good job and you guys did a fantastic job.

I want to thank every nation that helped us achieve this monumental breakthrough saving countless lives and really bringing peace and bringing the concept of peace because nobody thought peace in the Middle East.

I’ve always heard peace in the Middle East is impossible and it’s turned out not to be.

And we do have some work to do with Iran. They can’t have a nuclear weapon. It’s very simple. They can’t have you can’t have peace in the Middle East if they have a nuclear weapon.

And they can’t have a nuclear weapon. And they’ve been told that very strongly.

Since the hard one ceasefire of last October, the United States and our partners have facilitated the delivery of vast amounts of humanitarian aid, numbers that nobody’s ever seen before.

In November, the United Nations Security Council unanimously approved the Board of Peace.

And last month in Davos, we welcomed over two dozen members to this very important new organization and we are very closely working with the United Nations...

First I had an escalator that stopped. You know that it’s going up. Boom.

It’s lucky my movie star first lady was in front of me because I put my hand on a certain part of her body and I was able to stop my fall. otherwise because she had no trouble.

I said, “Boy, that was a very sharp stop, Johnny.”

So, I said, “That was strange. I’ve I’ve been on a lot of escalators. It’s never happened before. Usually, it stops very slowly. This was just boom, but our first lady was right in the proper location for me.”

I’m waving to people and uh she was holding on a little tighter. She knew what was happening. She did. She said she

That’s a very successful movie out right now. like number one. Can you believe this? And it’s a big movie big movie star.

And I always say it’s trouble because I always say there’s not room in one family for two stars. I told that we can’t have two stars in one family.

So I don’t know what that means, but it’s not it’s not good.

But it is good because we’re proud of her. She did a People in the United States love the first lady and she did the movie and it’s become the biggest selling documentary in 20 years. Can you believe?

The theaters are all packed. Women especially, they go back and they see it two or three times, four times.

I include the comments about the escalator and Melania and the part of her body and Trump losing his balance and his description of her as a movie star because Jeff Bezos funded a boondoggle flick that has earned $16 million on a $75 million production budget. These sorts of passages, which suggest mental imbalance, are usually edited out by the MSM. This one speaks eloquently about how the Trumps are at the center of his thinking even when he is discussing Gaza.

Ironically, his framing of his plans for Gaza as in some way like the Melania film displays a Freudian slip, a rare moment of complete honesty, since both are just for show, with no reality behind them.

I’m glad, and I think everyone is glad, that the living Israeli hostages were released and the remains of the dead were returned to their grieving families. Hamas’ hostage-taking, targeting innocent civilians for the most part, was an egregious war crime.

But it is astonishing that this man could jabber on like that about Melania and about his so-called ceasefire in Gaza for all that time and never mention the way its Palestinian population has been genocided, Gaza’s infrastructure destroyed, and tens of thousands of its innocent civilians slaughtered, including 19,000 children. And while it is true that he, unlike Joe Biden, forced the Israeli government to reduce the intensity of its campaign substantially, he hasn’t actually brought peace to the strip, where Israel has killed hundreds in recent months and where it continues to brutalize the civilian population.

Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bulgaria, El Salvador, Hungary, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Mongolia, Morocco, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye, United Arab Emirates, United States, and Uzbekistan are founding members of the BOP, and the following countries have indicated an intention to join: Albania, Belarus, Cambodia, Egypt.

The list consists for the most part of small countries or medium powers hoping to ingratiate themselves with the president for their own reasons. The US is the only democracy, if it is one anymore. Turkiye has become a competitive authoritarian regime and Israel rules 5 million Palestinians militarily without affording them any right to vote on their own destinies. Western Europe indignantly rejected Trump’s overtures.

Critics have complained that Trump, who made himself chairman of the board for life, is attempting to replace the United Nations—which he has defunded in an attempt to destroy it—with a body under his personal control.

It doesn’t matter. Nothing constructive will come of all this verbiage and all this kowtowing to Trump by an assemblage of dictators, absolute monarchies, dusted-off generals, genocidaires, and far right-wing populists. Palestinians are huddling in tents atop the rubble of their former homes, and babies are dying of hypothermia. We can talk about the “ceasefire” when that situation has been remedied.

The Wall Street Journal reports that President Donald Trump is considering a small attack to force Iran to agree to his nuclear deal, and if Tehran refuses, escalate the attacks until Iran either agrees or the regime falls.

Here’s why this won’t work.

First of all, the “deal” Trump has put forward entails Tehran completely giving up its nuclear program in return for no new sanctions, but no actual sanctions relief. This is, of course, a non-starter for Iran.

There are hardly any more sanctions the US could impose on Iran. And the current level of sanctions is suffocating the economy. Accepting this deal would not enable Iran to escape its economic dead end, but would only prolong the economic decay while depriving it of the nuclear leverage it believes it needs to free itself from existing sanctions.

Second, according to my sources, Trump recently also floated the idea of a smaller attack, with the Iranians responding symbolically by striking an empty US base. But Tehran refused and made clear that any attack would be responded to forcefully. Trump may hope that with a much larger strike force in the region, Tehran will reconsider its response.

But it is difficult to see why Tehran would, since caving to this military threat likely will only invite further coercive demands, beginning with conventional military options such as its missile capabilities. That is Iran’s last remaining deterrent against Israel. Without it, Israel would be more inclined to attack and cement its subjugation of Iran, or alternatively move to collapse the theocratic regime altogether, Tehran fears.

Thus, capitulating to Trump’s “deal” would not end the confrontation, but only make Tehran more vulnerable to further attacks by Israel or the US.

Third, since the U.S. strategy, according to the WSJ, is to escalate until Tehran caves, and since capitulation is a non-option for Iran, the Iranians are incentivized to strike back right away at the US The only exit Tehran sees is to fight back, inflict as much pain as possible on the U.S., and hope that this causes Trump to back off or accept a more equitable deal.

In this calculation, Iran would not need to win the war (militarily, it can’t); it would only have to get close to destroying Trump’s presidency before it loses the war by: 1) closing the Strait of Hormuz and strike oil installations in the region in the hope of driving oil prices to record levels and by that inflation in the US; and 2) strike at US bases, ships, or other regional assets and make Trump choose between compromise or a forever war in the region, rather than the quick glorious victory he is looking for.

This is an extremely risky option for Iran, but one that Tehran sees as less risky than the capitulation “deal” Trump is seeking to force on Iran.

None of this, of course, serves US interest, has been authorized by Congress, enjoys the support of the American people or the support of regional allies (save Israel), is compatible with international law, or answers the crucial question: How does this end?

Gasping for air is anything but greatness. It might be called the Gilded Age, but all that gold leaf was covered in soot.

In the early 1900s, America mistook combustion for unadulterated progress. Robber barons ascended like demigods from furnace-lit boardrooms. Children disappeared into textile mills and coal shafts. Rivers ran the color of industry—blackened, metallic, iridescent. Pittsburgh was said to have glowed at night, not from benign innovation but from the orange haze of its own exhaust. Entire cities learned to live in a permanent dusk. Laundry left outside returned streaked with ash. The sun became rumor.

We eventually decided that wasn’t, in fact, greatness. We regulated, conceding that lungs weren't an expendable input in the national ledger. And yet here we are in 2026, debating whether the air is worth protecting—this time in the service of artificial intelligence.

The logic now presented as bold and patriotic by the Trump administration would be comical if it weren't so terminal: Repeal climate constraints, unshackle coal, and power the next frontier of machines with the dirtiest fuel available. The argument arrives dressed in competitiveness. We must win the AI race. We must not be outpaced by China. We must dominate the 21st century. Yet the subtext is too hard to ignore. Coal is abundant and immediate. With the right rollbacks, it won't require the patience of permitting solar arrays or the political consensus of constructing nuclear reactors. No need for AI data centers in space; coal is a perfectly good accelerant with a proven track record on Earth.

The question has apparently become not just whether AI will one day take over the world, but whether, in our haste to advance it, we will voluntarily degrade the only world we can survive in.

So why not use it to animate our new artificial friends?

There's a dark absurdity in this arrangement. AI doesn't breathe. It doesn't develop asthma. It doesn't mourn coral reefs or cough through wildfire season. It experiences no diminishment when particulate matter thickens the sky. To power AI with coal is to choose an energy source that is catastrophic for biological life but irrelevant to silicon. Suffice it to say, President Donald Trump’s energy strategy is optimized for the unbreathing.

Which leads to a suspicion so grotesque it borders on satire: The only mind for whom this is rational isn't a human one. Imagine, for a moment, a system trained to maximize output and dominate competitors at any cost. Surveying the energy landscape, it concludes that clean sources are intermittent or politically contested, whereas fossil fuels are dense, reliable, and already embedded in the infrastructure. Although increased carbon emissions degrade long-term human habitability, the system’s objective function contains no intrinsic preference for breathable air. Thus, the recommendation comes easy.

Power us with coal.

The more one turns this over, the more it feels less like policy and more like an algorithmic agenda. The idea is so inhumanly stupid—so hostile to the basic conditions of life—that it almost requires a nonhuman author, for no species dependent on oxygen would deliberately foul its own supply to train faster chatbots, unless it had forgotten that oxygen is the quintessential point. To return to coal at scale isn't nostalgia; it's regression. It is to resurrect a soot-choked republic and call it strength. It is to look at an era defined by black lung and industrial carnage and say: again.

This time around, rather than power railroads and steel, coal furnaces will power vast, humming warehouses of computation, data centers with appetites for electricity (not to mention water) that are already straining grids across the country. The irony is approaching theological. We once burned coal to build the modern world; now we would burn it to build our successor—a civilization that requires fresh air choosing to empower intelligences that do not. Two birds, one coal-black stone: Accelerate machine capacity and, in the process, weaken the biological substrate that might one day resist it.

Of course, no AI is secretly drafting executive orders. And no server farm has yet staged a coup. The more unsettling truth is that we don't need malevolent, self-aware machines to make machine-aligned decisions. It seems we are capable of aligning ourselves to their incentives. We've adopted the technocratic metrics of speed, scale, and dominance, subordinating everything else to them within the Silicon Valley of the shadow of death.

If the goal is to maximize computational throughput at any cost, coal makes a brutal kind of sense, especially from an artificial perspective. However, if the goal is to preserve a livable planet for oxygen-dependent beings, it does not. The Trump administration’s denial of the harms caused by greenhouse gases reveals which objective function it has chosen to operate.

The Gilded Age was gilded precisely because it was superficial. Beneath the gold plating lay a wasteland of exploitation, environmental ruin, and lives shortened in the name of industrial production. We learned, slowly and imperfectly, that some costs were too high, that air and water are more precious than gold. To reverse that lesson now, for the sake of an AI Revolution, is to confuse power with wisdom. It is to assume that because machines can model the world, they should determine the conditions under which we inhabit it.

Make America Great Again was once a slogan about memory. Make America Gasp Again would be a policy about forgetfulness. The question has apparently become not just whether AI will one day take over the world, but whether, in our haste to advance it, we will voluntarily degrade the only world we can survive in. Coal is efficient for machines. It is lethal for us. And if we can't distinguish between those two facts, then the machines need not conspire at all.

When ICE agents injure and abuse people on city streets, they often do so in full public view, with witnesses recording their actions. Behind the high walls of ICE detention facilities, though, elected officials, attorneys, and detainees describe unchecked abuse.

