Contributing fundamentally to the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the struggles of British workers in the Industrial Revolution, Thomas Paine was the greatest radical of a truly radical age. Yet this son of an English artisan did not become a radical until his arrival in America in late 1774 at the age of thirty-seven. Even then he had never expected such things to happen.

However, struck by America’s startling contradictions and magnificent possibilities, and moved by the spirit and determination of its people to resist British authority, he dedicated himself to the American cause and through his pamphlets of 1776—Common Sense and the ensuing American Crisis Papers—he emboldened Americans to transform their colonial rebellion into a revolutionary war, defined the new nation in a democratically expansive and progressive fashion, and articulated an American identity charged with exceptional purpose and promise.

As Paine saw it: Americans could show the world that humanity had no need for kings and overlords, indeed, that common people, working people, could govern themselves!

Is it any wonder then that we have reached back and recruited Paine to the cause of rescuing America’s revolutionary promise from royal wannabee Donald Trump and his MAGA and GOP (Tory) subjects who seem set upon destroying it?

Vote Democratic top to bottom on November 5th… so we can start acting anew on Citizen Paine’s radical-democratic challenge: “We have it in our power to begin the world again.”Words That Turned a Rebellion Into Revolution
Poisoning the Blood of Our Country?
We Must Vote...

In 30 years, on some fall morning like today, we wake up and turn on the news. No one is talking about banning abortion or “legalizing abortion” because we don’t talk about wombs like they exist to be legislated around anymore. Instead they are announcing the closing of U.S. military bases in the Pacific, and returning the land to its stewards. Once places of pollution, sexual violence, and war buildup, these bases are something else now. And all over the South of the United States, communities have been given billions of billions of dollars to replace their infrastructure to better protect against natural disasters.

For a couple decades, the world has been working together to slow climate emissions; the only competition is who can save the world the fastest. Something that seemed unfathomable 30 years ago, when Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton destroyed Florida and North Carolina and when the government sent money to Israel for genocide instead of sending money to hurricane relief. Palestinians rebuilt Gaza, and people born in Gaza are free to visit their families in Jerusalem, Tulkarem, or Beitunia. The apartheid walls finally came down.

Any devastating moment can be the one that makes us change course in this timeline—natural disasters or coming to the brink of a world war could have been it. From the bottom up, the people demanded better priorities. Feminists thought holistically about what women ought to demand. If war and imperialism are killing women and children directly through bombs and indirectly through climate destruction, then feminists ought to demand an end to war. So they did. The money that was so tied up in the war industry every year, over $1 trillion, flowed into communities to meet beyond their most basic needs.

If we can see little glimpses of the world we want to live in by just being with each other, then we are tangibly moving in the right direction.

The world and its people have a sense of stability. We are all less filled with anxiety and trauma. That’s an example of the feminist future we can imagine.

If utopia is a world where uteruses can’t be legislated or Palestinians can move freely throughout their land, then we are guilty of being utopians. Having a social imagination is useful because we can’t start walking somewhere if we have no idea where we are going, or else we risk walking in the complete opposite direction. The “feminism” of Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, or any other woman of the ruling class has no vision for the future because their feminism very plainly endorses the status quo of endless war and capitalism. This brand of feminism might make it so women have the right to an abortion, but with no way to afford one if they need it, for example. We argue that the co-opted war mongering feminism of this era is leading us down a path that puts all women who aren’t in the ruling class in the line of fire. And we also argue that we can practice our feminist values to create a crawl space to reach a feminist future.

Any dehumanization is antithetical to feminist values. “Feminists” who haven’t said a word about the genocide in Gaza are leaving out Palestinian women—thus dehumanizing an entire population of oppressed people and giving discursive cover for a genocide. If you look at any atrocity at any moment in time, there were people, even “feminists,” justifying those atrocities and injustices. Even if they don’t mention Palestine at all and only discuss abortion rights, omitting it from their demands demonstrates dehumanization all by itself. They are saying aloud who is important to them and who is not.

With each exclusion, the war machine and patriarchy (they are the same thing) will just go to the next oppressed group of people that feminists are willing to leave behind. The first weekend of November, a Women’s March, hoping to stir the women into the streets like it did in 2017, is planned. It declares it is a feminist movement: “By 2050, we will be a feminist-led movement that ensures anyone and everyone has the freedom to lead empowered lives in safety and security in their bodies, in their communities, and throughout the country.” We wonder if our feminist vision should demand a little bit more, and if it’s really useful to have a vision that only includes “the country.” In a globalized world where our “country” has over 700 military bases and supplies weapons for every major conflict, don’t feminists within the U.S. owe a vision that transcends borders? If our oppression flows to every inch of the Earth, so should our solidarity.