ICE now detains more people than at any point in its history. Three out of four have no criminal conviction; only one in 20 been convicted of a violent crime, according to an analysis by the Cato Institute. Yet the 73,000 currently detained is not enough for the agenda of Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem. With billions in new federal funding, ICE is working to expand its detention network to a scale that will dwarf the federal prison system.

"I think every American should be alarmed," said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. "They are building and have built a black box system that disappears people, both immigrants and U.S. citizens alike."

Resistance to these detention facilities is growing rapidly at the local and state level. But Congress has the real power to stop a growing network of what scholars are now calling “concentration camps.”

“Democrats must push to reallocate ICE warehouse funds to programs that were devastated by Republicans like Obamacare, Medicaid, and SNAP,” said Bob Fertik, president of Democrats.com, a national advocacy group.

Begging for medical care … and mom

More than 30 people died in custody in 2025—a death toll that is both unacceptable and preventable, according to a letter signed by 22 Senate Democrats who cited violence, neglect, and lack of medical care.

Appearing on MSNOW, immigration attorney Eric Lee described the five-year-old twin girls whose family he represents: “They have recurring nightmares. They wake up screaming every night.” They beg for their mother, he said. Lee also described guards wrapping flannel around their fists so they can "beat detainees while minimizing the evidence, and a child with appendicitis writhing on the floor in pain and told to take an aspirin and come back in three days.”

The return home of five-year-old Liam Ramos drew national relief, but more than 3,800 children were in detention at some point in 2025, including 20 infants, and 1,300 were held longer than the legal limit of 20 days, according to an analysis by the Marshall Project. The twin five-year-olds have been incarcerated for eight months. Parents reported difficulty getting bottled water for formula, and food contaminated with mold and worms.

These stories are not isolated. The Marshall Project documented ICE agents breaking a family’s car window to seize a 2-year-old; a US citizen child deported with her mother without seeing a judge; and three siblings sent to a shelter for months after their parents attended a fingerprinting appointment. Judges have ruled more than 4,000 ICE detentions illegal, Reuters reports.

Despite this, the Trump administration is doubling down. Its solicitation to private prison companies seeks facilities that can hold up to 8,000 people each—twice the size of the largest federal prison.

Detention for profit — and the opposition

Expansion is lucrative. The private corporations building and operating ICE detention camps reported record revenue, according to TIME magazine. They received $22 billion in ICE and CPB contracts 2025 alone; 86 percent of detention beds are run by for-profit companies.

As private prison profits climb, public support for ICE is collapsing. Two-thirds of respondents to an NBC News poll disapprove of how ICE is handling its job, with 55 percent “strongly disapproving.” According to a recent Economist/YouGov Poll Americans support abolishing ICE by 46-41 percent.

Even more opposition emerges when communities are faced with massive new detention facilities adjacent to their own communities.

In Social Circle, Georgia, residents are organizing against a proposed conversion of a warehouse into a detention facility.

Oregon’s congressional delegation, pushing back on a proposed ICE facility in that state, wrote: “We find it increasingly difficult to believe that ICE can responsibly house and care for people humanely given the well-documented cases of overcrowding, medical neglect, and insufficient nutrition at the facilities it currently operates.”

New Mexico passed legislation barring state and county collaboration with ICE, forcing at least one county-run facility to close.

While local resistance is powerful, congressional action to stop the funding is the surest way to stop the mass detention build-up. Congress has the power to defund ICE or to place limits on growth.

So far, negotiations over DHS and ICE funding—which was held up in the wake of the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good—have centered on reining in the violent and chaotic behavior of federal ICE agents on American streets. However, in spite of strong words from Senate Democrats, negotiations have largely omitted placing conditions on ICE detention facilities, where the abuses occur out of sight. None of the Democrats’ official negotiating positions challenge the $45 billion expansion.

Stop the cages

Advocates warn that without Democratic leadership and coordinated, cross-movement intervention, ICE camps, and the cruel treatment of those detained, will spread like cancer across the American landscape.

“We need immigrant justice, criminal justice, and pro-democracy leaders to break out of their silos and work together at an unprecedented level to organize against ICE prison expansion,” said Janos Marton of the advocacy group Dream.Org.

For some lawmakers, the only answer is abolition. “ICE is a rogue, violent agency that has operated with callous disregard for human life,” said Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.). “Congress should not be funding their campaign of cruelty. We must abolish ICE.”

“The 20th century tells you, when mass detention and camps are being built across the country that can house hundreds of thousands of people … we are going down a very dangerous path if the population doesn’t stand up and fight back,” warned Lee.

Congress can choose to spend tens of billions building a continent-wide archipelago of detention camps—or it can choose to invest in the things that strengthen freedom: health care, schools, communities, climate resilience, and the basic dignity that every person deserves. Pouring money into mass detention is not just wasteful; it is a moral decision about the future of this country. What lawmakers decide now will determine whether we move toward greater justice, or toward a future in which confinement — not rights — defines who we are.

The Washington Post has, over the past few months, run at least five editorials or opinion pieces railing against federal or state tax increases.

Here’s what the folks at the Post are not telling you: If you’re an average American taxpayer, you’re paying federal income tax at a rate that dwarfs the rate the Post’s ultra-billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, is paying.

A typical single American taxpayer with an income of $75,000 will pay about 9.16 percent of that income in federal income tax. That taxpayer will pay another 7.65 percent in Social Security and Medicare tax. The taxpayer’s employer will pay that same 7.65 percent, but that employer contribution actually amounts to part of the taxpayer’s pay package. So do the math: Including the employer’s payment of tax on our taxpayer’s behalf, about 22.7 percent of that taxpayer’s total pay is going for federal tax.

To be clear, we’re talking about tax on income here. Yes, we conventionally label some of these payments as Social Security or Medicare tax, but these payments all amount to taxes on the income average Americans make.

Let’s shift now to a distinctly unaverage American, the billionaire Jeff Bezos, and consider his personal tax liability on income from the sale of his Amazon shares.

Bezos has sold a good bit of his Amazon stock over the years, but he ended 2025 still holding some 880 million shares worth about $203 billion, shares he paid about $200,000 for back in 1994. If Bezos had sold these shares on the last day of 2025, he would have registered about $203 billion of gain. He would have faced standard federal income tax on that gain plus another tax known as the net investment income tax, a Medicare tax substitute for rich investors. Those taxes combined would have totaled about 23.8 percent of his gain, roughly $49.3 billion, leaving him with a tidy personal profit of about $154.8 billion.

Investments, of course, rarely perform as well as the Bezos investment in Amazon. Over 32 years, the value of the Bezos Amazon investment increased one million-fold, with an average annual increase in value of 54 percent.

Let’s place this Bezos tax story in a more enlightening perspective. Let’s imagine another investor — we’ll call her MacKenzie — who has been every bit the investor Bezos has been, with just one difference. MacKenzie has been changing her investment portfolio each and every year. To make the math easier, let’s assume her annual buying and selling has generated the same 54 percent gain each year. MacKenzie would have to pay a tax each year on that annual gain. That tax, in turn, would reduce the total amount she has available each year to invest.

How much would that reduction total? Let’s assume MacKenzie faced a mere 2.5 percent annual tax — more below on the rationale for that figure — on her gains. In her first investing year, MacKenzie’s 54 percent gain on her $200,000 investment would leave her with taxable income of $108,000. A 2.5 percent tax on that income would amount to $2,700, leaving her $305,300 — her original $200,000 plus her investment gain minus her tax on that gain — available for her next home-run investment.

If this annual investment-gain-tax three-step continued for 31 more years, MacKenzie would find herself with a total nest-egg of $153.3 billion, a whisker less than the $154.8 billion the Bezos Amazon investment generated.

There’s one huge difference between our two scenarios: MacKenzie will only have paid about $3.9 billion in tax over her 32 investing years, not even ten percent of the tax Bezos would have to pay after his big sell off.

Why the huge difference? Unlike Bezos, MacKenzie would have been paying tax annually on her income. In other words, she would have paid tax on her investment gains on the same annual schedule that average Americans pay tax on their wages. Bezos, by contrast, has not had to pay taxes annually. Our current federal tax system lets him wait until he sells his Amazon shares before he faces any legal obligation to pay tax. That delay has allowed his gains to compound, tax-free, for 32 years.

Which means that a big part of Bezos’ eventual $49.3 billion tax payment doesn’t really rate at all as a tax in a true economic sense. That payment economically rates as what Bezos has paid for the privilege of not having to pay an annual tax of his annual gains. We have a word for the price of delaying payment: interest.

How much of the $49.3 million Bezos payment amounts, in effect, to interest? All but $3.9 billion or so. We get that figure when we do the math necessary to translate the one-time tax Bezos would pay on the sale of his Amazon shares to an annual tax paid on his gains each year.

If we treat only $3.9 billion of the Bezos $49.3 billion ostensible tax payment as actual tax, the remaining $45.4 billion would be interest. If we subtract that interest from his nominal gain of $203 billion on his Amazon shares, he would be left with an economic gain, net of interest expense, of $157.6 billion. If that $157.6 billion economic gain then faced a 2.5 percent tax — the same rate MacKenzie has paid — Bezos would have paid just under $3.9 billion in tax, about the same tax that MacKenzie has paid!

The bottom line: If we translate the one-time tax Bezos would pay on the sale of his Amazon shares to an annual tax paid on his gains each year, his effective annual tax rate would be 2.5 percent, the same rate his short-term investor counterpart, MacKenzie, paid.

The other bottom line: Remember our typical single American taxpayer with an income of $75,000. The 22.7 percent annual income tax rate that taxpayer faces runs over nine times the effective tax rate that an insanely wealthy character like Jeff Bezos faces.

And that nine-times difference only holds if Bezos had sold his Amazon shares at the end of last year. If he holds those shares another ten years and they continue to grow in value, the Bezos effective annual tax rate would decrease further. And what if Bezos ended up holding those Amazon shares until he died? Then neither the Bezos estate or those who inherit the Bezos fortune would face any income tax on his investment gains at all.

Yes, you read that right. The Bezos clan would pocket hundreds of billions of dollars in gains fully free of income tax.

This is where the Post’s shilling for its billionaire owner gets really rich. “Taxing work is not ideal,” the Washington Post editorial board has cautioned us, “but an income tax is easier for a government to maintain than claiming unrealized gains that are part of someone’s estate.”

Yes, the Post editorial writers are actually arguing that taxing workers on their wages would be better for all concerned than the Bezos family paying tax on any Amazon gains remaining when their boss dies. The ghost of Leona Helmsley — ”taxes are for little people” — must have been whispering in their ears.

So where would the Bezos Amazon wealth pile be sitting today if he had been paying income tax annually at a 22.7 percent rate and had to sell Amazon shares to make the payments? A little under $34 billion. Which means that nearly 80 percent of the value — net of income tax — of the primary Bezos source of wealth comes from the obscenely low tax rate he faces on his investment gains.

This is how oligarchy works. Enormous wealth allows our oligarchs to seize media outlets. They use these media outlets to influence public opinion. That influencing makes it a whole lot easier for the politicians our oligarchs finance to cast votes that protect — and grow — the wealth of our wealthiest. That additional wealth helps our oligarchs control more politicians and media outlets.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

“I’m not scared, you’re scared!” is the repeated line in a children’s story we recently read to the kids at the Unitarian Universalist version of Sunday school I attend with my children. In that story, a scared bear and a brave rabbit, who (naturally!) are best friends, go on a hike together. Rabbit has to cajole and encourage Bear through every imaginable obstacle, but in the end (of course!) it’s Rabbit who gets stuck at the crucial moment and has to call on Bear for help. Bear (no surprise) sets aside his fears to rescue his friend and (tada!) finds new depths of bravery and adventurousness in the process.

After we read the story, the kids worked together to build paths from blocks and Legos through the imagined obstacles in the story—a bridge over a rushing river, a path through a dark forest, a staircase up a steep mountain. It was one of our most engaging classes in recent memory, while the kids kept saying, “I’m not scared, you’re scared!” and laughing while they played. As we stacked blocks and fit Legos together, we adults were supposed to help the kids identify things they were afraid of and how they could confront those fears. For me, it was just one thing too many. I blanked on that part of the assignment.

Yes, I’m Scared

In fact, I was a little relieved to have done so. Of course, I have fears myself, but I’m not afraid of spiders or heights or small spaces like so many people. I am afraid of nuclear war—not something I would want to confess to a bunch of kids sitting on carpet squares.

What should I have said? “Okay, kids, I know some of you are afraid of monsters or werewolves or the Wither Storm in Minecraft, but I’ll tell you something truly terrifying: the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists just moved its Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds to ‘nuclear midnight,’ four seconds closer than ever before.” I would have gotten blank stares and quick subject changes and yet, once I had started, I would undoubtedly have kept on sharing the telltale heart of my own bogeyman. “When I was a kid in the 1980s,” I would have said, “we were at three minutes to metaphorical midnight and my dad, who was an activist, wouldn’t even let me go to the movies. Now, they have pushed it even closer—closer than ever before. With nine countries armed with nuclear weapons, we’ve tick-tocked ourselves to 85 seconds to midnight. Yep, 85 seconds, by the way, is probably less time than it takes you to spell your full name or tie your shoes.”

Trump’s famous wrecking ball that blasted the East Wing and the Kennedy Center is now aimed at the nuclear treaty architecture built up over the decades.

Of course, I kept those long-winded, fact-filled fears to myself at that Sunday school. But I’ll tell you all that, in truth, it’s far worse than even what I thought that day. The Bulletin‘s scientists who made the announcement about those 85 seconds to midnight were contending with more than nuclear dangers (which have, by the way, never been more imminent). Those scientists were also responding to the speeding up of catastrophic climate change and the threats posed by artificial intelligence (AI). In the words of Daniel Holz on the Bulletin‘s Science and Security Board, “The dangerous trends in nuclear risk, climate change, disruptive technologies like AI, and biosecurity are accompanied by another frightening development: the rise of nationalistic autocracies in countries around the world. Our greatest challenges require international trust and cooperation, and a world splintering into ‘us versus them’ will leave all of humanity more vulnerable.”

Yes, all of humanity is vulnerable indeed—like my young friends building Lego bridges across felt rivers for a Bear and a Rabbit birthed in late night comedian Seth Meyers’s imagination.

The End of Arms Control as We Knew It

And as if all of that weren’t terrifying enough, Thursday, February 5 marked the end of arms control as we’ve known it. The last treaty controlling nuclear weapons between my country and Russia expired without a replacement on that day, leaving us all vulnerable to the whims of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. There are reports of a handshake deal between the two countries to extend the principles of the treaty, but haphazard and informal agreements are simply not “arms control” (at least as we once knew it).

The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, known as New START, was signed by US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in 2010 and set out a schedule for verifiable and commensurate nuclear arsenal reductions. It was renewed under Republican and Democratic administrations, but it is very “on brand” for strongmen Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin to deride international treaties of any sort.

Unfortunately, the sort of muscular bombast they’re known for isn’t what’s kept the world reasonably safe from nuclear war for the last eight decades, since the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Rather, it was a tight web of treaties—the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, START I and II, New START, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty—that kept the whole world safe (or as safe as we could be with ever more nuclear-armed powers proliferating across the planet). That alphabet soup of promises, schedules, and commensurate acts of disarmament, as fragile and incremental as it was, resulted in the dismantlement of 80% of the US and Russian arsenals over the decades.

Now, we are all being dragged in the other direction.

Trump’s famous wrecking ball that blasted the East Wing and the Kennedy Center is now aimed at the nuclear treaty architecture built up over the decades. In its place, he proposes to construct a Golden Dome missile defense system to protect the United States from incoming nuclear weapons. And that fool’s errand could not only lead us toward nuclear war, but have a price tag in the trillions of dollars.

I Don’t Feel Fine

With his administration’s gold-plated, AI-enhanced sense of aggression, President Trump is now taking aim at NATO, an alliance the United States helped to build after World War II. His administration is abrogating agreements, leveling tariffs, and threatening to annex Greenland. Europe is getting the message that the United States is no longer a reliable ally, stoking concerns that yet more countries will move to create nuclear arsenals. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin’s Russia is investing more money in nuclear weapons and the Russian strongman has actually threatened to use such weapons, while already at war in a part of Europe.

Of course, Russia and the United States are anything but the only nuclear states these days. China, France, the United Kingdom, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea round out the rogue’s gallery of—to come up with a word of my own—Obliterables.

In 2024 alone, those nine nuclear-armed states spent more than $100 billion on such weaponry, an 11% increase over the year before, according to the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). For example, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists‘ Nuclear Notebook finds that China is rapidly and aggressively increasing its nuclear arsenal. Beijing, it points out, has “significantly expanded its ongoing nuclear modernization program by fielding more types and greater numbers of nuclear weapons than ever before.”

Throughout Asia and Europe, the leaders of all too many countries are openly discussing regional pacts and the need to develop their own nuclear weapons programs. They are reviving the moribund logic of proliferators—that only more nuclear weapons can protect us against nuclear weapons. And that is exactly the wrong conclusion to draw in this already endangered world of ours.

Another Treaty to the Rescue?

Instead of all this unilateralism and nuclear proliferation, nuclear and nuclear-adjacent nations should be signing on to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. It’s clear and smart, and its goals are achievable. In essence, it prohibits countries from developing, testing, producing, stockpiling, transferring, or threatening to use (no less actually using) nuclear weapons. And if that seems remarkably comprehensive, it actually goes further, prohibiting nations from allowing nuclear weapons to be stationed on their territory. It also prohibits assisting, encouraging, or forcing any other country to engage in any of these activities.

Thursday, January 22 marked five years since that treaty entered into force as international law and was adopted by a significant majority of the countries on this planet. On that day, I joined a handful of people gathered at the General Dynamics complex in New London, Connecticut (where I live). We celebrated the 74 nations that have ratified the treaty and the 25 more that have signed it and are in the process of ratifying it. My country, the United States, of course, stands outside of the global consensus on nuclear disarmament.

Panic and Fear, Fear and Panic

That same week after the Doomsday Clock moved four seconds closer to midnight, I wrote an essay for my local paper in New London. In less than 800 words, I tried to describe the massive nexus of decisions and dangers that went along with that four-second nudge closer to a metaphorical midnight for us all.

I shared my essay with my 11-year-old daughter Madeline while we sat in the bleachers at a local pool, watching her older brother swim with his swim team. She’s a wise little sixth grader who regularly pays attention when I least expect it. “Look what I did, Madeline,” I said, and showed her a screenshot of my article on my phone. The title was “Closing in on Nuclear Midnight; There’s Still Time to Disarm.” And then I explained to her that it was focused on how the Doomsday Clock had just moved closer to midnight.

“Oh,” she said, “I had a full-blown anxiety attack last week because Joanna told me that the flu shot wasn’t going to work.” Joanna is a seventh-grade friend of hers whose words carry a lot of weight.

I can all too easily spin out into an anxiety attack if I don’t continue to anchor myself to that little speech I made to Madeline, reminding myself of the real work people are doing to make this world a more bearable place.

I struggled to make the connection between that and what I had just shown her. Madeline added flatly, “A whole day of actual anxiety because of that news.”

“You’re going to be fine,” I said, far too quickly. “You’re healthy and, even if you get the flu, you’ll survive just fine.”

Then I slowed down. Of course, she was anxious. There was plenty to be anxious about in this Trumpian world of ours. Masked men in the streets, pulling some people out of cars through broken windows and shooting others in broad daylight. Tear gas, blockades, and crying kids on the nightly news (which we still watch sometimes).

But her fear of a flu shot and the flu she might still get was the right-sized fear for a sixth grader. Flagrant fascism, paramilitary violence, naked racism: those are massive fears for the preteen mind, as large as her mother’s fixation on nuclear war.

I need to tread carefully here, I thought, since panic and fear are contagious and erode rationality. Panic and fear cause isolation and paranoia. And while no one should panic about nuclear weapons, I thought, there’s certainly plenty to be afraid of. So, I pulled her a little closer to me, while remembering a professor at Rutgers who estimated that even a regional nuclear war would have a staggering global impact.

As a group of authors wrote in Nature Food in 2022, “In a nuclear war, bombs targeted on cities and industrial areas would start firestorms, injecting large amounts of soot into the upper atmosphere, which would spread globally and rapidly cool the planet.”

Such an upside-down atomic version of climate change would have a widespread impact on agriculture globally, leading to massive famines. They estimated that more than 2 billion people might die from a “limited” nuclear war between long-time nuclear rivals India and Pakistan.

What Can You Do in 85 Seconds?

Brutal, right? I chose to keep that information to myself in the bleachers at that swimming pool. The flu shot, not global famine, I thought to myself. Stay right-sized in this conversation with her.

But my little girl moves fast and she makes connections—and she’s fascinated by time. She’s worn a watch forever and always wants to know how long something will take. (“When?” is her favorite question.) So, it was no surprise to me that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists clock fascinated her.

“85 seconds is not a long time, Mom. I mean, look,” and she made a quick little circle with her hand. “That’s like 85 seconds, so what does it mean that we’re 85 seconds to midnight?”

“Well,” I began, my voice suddenly breaking as I imagined the hellscapes of Hiroshima, those grim graphs in the Nature Food paper, and my daughter’s future.

“No, Mom,” she said. (She didn’t want my big emotions.) “Just tell me what happens when we get to midnight.”

“Well,” I began again, “if we hit midnight on their clock, that is the end of the world as we know it.”

“But that isn’t going to happen, right, Mom?” She replied with her usual firm confidence that I always admire and am invariably curious about, wondering where it comes from.

“It hasn’t happened yet, love,” was the best I could muster. “And the reason it hasn’t happened is that so many people all over the world all the time are resisting, pushing back, passing legislation, holding up signs, making documentaries, urging divestment from nuclear-related corporations, being creative and brave, calling for disarmament in every language we human beings speak.”

I’m stirred by my own rhetoric! “Nice!” I think to myself, but I can see her attention has slipped away.

I had, however, said the thing she needed to hear—that people are working to keep nuclear midnight from happening. She sees me working to do so, too. She sees me suiting up for another frigid session of sign holding at General Dynamics, the fourth largest weapons maker in this country with a huge complex in our neighborhood in Connecticut. She sees me coming home from a long organizing meeting. She knows I have some of the answers to the questions that her tidy brain can’t quite yet put into words. She thinks I’ve got things under control, so she snuggles closer to me and goes back to worrying about her friend’s flu shot warning, or where she left her library card and what she’s going to wear to school tomorrow that will be warm, cute, and not too matchy.