Patriarchy is a stomach that is never satiated and is constantly looking for people to swallow up, so it encourages us and pressures us to leave people behind. At this present moment, we are being encouraged by Western feminists to put women in the U.S. ahead of women in Gaza, even when we see videos of pregnant Palestinian women being shot in the street. Western feminists are insisting we try to race to the top, leaving our sisters in Gaza ailing and starving in our dust. Unless part of the ruling class, Western feminists gain nothing by excluding Palestinian women from their politics and future aspirations. Without the practice and value of true solidarity, they will leave everyone living under the boot of capitalism and imperialism in the dirt.

Having a social imagination is key to our feminist world view. To quote Bill Ayers’ new book, When Freedom is the Question, Abolition is the Answer, social imagination is “the collectively creative, inventive, resourceful forces that embrace all of humanity and are explicitly pro-emancipation and pro-liberation for the many, for all.” Any feminist framework that doesn’t include the masses lacks what is necessary for social imagination.

Here’s what Western feminists are presented with: women in the Senate, women in the House of Representatives, and women in “power” vaguely. Let’s zoom in at the women in Congress who CODEPINK has been educating on the plight of women in Gaza for years now. When confronted with the reality of the human suffering they knowingly support and materially make possible, people like Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) shake their fists at us and insist they are focusing on the issues facing women here in the U.S. Not only is Western feminism exclusionary, it also thinks you’re stupid. Congress, and women like Pelosi, have had multiple opportunities to codify abortion rights in the United States. During this time, and in the last year, these same women have promised ironclad support for the genocidal state of Israel as it destroys families and sexually abuses Palestinian women and men.

So, what have these “feminists” in power delivered for the people? They give us an image of a woman sitting in the seat of power and “breaking the glass ceiling.” Is having a woman who sat where a man once sat to vote in favor of the same austerity or war spending that the man voted for “breaking the glass ceiling”? Sure. But, what about that is meaningful if the walls that hold up the ceiling keep the masses in poverty, trauma, and war? Feminists seek to tear the walls down altogether.

A plea for the status quo (that includes institutional violence against women) is not liberatory nor is it an example of social imagination. Liberatory values like feminism are all-encompassing, they are aspirational and inspiring. Above all, they are rooted in love.

We want a different future. So, what’s the alternative to exclusionary, Western feminism that doesn’t mind Palestinian women being murdered en masse as long as maybe, one day, they can codify the right to an abortion in one, singular country?

It’s feminism—feminism in practice, feminism that truly believes every person deserves dignity in this life. Feminism that can actually imagine and cultivate a future worth living to.

To begin to break out of the racial capitalist patriarchy is to begin practicing feminist values in our everyday lives. At CODEPINK, we call this moving from the war economy to the peace economy. Here are five simple steps you can start taking today:

1. Talk to and meet a new stranger every day. On the bus, at a cafe, on the street. Anywhere. Get outside
2. Practice curiosity. When you hear information relayed to you about another person or issue, ask why that might be the case, or even if that’s the case at all. Curiosity can help us sift through mass media and interpersonal drama with a more critical lens.
3. Practice patience. Remind yourself to not be condescending to people who know less than you about politics or anything at all!
4. Practice generosity. When we live from a place of abundance, we are actively rejecting the scarcity the war economy instills in us.
5. Practice all-encompassing care. You care about the people directly around you. But you also care about the people around them, and then the people around them. You can’t possibly have a feminism that is exclusionary if your empathy reaches everywhere.
6. Read about more practices and our support of you at codepink.org/peaceeconomy

Yes, the atrocities the U.S. government carries out in our name aren’t necessarily our fault. Our politicians are bought off and don’t represent the people, we know that. But practicing our values as we build our movements is critical. If we can see little glimpses of the world we want to live in by just being with each other, then we are tangibly moving in the right direction.

This constant practice of our feminist values makes sure no one gets left behind and prevents our movement from being sucked into co-option. In the U.S., our struggle is with our own government’s priorities. They thrive on getting rich from war and the power they draw from it. They never had and never will be concerned with life, ours or the planets. When our government’s oppression spans the entire world, the people’s struggle is always one.