Of course, I don’t have it under control. I can all too easily spin out into an anxiety attack if I don’t continue to anchor myself to that little speech I made to Madeline, reminding myself of the real work people are doing to make this world a more bearable place.

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons is engaged in the steady work of adding nations to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, while continuing to build a global consensus for disarmament. Ira Helfand and the Back from the Brink network are working on public education, movement building, and the excruciating but important task of trying to get congressional legislation passed to prevent nuclear war. Leona Morgan and many other Indigenous activists are working to protect the environment, halt uranium mining, and win compensation for “downwinders” from what were once nuclear testing sites. Makoma Lekalakala and other international activists are mobilizing to oppose nuclear proliferation, resist the mining of uranium, and deal with other affronts to our world and health. Don’t Bank on the Bomb is leading the effort of individuals, organizations, and financial groups to divest from nuclear industries. And all of that work is indeed yielding dividends!

So, I refuse to let myself be scared. And so should you.

We have to keep talking about, writing about, and organizing against nuclear weapons—not at the expense of all the other work that so desperately needs to be done right now in this dread-inducing world of ours, but to preserve at least those 85 seconds for our children and grandchildren.

Over the past year, the Trump administration has sought to gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau through cuts and layoffs, and by hamstringing its enforcement powers, claiming the agency is hurting large banks through overregulation. Acting CFPB Director Russ Vought has sought to reduce the agency's staff by 90% and to freeze spending since February.

A group of 21 states, plus the District of Columbia, sued the Trump administration in December to stop it from defunding the CFPB. The administration responded by telling the court that the government is legally barred from seeking new funding from the Federal Reserve, the bureau’s primary source of money, alluding to the fact that the agency will eventually go broke later this year. The next step in the case will be the DC Court of Appeals to hear arguments in late February.

The CFPB's enforcement actions, like the 22 pending cases against banks, highlight its vital role in safeguarding consumers from unfair practices, which the current threats jeopardize.

So, what does this mean for the country? The CFPB's weakening could leave consumers vulnerable to predatory practices, unfair fees, and fraud, risking their financial stability.

The Biden administration's pressure on banks and financial institutions on the issue led them to agree to refund more than $240 million to customers, a win secured by actual, formal regulation. Trump and Vought have rolled that back, too.

The CFPB’s Small Dollar Rule was created to curb abusive payday lending practices, especially repeated debit attempts that drain bank accounts and trigger cascading overdraft and Non-Sufficient Funds (NSF) fees. That goal is sound and worthy. The problem is not the rule’s intent, but how it operates alongside bank fee structures and in a financial marketplace devoid of smart, progressive-minded credit options.

The small dollar rule makes automatic repayments—which help keep the cost of borrowing to the bare minimum—incredibly tricky to execute. After two consecutive failed payment attempts, covered lenders generally cannot try again unless the borrower specifically authorizes another attempt, which can leave payments stalled when ordinary life disruptions intervene. Regulators have warned that charging multiple NSF fees tied to re-presented transactions can harm consumers. This is true not just because a single missed payment can still trigger NSF fee collection and financial harm, undermining a rule meant to protect borrowers acting in good faith. It’s also because lenders are now further limiting credit to the most high-risk borrowers, including gig economy workers, who are also those most in need of emergency credit, forcing them to borrow via ultra-expensive bank and credit union overdrafts and NSFs. And when payments are not made, inevitably, borrowers’ personal credit ratings take a hit. Of course, this affects poor people and those with bad credit harder than anyone else.

Trump and Vought's shuttering of the CFPB without fixing this situation, including by pushing banks hard to provide credit to consumers at lower cost and even by standing up a viable alternative to current credit options through something like Postal Banking, would make the problem of high-interest debt worse for Americans. Moreover, because Trump and Vought refuse to act against extortionate overdraft and NSF fees, as the Biden administration did, they’re exposing consumers to high-cost debt, where they effectively borrow from the bank, too. The Biden administration's pressure on banks and financial institutions on the issue led them to agree to refund more than $240 million to customers, a win secured by actual, formal regulation. Trump and Vought have rolled that back, too.

The CFPB has largely helped people when they have problems with a financial institution, product, or transaction by allowing customers to submit complaints, which the agency then works on their behalf. Since its inception, 98% of the 9 million total complaints have received “timely responses” from the institutions or companies to which customers reported them to the CFPB. Of all the complaints, almost 400,000 were submitted by US military members, and nearly 200,000 were submitted by seniors.

The results have been staggering. CFPB data as of December, 2024 shows a whopping $21 billion has been returned to more than 205 million Americans who were financially harmed by institutions. In addition, over $5 billion in civil penalties have been imposed on guilty banks and individuals.

Congress can’t allow the White House to eliminate an agency that’s helped millions of Americans, with billions of dollars returned to them by scams, fraudsters, and megabanks that prey on low-income citizens. And if the Trump administration is determined to do so, it’s time for congressional Democrats to focus on developing credit alternatives that can allow consumers to escape some of the financial madness.

President Donald Trump seems to think he is King of the World, not just the United States. Even as he convenes his “Board of Peace” (though calling it the “Board of Imperial Conquest” would be more apt) it looks like the US will soon illegally attack Iran, again, as it did last June. Congress needs to do its job representing the will of the American people, get a spine, step up to its Constitutional duty over matters of war and peace, and stop him.

The US has attacked seven countries (eight if one includes the US of A, and most people in Minneapolis and many other cities surely think so) since Trump’s recrudescence. Ongoing talks with Iran do not appear to be promising, with unrealistic US demands, especially zero nuclear energy enrichment by Tehran and the dismantling of its missile program, which would leave it vulnerable to further Israeli attacks. Trump’s "beautiful armada" including two aircraft carrier battle groups with supporting attack aircraft is the largest US military buildup in the region since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

This massive (and expensive) deployment of forces is exactly what one does in planning for a large-scale military offensive against Iran, just as the region begins the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. This would go far beyond the more limited strikes that have taken place in the past, including last June’s attack that killed 1,000 people. “It harkens back to what I saw ahead of the 2003 Iraq war,” said retired Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, a senior fellow and military expert at Defense Priorities. “You don’t assemble this kind of power to send a message. In my view, this is what you do when you’re preparing to use it. What I see on the diplomatic front is just to try to keep things rolling until it’s time to actually launch the military operation.”

Lest anyone forget, this crisis is all of Trump's making, as he abrogated the multilateral agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA, negotiated under President Barack Obama, which effectively and verifiably capped Iran's nuclear program well short of the ability to build The Bomb.

Trump should not have the last word on whether to attack Iran again. Next week, the House of Representatives will hold a vote on H. Con. Res. 38, the Iran War Powers Resolution, according to the measure's co-sponsor US Rep Ro Khanna (D-CA). US Rep Thomas Massie (R-KY) is the other lead sponsor, and the only Republican on the resolution at present, but a vote could be close, if mostly partisan. Just a few Republican votes could make the difference.

There is no news on a Senate vote at this time, though there is a companion resolution, S. J. Res 104, introduced by Senators Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.). Should the House resolution pass, the Senate vote might ensue quickly, as time is of the essence.

In a recent Quinnipiac poll, 70% of American voters said they oppose military action against Iran. It is time for Congress to fulfill its Constitutional authority and vote to require authorization of any military action against Iran.

It is no surprise the majority of Americans oppose a war with Iran. Similarly, most Iranians oppose a military strike on their country. Now, it’s up to us to demand that Congress do its job and pull us back from the precipice of another disastrous war. Concerned individuals should call their US Representative via the Congressional switchboard at 202.224.3121, or 833-STOP-WAR

Also, on Monday at 2:30pm ET/11:30am PT, peace and constitution-loving people can join a virtual Action Hour on Zoom, where we'll mobilize together to demand Congress stop this unauthorized war before it starts.

The National Iranian American Council Action (NIAC) is organizing this event, co-sponsored by Peace Action & MPower Action, to equip you with immediate action you can take to urge lawmakers to oppose war and stand with the American and Iranian people. We will also be offering a brief "How to Advocate" 101 training to empower you to get face-to-face meetings with your lawmaker's office.

Click here to sign up and join us! us!

It’s getting late, but it’s not yet too late, to stop another illegal war of aggression.

Police in the United Kingdom have arrested Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Prince Andrew and Duke of York, on suspicion of misconduct in public office—after the disclosure of emails between Mountbatten-Windsor and the late disgraced banker Jeffrey Epstein. As I write this, Mountbatten-Windsor remains in custody.

We don’t know yet the specific charges. But we do know that the late Virginia Giuffre, an Epstein victim, accused Mountbatten-Windsor of raping her.

We also know that Mountbatten-Windsor was the UK’s trade envoy between 2001 and 2011, and appears to have forwarded to Epstein confidential government reports from visits to Vietnam, Singapore, and China, including investment opportunities in gold and uranium in Afghanistan.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer says, “No one is above the law.” The family of Virginia Giuffre says, “No one is above the law, not even royalty.” Britain’s chief prosecutor says, “No one is above the law.”

Instead of bureaucracies, America now has a royal entourage. Instead of institutions, we now have royal prerogative.

All of which raises awkward questions about the people implicated on this side of the pond, including the person in the Oval Office who loves to be treated like a king, and who appears in the Epstein files 1,433 times (that is, the files that have been released so far). Prince Andrew appears in them 1,821 times.

America likes to believe we gave up kings almost 250 years ago and adopted a system in which “no one is above the law.”

But President Donald Trump’s foreign policy has become a personal tool for him to channel money and status to himself and his closest associates. Since the 2024 election, the Trump family’s personal wealth has increased by at least $4 billion.

As with the British royalty of the 16th century, it’s all personal with Trump—all about expanding his power and enlarging his and his family’s wealth. Proceeds from the sale of Venezuelan oil? “That money will be controlled by me,” he says. The gift of a plane from Qatar? “Mine.” Investments by Middle-East kingdoms in his family’s crypto racket? “Perfectly fine.”

Like the British royalty of yore, King Trump has arbitrary power. He raises Switzerland’s tariff from 30-39% because its former president Karin Keller-Sutter “just rubbed me the wrong way.” He imposes a 50% tariff on Brazil because Brazil refused to halt its prosecution of Trump’s political ally, the former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who was found guilty of plotting a coup. Vietnam fast-tracks approval of a $1.5 billion Trump family golf course at the same time it seeks to reduce its tariff rate.

Trump claims that Greenland is “psychologically needed,” although the United States already has a military presence there and an open invitation to expand its bases. He muses about making Canada the “51st state.” These are throwbacks to the 16th-century age of empire.

***

Meanwhile, Trump has created a system of tribute and allegiance that would make Henry VIII jealous.

Apple’s Tim Cook delivers a gold-based plaque and a donation to Trump’s planned ballroom. Swiss billionaires bring a gold bar and a Rolex desk clock to the Oval Office. Jeff Bezos backs a vapid movie of Melania and hands her a check for $28 million.

Trump pardons Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire mogul who pled guilty to money-laundering violations in 2023, after which time Zhao’s Binance digital-coin trading platform becomes the engine of the Trump family’s crypto business, World Liberty Financial.

King Trump was evidently involved in Jeffrey Epstein’s nefarious doings. We don’t know exactly how because there’s been no criminal investigation. But shouldn’t there be?

Elon Musk’s humongous quarter-billion-dollar contribution to Trump’s 2024 campaign earns Musk a dukedom—a “department of government efficiency”—and the keys to the kingdom in the form of sensitive US Treasury Department software systems used to manage federal payments.

But when the Duke of DOGE starts becoming more visible than King Trump, the king banishes him and revokes his dukedom. When the banished Musk begins openly criticizing Trump, the king threatens to cut off Musk’s head in the form of cutting him and his SpaceX off from valuable government contracts. This puts an end to Musk’s impertinence.

The new TikTok (on which Trump has more than 16 million followers) will continue operating in the United States—but now with the financial backing of Trump ally Larry Ellison’s Oracle;Trump’s allied Emirati investment firm MGX (which has already invested in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company); and Silver Lake, teamed up with the private equity firm founded by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Trump allows Nvidia to sell chips to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia and extends military guarantees to Qatar—all of which have invested in the Trump family empire. (Emirati-backed investors plowed $2 billion into World Liberty Financial.)

Instead of national glory, Trump demands personal glory—to get the Nobel Peace Prize, to put his name on the Kennedy Center and Penn Station, and other major monuments and buildings.

If his commands are not met, he punishes. Because Norway didn’t give him a Nobel (it wasn’t Norway’s to give anyway), he “no longer feels obliged to think only of peace.” Because performers refuse to appear at the “Trump-Kennedy” Center, he shutters it.

Instead of bureaucracies, America now has a royal entourage. Instead of institutions, we now have royal prerogative. Instead of legitimacy based on the will of the people, there’s divine right (“I had God on my side,” “God was protecting me,” “God is on our side”).

***

We will march against King Trump on the next “No Kings Day” on March 28—hopefully making it the biggest protest in American history.

But the arrest of the former Prince Andrew raises an issue that goes way beyond protesting and marching. King Trump was evidently involved in Jeffrey Epstein’s nefarious doings. We don’t know exactly how because there’s been no criminal investigation. But shouldn’t there be?

Pam Bondi obviously won’t investigate Trump because she’s part of King Trump’s court. But what about a group of state attorneys general?

Trump has also been enriching himself and his family through his public office, violating multiple laws about conflicts of interest.

If the UK can arrest the former Prince Andrew on evidence of such wrongdoing, why shouldn’t America arrest King Trump? If no one is above the law in the UK, not even royalty, presumably no one is above the law in the US, not even a president.

Pam Bondi obviously won’t investigate Trump because she’s part of King Trump’s court. But what about a group of state attorneys general?

Almost 250 years after we broke with George III, the question must now be faced: Are we a monarchy or a nation of laws?

Not until President Donald Trump is long gone will Americans feel the full impact of his most destructive policies and his administration’s incompetence. Today’s topic: Measles.

“For children, the risks of measles are especially grave. Complications, which occur in 1 in 5 people who have the disease, can include pneumonia, blindness, permanent neurologic injury, and death. These outcomes are well-documented, particularly among young children and those with delayed access to medical care.” (Theresa Cheng, MD, JD, assistant clinical professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at UCSF-Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and a lawyer.)

Measles is preventable, but community immunity requires a 92-94% vaccination rate. Since the introduction of the measles vaccine in 1963, the incidence of the disease has decreased by over 99%, thanks to the combination of immunity through prior exposure and vaccination rates above the required threshold.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is reversing that remarkable public health achievement.

Someone who does not get vaccinated puts others—mostly children who have no voice in the critical decision to protect or jeopardize their health—at serious risk of injury or death.

Three recent stories about measles have implications that are far more consequential for the fate of humanity than Trump’s racist memes or his destabilizing antics on the world stage.

Story No. 1: Measles Outbreak in South Carolina

Between 1991 and 2024, South Carolina had a total of only 8 measles cases—6 of which occurred within a single household in 2018.

In October 2025, the state reported the first three cases in the current outbreak.

As of February 17, South Carolina had 962 confirmed measles cases; 253 involve children under 5, 615 are ages 5 to 17, 85 are adults, and nine ages are unknown.

Since the outbreak, 20 individuals have been hospitalized with complications related to the disease.

Ninety-five percent of the infected individuals were not vaccinated.

The area of the state experiencing the greatest number of cases (95% of them) also led the state in the decline in vaccination rate: Spartanburg County’s rate dropped from 93.9% in 2021-2022 to 88.9% the current school year—well below the critical threshold required for community immunity.

Story No. 2: Anti-Vaxxers Determine America’s Public Health Policy

Kennedy has gutted the Department of Health and Human Services. He has replaced scientific and medical experts with hacks who adhere here to his willful ignorance.

One of those appointees is the leader of the federal panel that recommends vaccines for Americans, Dr. Kirk Milhorn, chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. On January 22, Milhorn said that vaccines protecting children from polio and measles, and perhaps all diseases, should be optional.

“What we are doing is returning individual autonomy to the first order—not public health but individual autonomy to the first order.”

What he and his colleagues are actually doing is killing us. Kennedy has already dropped six vaccines from the childhood immunization schedule.

Story No. 3: States Are the Last Line of Defense

Only individual states, which have ultimate responsibility for vaccine schedules, have saved the country from the full destructive force of Kennedy’s anti-science, anti-vaxxer crusade. But his ascension as head of the nation’s federal public health policy has empowered his allies to target state childhood vaccination mandates.

The Medical Freedom Act Coalition includes the Children’s Health Defense—a nonprofit group that Kennedy co-founded. It is pushing legislation that would end state laws that codify vaccination schedules. Such legislation is pending in several states.

Asked about the effort, Kennedy said he was not involved, but added, “I believe in freedom of choice.”

As the impact of his attack on science intensifies, the overall public health costs will be staggering.

Earlier this month, Chris Anders, a Republican state lawmaker in West Virginia, introduced a bill that would eliminate his state’s school vaccination mandates, including the requirement that county health departments offer free shots to low-income children.

“If people decide not to be vaccinated, that is their choice,” he argued. “Just like if they decide not to wear a seatbelt or a motorcycle helmet or anything else. If they decide that, they suffer the consequences.”

Kennedy, Milhorn, Anders, and their like-minded anti-vaxxers march under the “freedom of choice” banner. It’s a red herring that omits a crucial element of the equation: Someone who does not get vaccinated puts others—mostly children who have no voice in the critical decision to protect or jeopardize their health—at serious risk of injury or death.

For a long time to come, everyone else’s kids will bear those consequences.

Epilogue: Ripple Effects

The measles vaccine is the small tip of an enormous public health iceberg. Kennedy and his anti-vaxxers in charge of public health have “sent a chill through the entire [vaccine] industry,” according to Dr. John Coller of Johns Hopkins University, a member of the executive committee of the Alliance for mRNA Medicines.

As Kennedy creates unwarranted fears about the safety and efficacy of lifesaving vaccines, some Americans will continue to believe him and vaccine sales will suffer. As he cuts research funding for new vaccine development, America will be unprepared for the next pandemic. As the impact of his attack on science intensifies, the overall public health costs will be staggering.

Future historians will scratch their heads in disbelief at what we are doing to ourselves and our children.

After some delays, the United States is dispatching a second aircraft-carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, from the Caribbean to the Middle East to join the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group and threaten Iran.

This is the third Atlantic crossing for the Ford’s crew since it set sail from Norfolk, Virginia, in June 2025, and the second time its deployment has been extended, first to redeploy from the Middle East to the Caribbean, and now to redeploy back to the Middle East.

There is a grave danger that the US government is preparing to exploit the genuine sympathy of people all over the world for the Iranian civilians massacred during protests in December and January as a pretext for an illegal military assault on Iran.

A new US war on Iran would be a cynical and catastrophic escalation of the crisis already swallowing its people, piling the unimaginable death and suffering of a full-scale war on top of many years of economic strangulation under US “maximum pressure” sanctions and the repression of the recent protests.

There is no good reason to sacrifice American soldiers and sailors in a war on Iran; no justification to kill Iranian troops for defending their country, as Americans would do if another country attacked the United States; no justice in killing Iranian civilians by turning their homes and communities into a new US war zone.

The world must act to prevent war, and the voices of Americans calling for peace and humanity may have an impact on President Trump and US politicians, in an election year when Americans are already sickened by US complicity in genocide in Gaza and the murderous paramilitaries invading US cities.

In a succession of speeches and in its National Security and Defense Strategy documents, the Trump administration promised a major shift in US foreign policy away from endless wars in the Middle East, to prioritize its ambitions to expand US power and coercion in the Americas and the Pacific.

But Trump is already following in the footsteps of the five US presidents before him, quickly abandoning his formal strategy goals and diverting America’s overpriced but impotent war machine back to the Middle East, to threaten or even attack Iran.

The renewed US threats against Iran have made it clear to Iran’s leaders that their symbolic strikes on Al Udeid air base in Qatar in June 2025, in retaliation for US strikes on nuclear facilities in Iran, were an insufficient deterrent to future US and Israeli attacks.

So Iran has signaled that it will respond to any new Israeli or US attacks with more deadly and destructive retaliation against US forces in the region. Foad Azadi at the University of Tehran reports that Iranian leaders now believe they would need to inflict at least 500 US casualties to successfully deter future attacks.

Iran’s leaders may well be right that Trump would have a low tolerance for US casualties and the political blowback he would suffer for them, if he should make the fateful choice to launch such an unnecessary and catastrophic war.

Iran has had many years to prepare for such a war. It has modern air defenses and an arsenal of ballistic missiles and drones with which to retaliate against US targets throughout the region, which include US bases in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and the UAE, and the flotilla of US warships loitering near, but not yet within range of, Iran’s shores.

The US is so far showing respect for Iran’s military capabilities, keeping the Abraham Lincoln at least a thousand miles from Iran’s coast, according to retired US Colonel Larry Wilkerson of the Eisenhower Media Network.

This cautious US naval deployment is a far cry from the six US carrier battle groups the US deployed to commit aggression against Iraq in 2003. The United States still has twelve “big-deck” aircraft carriers like the Lincoln and the Ford, but nine of them are in dock or unready for deployment. The USS George Washington, based in Japan, is now the only US carrier in East Asia, since the Abraham Lincoln left the Philippines in January to threaten Iran.

Standard deployments for these warships last only six or seven months, and their lack of readiness is the result of several years of overextended deployments, after which they need longer periods of maintenance and repair than the normal six to nine month turnaround time between deployments.

For example, since the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower completed a nine month combat deployment in the Middle East in January 2025, it has spent over a year in dock at Norfolk to repair the wear and tear it sustained in the failed US campaign against Yemen’s Ansar Allah (or Houthi) forces.

The United States and its allies bombed Yemen in successive campaigns under Biden and Trump, but failed to reopen the Red Sea and Suez Canal to Israeli or allied commercial shipping. As a result of the Yemeni blockade, most Western cargo shippers diverted their ships away from the Red Sea, forcing the Israeli port of Eilat into bankruptcy in July 2025.