So, when we imagine a world where our priorities shift to the people, and we look past the horizon and over the Mediterranean, there is also a liberated Palestine.

As global leaders converge in Colombia for the COP16 global biodiversity summit this week, they face a stark reality: Despite over a decade of pledges to protect biodiversity, not a single global target has been fully achieved.

Forests continue to burn, habitats are vanishing, and biodiversity is spiraling toward collapse. Without addressing the systemic drivers of environmental destruction—especially in the Global South—this failure will persist.

The last biodiversity summit (COP15) saw the adoption of decisions on instruments to reduce inequalities, ensure a gender-responsive approach to biodiversity action, take a human rights-based approach, and guarantee access to justice and participation in decision-making by communities. These points are found in the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity’s Gender Plan of Action and the Global Biodiversity Framework’s Targets 22 and 23 and Section C on implementation.

The economic model that Global South countries are forced to pursue by the international financial institutions, based on natural resource extraction with highly unequal distribution of benefits and impacts, is driving extinction and global biodiversity loss.

In Cali, countries will take stock of the targets and commitments adopted so far. This meeting is a crucial opportunity to assess how well the 196 signatories of the convention—sadly, the United States is not one of them—have tackled biodiversity loss so far. And because the crisis we face is so urgent, it’s also a moment in which we must look toward the leadership of women, who play key roles in local agricultural production, family and local economies, and stewardship of biodiversity in key areas like the Amazon.

Picture women like Lucy Mulenkei, a Masai woman who has championed the interests of marginalized pastoralist and hunter-gatherer communities throughout Africa. Or Patricia Gualinga, who has led her Kichwa community in the Amazon in keeping oil drilling off their land and proposing a “living forest” model for rights-based conservation. And Xananine Calvillo, a young woman from Mexico who recently called on the World Bank to stop loaning money to factory farming companies that destroy forests and rivers in sensitive ecosystems.

Our governments and institutions have failed in the past, but they have a chance to listen to women leaders this week. It’s urgent that they do this, and start putting their money where their mouth is, ending subsidies for harmful industries that are behind biodiversity loss.

Why Past Plans on Biodiversity Failed

The strategy agreed in 2010 to guide global action during the U.N. Decade on Biodiversity (2011-2020) recognized the need to address the underlying drivers of biodiversity loss. The failure to tackle these root causes is one of the reasons cited in the third edition of the Global Biodiversity Outlook as to why we didn’t meet the first global biodiversity target in 2010.

Building on this analysis, the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020 structured the 20 Aichi Biodiversity Targets around five Strategic Goals, setting benchmarks for progress through relevant policies and enabling conditions.

However, at the global level, none of the 20 Aichi Targets were fully achieved.

Target 4 on sustainable production and consumption was deemed not achieved with “high confidence,” which means that actions to reduce the ecological footprint failed after a decade of commitment. Between 2011 and 2016, the ecological footprint remained at approximately 1.7 times the level of biocapacity—in other words, requiring “1.7 Earths” to regenerate the biological resources used by our societies.

The rate of loss of all natural habitats including forests, which is considered in Aichi Target 5, is not lower than that of previous decades, with South America surpassing a record for forest fires this year, with 433,000 fire hotspots and over 14.4 million hectares of forest cover burned or affected in different biomes of Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Peru. Brazil and Bolivia alone have seen their forest devastated by 7 million hectares each, while the Amazon river basin is reporting the lowest levels on record amid a severe drought driven by climate change.

What’s Behind Biodiversity Loss

Governments continue to provide billions of dollars in tax breaks, subsidies, and other perverse incentives to support deforestation, water pollution, and fossil fuel consumption which directly work against the goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement and the Global Biodiversity Framework.

By some measures, countries spend at least $2.6 trillion a year on propping up polluting industries, which is equal to 2.5% of global GDP. And the wealthiest nations claim there isn’t enough money to help Global South countries respond to the crises of climate change and biodiversity loss.

The failure to tackle the underlying causes of biodiversity loss, including fossil fuel extraction, mining, industrial agriculture, intensive livestock farming, large-scale infrastructure projects, and monoculture tree plantations— estimated to drive up to 90% of biodiversity loss—are partly linked to the contradictions within the Global Biodiversity Framework. Biodiversity offsets and other market-based schemes considered in Target 19(d) undermine Goal C of the framework, which is to protect the integrity, connectivity, and resilience of all ecosystems.