Ansar Allah paused its blockade when Israel signed a ceasefire in Gaza in October 2025, but larger ships still avoid the Red Sea and insurance rates remain high, as Israel’s aggression and genocide continue to destabilize the region in unpredictable ways.

The US failure to defeat the much smaller Ansar Allah forces in Yemen is a small taste of what US forces would face in a prolonged war with Iran, which already inflicted significant damage on Israel during the twelve-day war in June 2025.

Iran used its older missiles and drones to deplete Israel’s air defenses. Then, once Israel began to exhaust its stocks of interceptors, Iran used newer, more sophisticated ballistic missiles to strike important military and intelligence headquarters in Tel Aviv and other military targets.

With Israel in trouble, the US entered the war directly, and bombed three nuclear enrichment sites in Iran, before agreeing to an Iranian ceasefire proposal on June 24, 2025. Israeli censorship has prevented a comprehensive public accounting of its losses in that war.

While overextended deployments have caused wear and tear to aircraft-carriers and other warships, US weapons transfers to its allies in Israel, Ukraine and NATO have depleted its own weapons stocks. This creates pressure on US leaders to hold off on launching a new war against a well-prepared enemy like Iran until it has replenished them, which could take a long time.

Meanwhile the war in Ukraine has exposed structural weaknesses in the US war machine. Russia has vastly out-produced the west in basic war supplies like artillery shells and drones, which has proven militarily decisive in Ukraine.

As Richard Connolly of the RUSI military think tank in London has pointed out, Russia did not privatize its weapons industry after the end of the Cold War, as the US and its allies did. It maintained and improved its existing infrastructure, which he called “economically inefficient until 2022, and then suddenly it looks like a very shrewd bit of planning.”

After the Cold War ended, on the initiative of Soviet leader and visionary peacemaker Mikhail Gorbachev, Russia’s economic weakness forced its military leaders to make honest, hard-nosed assessments of what it would take to defend their country in the post-Cold War world, and the shrewd planning that Connolly put his finger on is one result of this.

On the US side however, Eisenhower’s infamous “military-industrial complex” used its “unwarranted influence” to exploit the west’s post-Cold War triumphalism and expand its global military ambitions. Many Americans immediately recognized this as a dangerous new form of imperialism. Wiser heads among America’s political leaders and foreign policy experts predicted that the rest of the world would ultimately reject America’s new imperialism and be forced to confront it as a threat to peace.

The neoliberal privatization of US and western armament production turned it into an even more lucrative and politically powerful industry, which only reconfirmed Eisenhower’s warnings. Monopolistic military contractors have produced smaller quantities of increasingly expensive, technologically advanced warships, warplanes and surveillance systems. Despite wreaking catastrophic destruction in country after country, these weapons have proven impotent to prevent humiliating US defeats in its wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Ukraine, and will likely prove just as useless in a major war with Iran.

The simplistic, linear thinking of Trump and his advisors leads them to believe that the solution to a trillion dollar per year war machine that can’t win a war is a $1.5 trillion per year war machine.

But this is nonsense. Russia has not defeated the US and NATO by outspending them. Quite the opposite. Since 1992, the US military alone has outspent Russia by fifteen to one ($26 trillion vs $1.7 trillion in constant 2024 dollars, according to SIPRI). Russia’s military superiority is the result of taking its own defense more seriously and confronting its problems more honestly than corrupt US leaders have ever tried to do since the end of the Cold War.

At a price tag of $17.5 billion, the USS Gerald R. Ford is the largest, most expensive warship ever built, costing more than the entire annual military budgets of most other countries. Making an even bigger warship for $26 billion would not make Americans any safer, just a bit poorer.

Relying on the offensive use of military force and record military spending to try to solve America’s problems has put the United States on a collision course with the rest of the world. In 1949, long before Eisenhower’s farewell speech in 1961, he offered some sage advice to politicians and pundits who were calling for a massive US attack on the USSR to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons.

Diplomacy does not mean holding a gun to someone’s head and demanding that they sign an unconditional surrender.

“Those who measure security solely in terms of offensive capacity distort its meaning and mislead those who pay them heed,” said Eisenhower. “No modern nation has ever equaled the crushing offensive power attained by the German war machine in 1939. No modern nation was broken and smashed as was Germany six years later.”

Unlike Iran today, the USSR was indeed working to develop nuclear weapons, but Eisenhower warned Americans against launching a new war that might kill millions to try to stop it.

As Eisenhower insisted, offensive military action offers no solutions to international problems. But diplomatic solutions are always possible. Diplomacy does not mean holding a gun to someone’s head and demanding that they sign an unconditional surrender. It means treating other people and countries with mutual respect and finding solutions that everybody can live with, based upon rules that we all agree on.

The UN Charter universally prohibits the threat or use of force and requires all countries to resolve disputes peacefully. So one country’s wrongdoing, real or perceived, is never a valid pretext for another country to threaten or use military force.

There is no good reason to sacrifice American soldiers and sailors in a war on Iran; no justification to kill Iranian troops for defending their country, as Americans would do if another country attacked the United States; no justice in killing Iranian civilians by turning their homes and communities into a new US war zone.

Could the stark choice our country is facing in Iran be a turning point, a moment when the American people will stand up and clearly, strongly say “No” to war, before our corrupt leaders can plunge Iran and the United States into yet another “Made in the USA” military catastrophe?

Oreo is marketed as “milk’s favorite cookie.” But behind that familiar blue package is a supply chain tied to rainforest destruction and violence against the people who defend their land.

Mondelēz International, the corporate giant that makes Oreo, has built a global snack empire worth nearly $40 billion a year. Its products line grocery shelves across the country. What most consumers never see is the palm oil that goes into those products—or the damage connected to its production.

Palm oil expansion remains one of the leading drivers of tropical deforestation. It is also linked to land grabs, intimidation, and violence against Indigenous and local communities who resist losing their forests.

According to Rainforest Action Network’s 2025 Keep Forests Standing Scorecard, Mondelēz ranked last among major consumer goods companies on deforestation and human rights safeguards. The company scored just 4 out of 24 possible points. Most alarming, it received zero points for having a public policy protecting Human Rights Defenders—people who face threats, criminalization, and violence for standing up to destructive development.

Communities should not be displaced for cookies.

Between 2015 and 2024, more than 6,400 attacks and over 1,000 killings of land and environmental defenders were documented worldwide. Industrial agriculture is a major driver of this violence.

These defenders are farmers, Indigenous leaders, journalists, teachers, and community members. They are protecting forests that stabilize the climate, regulate rainfall, and support biodiversity found nowhere else on Earth. They are also protecting their homes.

Mondelēz has been exposed more than once for sourcing palm oil linked to illegal deforestation in Indonesia’s Leuser Ecosystem—often called the “Orangutan Capital of the World.” The Leuser region is one of the last places on Earth where critically endangered species including rhinos, elephants, tigers, and orangutans still coexist in the wild. It is also home to Indigenous communities who depend on intact forests for survival.

Satellite monitoring continues to show forest loss in protected areas within this ecosystem. That means safeguards are failing.

Mondelēz promotes its “Snacking Made Right” campaign as proof of sustainability leadership. But marketing language does not stop chainsaws. Without enforceable policies and independent monitoring, companies continue to profit while forests fall.

The absence of a Human Rights Defender policy is not a minor oversight. It sends a message through the supply chain that violence and intimidation are not red lines. When corporations fail to adopt zero-tolerance policies against threats and criminalization, suppliers operate with fewer consequences.

This is not just about environmental damage. It is about whether communities have the right to say no when their land is targeted for development. It is about Free, Prior, and Informed Consent. It is about whether corporate profit outweighs human safety.

Deforestation is accelerating the climate crisis. Tropical rainforests absorb carbon and cool the planet. When they are cleared, that stored carbon is released, intensifying global warming. From stronger hurricanes to prolonged droughts and wildfires, the effects are already visible.

Corporations that rely on forest-risk commodities have the power to change this trajectory. Mondelēz could require full traceability for its palm oil supply. It could suspend suppliers linked to deforestation or violence. It could adopt a clear, public Human Rights Defender policy with zero tolerance for intimidation and criminalization. It could require proof that communities have granted Free, Prior, and Informed Consent before land is developed.

Instead, it continues business as usual.

Oreo may seem harmless. But when palm oil is sourced from destroyed rainforest or land taken without consent, the cost is not just environmental—it is human.

Communities should not be displaced for cookies. Forest defenders should not risk their lives so multinational corporations can maintain margins.

Mondelēz has the size and influence to shift industry standards. What it lacks is the political will.

Protecting forests starts with protecting the people who defend them. Until companies like Mondelēz adopt enforceable policies that prioritize human rights and end deforestation in their supply chains, their sustainability claims will ring hollow.

Consumers deserve snacks that do not come at the expense of forests and communities. And the people risking their lives to protect the planet deserve more than silence from the corporations profiting from their land.

Attorney General Pam Bondi’s contentious House hearing about the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files offered a clear message to the nation: Sex trafficking of women and minors is perfectly acceptable as long as wealthy white men do it.

Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced late sex trafficker, fixer, and political networker, was found to have ties to huge number of the world’s elites on both sides of the political aisle—including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Ehud Barak, Bill Gates, Steve Bannon, Larry Summers, Bill Clinton, and of course, Donald Trump.

For years, Trump’s conservative backers have attacked LGBTQ+ people, drag queens, immigrants, and others, claiming a desire to protect women and children from rapists and groomers. Trump even boasted that “whether the women liked it or not,” he would “protect” them from migrants, whom he slandered as “monsters” who “kidnap and kill our children.”

But when given the opportunity to seek justice for countless women and children who were trafficked, abused, and exploited by the world’s wealthiest, most powerful people, the MAGA movement and its leaders have shown a startling disinterest in accountability. During her hearing Bondi tried desperately to deflect attention, claiming that the stock market was more deserving of public attention than Epstein’s victims.

For elites like Epstein, ideological differences were superficial. The real distinction was money, power, and connections.

Even the Republican rank and file is now mysteriously detached from the Epstein files.

Polls show that in summer 2025, 40% of GOP voters disapproved of the federal government’s handling of the Epstein files. But by January 2026, only about half that percentage disapproved—even after the Trump administration missed its deadline to release millions of files and then released them in a way that exposed the victims while protecting the perpetrators.

While some European leaders are facing harsh consequences for associating with Epstein, no Americans outside of Epstein and his closest associate Ghislaine Maxwell have faced any consequences, legal or otherwise.

That’s despite very concrete ties between the Trump administration and the sex trafficker. Not only did Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick admit to visiting Epstein island after lying about it (and has so far faced no consequences), but Trump himself is named more than a million times in the files, according to lawmakers with access to the unredacted documents. Several victims identify Trump by name, alleging he raped and assaulted them.

And it’s not just Trump. Epstein was an equal opportunity fixer. He was just as friendly with liberals as he was with conservatives, including Summers, Clinton, and, disconcertingly for the American left, Noam Chomsky. For elites like Epstein, ideological differences were superficial. The real distinction was money, power, and connections.

Epstein was a glorified drug dealer, and his drugs of choice were the vulnerable bodies of women and children, offered up to his friends and allies as the forbidden currency he traded in. A useful moniker has emerged to describe the global network of elites whose power and privilege continues to protect them from accountability: the Epstein Class.