Forest fires continue to rage in the Amazon, and there’s no time to let companies swoop in with false solutions to the problem.

Letting the market have its way with biodiversity policy is not the way to achieve biodiversity protection, either. So-called biodiversity investment projects have increasingly been exposed for human rights violations, social and gender impacts, conceptual flaws like inattention to ecosystem integrity, and problems with compliance and effectiveness.

The economic model that Global South countries are forced to pursue by the international financial institutions, based on natural resource extraction with highly unequal distribution of benefits and impacts, is driving extinction and global biodiversity loss. That’s why, if we really want to enable urgent and transformative action, government support for export-oriented economic sectors, subsidies, preferential tax subsidies, and diluting environmental regulations must end immediately.

Here’s What Should Happen at COP16

The biodiversity summit this week in Colombia presents us with an opportunity to reaffirm our collective commitment to forest and biodiversity conservation.

Women in all their diversity, Indigenous peoples and local communities, Afro-descendants, peasants, youth, and grassroots movements must be central in shaping the policies that will guide our future. Governments must prioritize people and the planet over corporate profit in a way that is just and equitable, gender-responsive, rights-based, and rooted in a non-market-based approach led by real, community-led solutions.

Transformative change necessarily demands challenging the international financial and monetary systems that force Global South governments to maintain and expand extractive activities and perpetuate the destruction of nature, as well as gender and social inequalities.

As global leaders gather in Cali to review the state of implementation of the Global Biodiversity Framework and show the alignment of their National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans with the Framework, it is crucial that we critically examine the level of biodiversity commitments and address the structural drivers of biodiversity loss.

If we ignore those structural drivers, the harmful activities that are the same ones countries have been propping up with subsidies and favorable terms, there’s no way to halt the biodiversity crisis. Forest fires continue to rage in the Amazon, and there’s no time to let companies swoop in with false solutions to the problem. Transformative change is what is needed, and women like Xananine, Lucy, and Patricia will be there at COP16 with real solutions in their hands.

When Lyndon B. Johnson became president in 1963, he wanted the United States to become a “Great Society” with voting rights for all and an end to discrimination and poverty.

“With your courage and with your compassion and desire, we will build a Great Society,” Johnson told Ohio University students when he kicked off the effort. “A society where no child will go unfed, and no youngster will go unschooled.”

Central to Johnson’s vision for a Great Society was healthcare. The two health programs he started, Medicare and Medicaid, do not offer the universal coverage many nations provide, but they did advance healthcare as a right and not just a privilege for the wealthy.

Trump spent his four years as president trying to take health coverage away from 45 million people by destroying the Affordable Care Act. His only plan for healthcare in a second term is to privatize.

Medicare and Medicaid now offer peace of mind to 150 million older, lower-income, and disabled Americans. Together, they provide healthcare to the largest single pool of people in the United States.

Yet private insurance companies have been chipping away at public healthcare for years to boost their profits. If Donald Trump becomes president, they’ll take it all away. When they do, every one of us will lose, while massive corporations and their executives win, at our expense.

Medicare was run by the federal government for decades. Yet in 1997, Republicans in Congress invited private insurers to manage these plans. Private companies now run more than half of all Medicare policies. Under Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for Trump’s next administration, private insurance will become the default option for new enrollments, ultimately leading to complete privatization.

These private plans, now called “Medicare Advantage,” offer patients less while charging taxpayers more. Private companies like UnitedHealth, the largest provider of Medicare Advantage, love to get guaranteed income from our tax dollars, while they delay and deny claims to boost their profits. If Trump’s plan takes effect, the number of Medicare Advantage policies UnitedHealth controls is expected to reach 15.6 million.

One out of every three Medicare Advantage policyholders is denied care by private insurers like United every year. Under Trump’s plan, UnitedHealth alone would deny care to as many as 5.2 million people. This ability to deny care is what makes Medicare Advantage plans far more profitable to private insurers than any other plans they offer.

Privatized Medicare sounds more like a “Disadvantage” to me. It’s a raw deal for everyone who, like me, believes the United States can do better. I believe that as a nation, we have the courage, compassion, desire, and resources to offer healthcare for all, not just the wealthy few. We can start by electing a president who, unlike Trump, will not destroy Medicare, but will defend and improve it.

Vice President Kamala Harris just announced her plan to expand Medicare coverage to help cover the costs of home healthcare for seniors. This will help the 1 in every 4 Americans who cares for an older member of their household.