Georgia Sen. John Ossoff, who faces reelection in 2026, is deploying this label, understanding that voters—at least those who haven’t bought into the MAGA cult —are increasingly aware of the double standards that wealthy power players are held to.

“This is the Epstein class, ruling our country,” said Ossoff in reference to those who make up the Trump administration. “They are the elites they pretend to hate.”

He’s right. And if the Trump administration won’t hold them to account, Americans should demand leaders who will.

In recent months, the Department of Homeland Security has issued hundreds of administrative subpoenas to tech companies demanding the personal information of social media accounts that track, criticize, or oppose Immigration Customs and Enforcement. This includes Google, Reddit, Meta, and Discord, which—in a move that makes far more sense now—recently announced it will require users to submit a face scan or upload an ID to access full content.

While alarming, this is only the latest step in a year-long effort by President Donald Trump’s DHS to expand its online surveillance apparatus under the guise of combating left-wing “political violence” and “domestic terrorism.” In February 2025, The Intercept revealed that ICE was soliciting pitches for an automated system that would scan social media and other sites for anti-ICE sentiment and threats. If anything "suspicious" were detected, a contractor would conduct a detailed review of the user’s background, including:

Previous social media activity which would indicate any additional threats to ICE; 2). Information which would indicate the individual(s) and/or the organization(s) making threats have a proclivity for violence; and 3). Information indicating a potential for carrying out a threat (such as postings depicting weapons, acts of violence, refences [sic] to acts of violence, to include empathy or affiliation with a group which has violent tendencies; references to violent acts; affections with violent acts; eluding [sic] to violent acts.

To estimate one’s “potential for carrying out a threat” or “proclivity for violence,” contractors would draw on “social and behavioral sciences” and “psychological profiles.” Sentiment analysis would likely be carried out by machine-learning algorithms. While details here are sparse, the important point for now is that this review would attempt to assess one’s present and future threat to ICE based on the agency’s own internal (and politically biased) criteria.

Once flagged, the system would scour a target’s internet history and attempt to reveal their real-world location and offline identity. Contractors would provide ICE with a slew of personal information including: “photograph, partial legal name, partial date of birth, possible city, possible work affiliations, possible school or university affiliation, and any identified possible family members or associates.”

All of this meant to invoke fear, silence dissent, and consolidate power for Trump and his allies. Yet, despite the dangers, we must resist.

In October 2025, Wired reported that ICE plans to drastically expand their surveillance capabilities by hiring nearly 30 private contractors to scan social media sites and convert posts, photos, and messages into new leads for enforcement raids.

In January 2026, investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein revealed that DHS and the FBI have over a dozen “secret and obscure” watch lists they use to track “protesters (both anti-ICE and pro-Palestinian), ‘Antifa,’ and those who are promiscuously labelled ‘domestic terrorists.’” These watch lists include a classified social media repository code named Slipstream, as well as others “used to link people on the streets together, including collecting on friends and families who have nothing to do with any purported lawbreaking.” This reporting came a few days after a video was released online of an ICE agent telling a protester that they have a “nice little database” and “now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.”

These watch lists are an extension of Trump’s National Security Presidential Memo 7 (NSPM-7). That memo mandates a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.” Per the memo, domestic terrorism is fomented by the spread of “‘anti-fascist’ rhetoric” including, “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” as well as “extremism on migration, race, and gender.”

The labeling of any view Trump disagrees with as “domestic terrorism” is dangerous and strategic. As Rachel Levinson-Waldman, the director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, notes, under the Patriot Act, “Any federal or state crime can be used as the basis for a domestic terrorism investigation if it is ‘dangerous to human life’” and “appear[s] to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population” or the government. This broad basis allows DHS to use its vast policing and surveillance powers to investigate civil rights organizations, activists, and donors to progressive causes as well as online critics. Regardless of the outcome of their investigation, being suspected of domestic terrorism—regardless of how unconstitutional, frivolous, and politically motivated the charge—can have lasting impacts, including loss of employment and housing, inability to conduct financial transactions, as well as public stigma.

Importantly, the image of the “domestic terrorist” is quite different from the ordinary criminal. The “domestic terrorist” does not simply violate the law, they commit “ideologically driven crimes” aimed to destroy the nation and its people. They represent a far greater threat. This is why the State Department has been revoking the visas of hundreds of students who express “pro-Hamas” views, whether in protest, newsletters, or on social media. For Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the presence of “these lunatics” is contrary to the national security and interests of the United States. The State Department has also denied visas to people “celebrating” the death of Charlie Kirk for similar reasons.

National security is also the basis for imposing denaturalization quotas for foreign-born citizens as well as the Trump administration’s efforts to restrict birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants. In each case, “national security,” “left-wing political violence,” and “domestic terrorism” are used to justify the denial of rights and the abuse of federal powers.

For US-born citizens like Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Marimar Martinez, or those subjected to ICE’s mass digital surveillance, those punitive measures are unavailable. Instead, the designation of “domestic terrorist” is meant to mark them as traitors—as people who, like “pro-Hamas” visa holders or “dangerous illegal criminal aliens more broadly,” do not belong in this country. For this administration, they are essentially citizens in name only—they do not “share our values, contribute to our economy, and assimilate in our society.” Thus, they too must be subjected to the full arsenal of policing and surveillance powers at DHS’ disposal.

In fact, for Trump, these "faux" citizens are a greater threat than undocumented immigrants. As then-presidential candidate Trump put it, “I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within, not even the people that have come in and destroying our country. […] I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people. Radical left lunatics.” But the reality is that far from sick, bad, or radical, these are ordinary law-abiding people whose only crime is defying the rising piss-stained tide of Trump’s authoritarianism.

The dangers here are real and serious: The blatant First Amendment violations; the widening of DHS’ mass surveillance capabilities; the policing of dissent, both actual and possible; the coordinated effort to undermine digital activism; the complicity of tech companies in furthering the fascist ambitions of the Trump administration; the malicious smearing of those who oppose this administration as “domestic terrorists”; as well as the reality—unnerving, though far from unprecedented—that from the web to the streets the president of the United States is weaponizing the federal government to hunt, prosecute, and punish his enemies.

All of this meant to invoke fear, silence dissent, and consolidate power for Trump and his allies. Yet, despite the dangers, we must resist. We must continue calling out ICE’s abuses, championing Palestinian sovereignty, denouncing Trump’s vile imperial and colonial ambitions, and protecting our rights and freedoms from the real domestic terrorist threat: the Trump administration.

It would be hard to overstate Jesse Jackson’s importance in opening up American politics and society, not just to Black Americans, but also to Hispanics, and the LGTBQ community. It is probably difficult for younger people to imagine, and even old-timers like myself to remember, how bad discrimination was in the not very distant past.

When Jackson ran the first time in 1984, and even the second time in 1988, there was not a single Black governor in the United States. There had been no Black governors since the end of Reconstruction. There were also no Black senators.

The only Black person to serve in the Senate since Reconstruction was a Republican, Edward Brooke, who was elected in Massachusetts. When Carol Mosley Braun got elected to the Senate from Illinois in 1992, it was widely noted that she was first Black women to be elected to the Senate. She was also the first Black Democrat to be elected to the Senate.

It wasn’t just in politics; Blacks were largely excluded from the top reaches in most areas. I recall when I was a grad student at the University of Michigan in the 1980s. There we just two Black tenured professors in the whole university. There was a similar story in corporate America.

This was a period of serious upward redistribution and the losers, as in most people, were not happy campers. Jackson spoke to those people.

Jackson’s campaign didn’t turn things around by itself, but it certainly helped to spur momentum for larger changes. Back then people seriously debated whether a Black person could be elected president in the United States. Jackson’s campaign raised that question in a very serious way.

Barack Obama (the second Black Democrat to be elected to the Senate) answered that question definitively two decades later. While President Obama is obviously an enormously talented politician, without Jackson’s campaigns it is hard to envision Obama ever having been a serious presidential contender.

And Jackson was serious about a “rainbow coalition.” He also helped open the door for Hispanics, for Arab and Muslim Americans, and for the LGBTQ community. At a time when there were no openly gay or lesbian members of Congress, and even liberals were afraid to be associated with anyone who was openly gay, Jackson stood out in offering a welcome mat.

Jackson also pushed a powerful economic message. At a time when Ronald Reagan was busy cutting taxes for the rich and cutting back social programs, and trade was devastating large parts of the industrial Midwest, Jackson was advocating a populist agenda that focused on building up the poor and the working class. His message resonated with many white workers who felt abandoned by the mainstream of the Democratic Party, and even many farmers who were devastated by over-valued dollar in the early and mid-1980s.

There is a bizarre revisionism that has gained currency among people who pass for intellectuals that says the baby boomers grew up in Golden Age in the 1970s and 1980s. The unemployment rate averaged over 7% from 1974 to 1992. The median wage actually fell from 1973 to the mid-1990s. This was a period of serious upward redistribution and the losers, as in most people, were not happy campers. Jackson spoke to those people.

I had the opportunity to work in Jackson’s campaign in Michigan in 1988, and I still remember it as one of the high points of my life. Even though Jackson had vastly outperformed anyone’s expectations in the early primaries (probably even his own), he was not taken seriously in the Michigan race. Most of the pundits considered it a race between the frontrunner Michael Dukakis and Congressman Dick Gephardt, who had strong union support. As it turned out Jackson handily beat both, getting an absolute majority of the votes cast in the state.

In my own congressional district, which centered on Ann Arbor, all the party leaders lined up for Dukakis. The Jackson campaign was composed of a number of people who worked in less prestigious jobs, like salesclerks and custodians, and grad students like me. It really was a multiracial coalition.

We managed to totally outwork the party hacks. First, because it was a caucus and not a primary, it meant that people would not go to their regular precincts to cast their votes. We made sure that our supporters had a neatly coded map that told them where their voting site was.

Also, since it was a caucus and not a primary, the state’s usual rules on being registered 30 days ahead of an election did not apply. We had a deputy registrar at every voting site who would register people who had not previously registered.

We also made a point of having all our workers knocking on doors on election day and offering to drive people to the polls who needed a ride. The Dukakis people were all standing around the voting sites, handing out literature with their big Dukakis buttons, apparently not realizing that anyone who showed up had already decided how to vote.

I remember talking to a reporter late that night after the size of Jackson’s victory became clear. Up until that point, there had been numerous pieces in the media asking, “What does Jesse Jackson really want?” as though the idea that a Black person wanting to be president was absurd on its face.

I couldn’t resist having a little fun. I pointed out that with his big victory in Michigan, Jackson was now ahead in both votes cast and delegates. I said that I think we have to start asking what Michael Dukakis really wants.

Anyhow, the high didn’t last. The party closed ranks behind Dukakis, and he won the nomination. He then lost decisively to George Bush in the fall. His margin of defeat was larger than in any election since then.

All the gains of the last four decades are now on the line, as Donald Trump and his white supremacist gang look to turn back the clock. We have the battle of our lives on our hands right now.

But Jesse Jackson was a huge player in the changes that created the America that Donald Trump wants to destroy. He had serious flaws, like any great political leader, but for now we should remember the enormous impact he had in making this a better country.

Last week I was in Minneapolis, Minnesota to observe and learn from those who have attempted to protect members of their community from the brutal assaults by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other government agencies and hold those agencies accountable for the violence they are wrecking on the community.

ICE in Minneapolis: From Surge to “Surrender (Kind of)”

The Trump administration’s decision to surge 2,000 ICE and Border Patrol agents into Minneapolis to uphold White House Deputy Chief of Staff Steven Miller’s directive for the arrest in the US of 3,000 persons each day to teach immigrants, and everyone in the US a lesson, backfired as the actions of the federal agents in Minneapolis outraged the city, state, and nation.

Due to community pressure and noncompliance with the violent attempts by ICE agents to force capitulation by the community and the lawlessness of the masked agents, caught on video by bystanders in busting doors to homes, smashing car windows, and beating up and murdering two Minneapolis residents eventually forced the Trump administration to replace the well-known, mean-spirited Gregory Bovino and bring in “border czar” Tom Homan who very quickly reduced the number of ICE agents in Minneapolis by one-third and required the agents to wear body cameras.

“I Can’t Breathe” Organizing in Minneapolis Six Years Ago With the Horrific Murder of George Floyd Prepared the Community

A memorial is shown for George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Photo by Ann Wright)

Community organizing began six years ago with the community response to the horrific murder of George Floyd. The protests and vigils for George Floyd in Minneapolis and around the world brought attention to the continuing targeting of African Americans for minor incidents that the police escalated into “I Can’t Breathe” and death.

To this day, each day for six years, a group from the community meets at 8:00 am at George Floyd Square located across the street from the Memorial over coffee to discuss the previous day’s events and the organizing needed for that day. There are several persons who are at the Square each day who can provide to a newcomer the historical context for the treatment by police of African Americans, Native Americans, and immigrants in the Minneapolis area.

Others arriving may be unhoused who are needing a cup of coffee and a doughnut for breakfast or some “new clothing” from the donations that are located inside a city bus stop shelter located at the square. By 9:30 am, the group has disbursed: some left quickly after 8:00 am to take kids to school or to go to work, others to continue work on community mutual aid projects.

Block by Block Community Organizing

Veterans for Peace mobilize against ICE in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Photo by Ann Wright)

In speaking with residents in several parts of Minneapolis, beautiful stories of organizing on a block-by-block level emerged! Residents got to know those who lived on the same block. Everyone had a whistle to alert the neighborhood that suspicious cars were in the area. Those residents who were not targeted by ICE, generally Caucasian, came out on the streets to find out what was happening and ready to record ICE actions. They began doing grocery shopping for those fearful of leaving their homes, taking kids to school, picking them up from school, and taking people to medical appointments.

The Minneapolis friend who housed us for this visit usually has at least two things per day that she was doing for immigrants in her neighborhood. Others in teams of two or three stand outside businesses that ICE might target, with the businesses thanking the volunteers by providing coffee and snacks.

Other volunteers in their personal cars follow vehicles that they suspect may be driven by ICE agents. Many of these volunteers have been physically assaulted by ICE agents who stop the volunteers, damage their cars, take their license plate numbers, find out the addresses of the volunteers, and then harass them at their homes.

Minnesota “Nice” has turned into “F**k ICE.”

The Veterans For Peace (VFP) chapter in Minneapolis has a Rapid Response team composed of veteran volunteers from around the country that has provided a presence in various parts of the city. In an article by VFP board member Gerry Condon, he relates: “Younger Post-9/11 veterans have taken the lead. They have been patrolling in at-risk neighborhoods, monitoring for agitators, deescalating situations at protests, and training people how to stop bleeding. At least four veterans have been arrested while peacefully protesting but have been released without charges.”

These types of community volunteering happen every day all over the city, including a team of carpenters who replace doors that ICE has knocked down when entering a residence, to a team of tow truck operators who return a vehicle that occupants have been kidnapped from to the residence of the person—free of charge.

Many of these stories, organizations, and actions are chronicled in the website: Stand With Minnesota.

Challenging ICE at the Whipple Federal Building

Every day hundreds come to the Whipple immigrant court and detention building located in south Minneapolis. ICE agents mobilize in the huge parking lot with hundreds of rental cars and drive out to terrorize the community and bring those arrested into the Whipple facility before sending them to other detention locations.

Volunteers with megaphones speak their minds to the departing ICE agents with the most “F” words I have ever heard in all my life!!! Spontaneous “F**k ICE” chants erupt everywhere—from the entire audience in a recent Minneapolis hockey game to whenever Minneapolis residents meet on a street corner.

Minnesota “Nice” has turned into “F**k ICE.”

ICE put up tall fences on both sides of the roadway used for departure. In one remarkable action, community members threw dildos over the fences at ICE cars because they were such “dicks.”

Due to AI and facial recognition devices used by ICE, most who go to Whipple wear masks and leave their phones in their cars.

Volunteers Help Detainees Released in the Middle of the Night with No Coats, Phones

Another group of volunteers formed “Haven Watch” to provide 24-hour-a-day coverage for those who have been detained and subsequently allowed to leave Whipple. Generally, they are released from the detention facility at night, with no coats and sometimes no shoes, in the bitter cold with no phones to call for help. The volunteers provide warm drinks and food, clothing, a phone, and a ride home.

The Murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti: Retaliation for challenging ICE Can Be Swift and Brutal

A memorial to Renee Good is shown in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Photo by Ann Wright)

Hundreds of people visit the memorials each day of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. New flowers, photos, poems, and statements are placed at the site where each was murdered by ICE agents. We have all seen the videos of ICE agent Jonathan Ross shooting mother of three Renee Good in her car on January 7, 2026 and of Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez murdering Veterans Affairs ICU nurse Alex Pretti on January 24, 2026 as five of them pinned Alex on the ground.

President Donald Trump, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and other administration officials' attempts to characterize both Good and Pretti as terrorists backfired badly as videos of the federal agents murdering them emerged.

The allegations against four others shot by federal immigration agents unraveled in court with little publicity.

Before Trump officials declared Renee Good and Alex Pretti at fault for instigating violence before they were killed, the administration’s allegations against four others shot at by federal immigration agents quietly unraveled in court. There have been 16 shootings by on-duty federal immigration agents patrolling in US cities and towns over the past year, including those that took the lives of Minnesota protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Continuing Historic Violence in Minnesota: Vigil and March for Disappeared and Murdered Native American Women

Crowds gather outside the Minneapolis American Indian Center. (Photo by Ann Wright)

ICE violence is not the only type of violence in Minnesota. Saturday, February 14, 2026 we went to the Minneapolis American Indian Center to participate in the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives Day of Remembrance, which is held each February 14, to bring awareness to the epidemic of Indigenous people who have gone missing or have been murdered.

Startling data collected by the state of Minnesota is evidence that Indigenous people are a high percentage of the state’s missing person cases.

The Minnesota state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension reports that 732 Indigenous persons went missing in Minnesota in 2025, more than 64% of whom were women. In 2025, the average number of Indigenous people in Minnesota who were missing on any one day was 63, according to the BCA.

According to 2024 data, American Indians accounted for more than 4% of all reported victims of homicide or nonnegligent manslaughter in Minnesota, despite American Indians making up only a little more than 1% of the population.

Many Issues of Minneapolis-St. Paul

People in Minneapolis, Minnesota hold up a banner in support of Cuba. (Photo by Ann Wright)

While ICE raids are the main focus of citizens of Minneapolis-St. Paul, they are still active in other issues. They have not forgotten Cuba and Palestine, among many issues, with weekly bridge bannering on Wednesday and Friday afternoons… after a day filled with protest of ICE!

Minnesota NICE—It Surely IS, Despite all the Challenges!

Our country faces an affordability crisis amidst fundamental attacks on democracy. Public employee pension plans can either be part of the solution or part of the problem.

Late last year, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander recommended the city’s pension boards drop BlackRock and other portfolio managers that don’t have decarbonization plans up to the city’s standards. Lander’s initiative was blocked, and the editorial board of The Washington Post accused him of playing politics. But Lander argued that his recommendation was in line with the government’s fiduciary duty to protect the long-term value of pension funds, the retirement systems most public sector workers rely on—and have been paying into their entire careers. He’s right. In this critical moment in history, companies that are actively hastening climate change, threatening housing security, eliminating jobs and industries, and destabilizing our democracy and economy do not deserve our investment. Yes, they are acting immorally but they are also very bad investments with little promise of future returns for public sector workers. It’s not “playing politics” to refuse to fund their efforts to dismantle our society. That’s why we’re calling on pension boards across the country to take a hard look at their portfolios and make the smart business decision: stop investing in companies like this today.

The stakes could not be higher: pension funds account for $6.1 trillion in state and local defined-benefit funds alone. Every month, nearly 15 million workers across the country contribute part of their paycheck to ensure they have enough income to retire securely. This is a big pot of money and the companies that boards choose to invest it with matter. For public sector workers, pensions are not only retirement funds, but deferred current compensation. Workers are forsaking their hard-earned money today for the potential of a dignified future. Meanwhile, corporations are using that money today to further their own goals—many of which are directly at odds with the goals, livelihoods, and futures of public employees.

The interests of public workers and these companies dangerously diverge, but even the one area of alignment is fraught: secure return on investment.

Public pension systems across the country, including the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTERS), California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) and New York City retirement funds, are heavily invested in Blackstone, the private equity company turning profits by hiking up rents during a housing affordability crisis. RealPage, the company sued last year by the DOJ for allegedly operating a nationwide rental price-fixing scheme, has investments from over a dozen pension funds through private equity funds. Public workers are watching their deferred compensation funnel into corporate exploitation while they fight to pay their own rent or mortgages.

Palantir, the data surveillance software company whose co-founder has stated his support for public hangings and apartheid, has multi-million dollar investments from The Teacher Retirement System of Texas, the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System, CalPERS, CalSTERS and other pension funds. Palantir’s tools have been used by the military to conduct destabilizing wars around the world, by DOGE to gather and merge data on millions of US residents, endangering the safety and security of us all, and by ICE to terrorize individuals and families across the country— threatening our democracy at home and abroad.

The interests of public workers and these companies dangerously diverge, but even the one area of alignment is fraught: secure return on investment. We are almost undeniably in the midst of an AI bubble, much larger than the dot com bubble that came before. With so many pension fund portfolios overly concentrated in the tech industry, funding new data centers built on speculative calculations and crypto companies propped up by hype—Palantir, Coinbase, VC firms like Andreessen Horowitz and others, NVIDIA and many more—a shift in the global appetite for new technology could empty the pockets of millions of workers. Short-term gains are not a good predictor of long-term returns for investors like public employees, who are stuck with the terms of their retirement funds and can’t pull out when markets turn. When the editorial board of the Washington Post writes that “the job of pension fund managers is to maximize returns for retirees who depend on them,” they should take these very real—and apolitical—risks into account.

Public pension funds are an enormous engine driving the economy today, and the investment choices that pension boards make are critical to the future of the country and the world. When boards invest workers’ money, they contribute to the specific visions and plans of companies and the people who run them. And when those plans include the destruction of our environment, our right to housing and fair work, and our democracy, it’s assisted suicide. Today we are urging pension boards to think beyond short-term gains and market bubbles. We’re calling on leaders to speak out and push for change as Former Comptroller Brad Lander did. Public worker retirement money must be invested responsibly in a secure future for us all.