Harris will pay for her plan by expanding Medicare’s ability to negotiate with drug manufacturers to lower costs. Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act passed by President Joe Biden, the federal government now has the power to demand lower drug prices and get them.

The Biden and Harris administration has already successfully lowered the prices of drugs for diabetes and heart disease by as much as 79%, and capped the price of insulin at $35. These changes will save taxpayers $6 billion a year, and you and I will save $1.5 billion every year in our out-of-pocket costs. As president, Harris will negotiate even more cost savings, which will translate into more care for families like ours.

To me, this is the President Harris Advantage. Trump spent his four years as president trying to take health coverage away from 45 million people by destroying the Affordable Care Act. His only plan for healthcare in a second term is to privatize.

Vice President Harris, in contrast, has an actual track record of working to improve our health, and has pledged to do even more if she is elected. This is why she has my vote.

Presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have put forward a wide range of different tax proposals during this year’s campaign. We have now fully analyzed the distributional impacts of the major proposals of both Vice President Harris and former President Trump in separate analyses (see here for Harris and here for Trump).

In all, the tax proposals announced by Harris would, on average, lead to a tax cut for all income groups except the richest 1 percent of Americans, while the proposals announced by Trump would, on average, lead to a tax increase for all income groups except the richest 5 percent of Americans.

If the Harris proposals were in effect in 2026, the richest 1 percent – with incomes of $914,900 and above – would receive an average tax increase equal to 4.1 percent of their income. All other income groups would receive tax cuts, including an average tax cut equal to 2.7 percent of income for the middle fifth of Americans – with incomes between $55,100 and $94,100 – and an average tax cut equal to 7 percent of income for the poorest fifth of Americans (those with incomes less than $28,600).

Under the Trump proposals, in 2026 the richest 1 percent would receive an average tax cut equal to 1.2 percent of their income. The next richest 4 percent – with incomes between $360,000 and $914,900 – would receive an average tax cut equal to 1.3 percent of their income. All other income groups would receive tax increases, including an average tax increase equal to 2.1 percent of income for the middle fifth of Americans and an average tax hike equal to 4.8 percent of income for the poorest fifth of Americans.

Average tax changes vary widely between the two candidates’ plans. For example:

• The middle fifth of Americans would receive an average tax cut of $1,980 under Harris’ plan and an average tax increase of $1,530 under Trump’s plan.

• The bottom fifth of Americans would receive an average tax cut of $1,130 under Harris’ plan and an average tax increase of $790 under Trump’s plan.

• The top 1 percent of Americans would receive an average tax increase of $121,460 under Harris’ plan and an average tax cut of $36,320 under Trump’s plan.

Harris tax plan

This analysis examines major tax proposals Harris has explicitly announced and others that are major pieces of President Biden’s tax agenda, which Harris has said she would pursue and which are consistent with her campaign pledges:

• Extending the temporary provisions in the 2017 Trump tax law that will otherwise expire at the end of 2025 fully for those with incomes of less than $400,000 but with strict limits on benefits for those with incomes above $400,000

• Proposals for workers and families related to raising children and obtaining health coverage, assisting service workers and making housing more affordable

• Reforming the taxes that fund Medicare, which would raise taxes on those with incomes of more than $400,000

• Scaling back existing tax breaks on capital gains and dividends for those with incomes of more than $1 million (and in some cases far more)

• Reforming the corporate tax code to scale back recently enacted breaks and long-standing loopholes that have been shown to increase income inequality and racial inequality

Trump tax plan

This analysis also includes all of Trump’s major tax proposals, including:

• Extending the temporary provisions in Trump’s 2017 tax law that will otherwise expire at the end of 2025 (except for the $10,000 cap on State and Local Tax (SALT) deductions, which he recently stated he would not extend)

• Exempting certain types of income from taxes (overtime pay, tips and Social Security benefits)

• Reducing the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 20 percent and then further reducing it to 15 percent for “companies that make their product in America”

• Repealing tax credits enacted as part of President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act that provide incentives for the production and use of green energy

• Imposing a new 20 percent tariff on imported goods, with a higher rate of 60 percent for goods from China

For more details on the impact of either of the candidates’ tax proposals, you can read more here:

• A Distributional Analysis of Kamala Harris’ Tax Plan

• A Distributional Analysis of Donald Trump’s Tax Plan

With the election up for grabs and perhaps even slipping towards Trump, Kamala Harris needs an October surprise. What major last-minute events might tip the election her way?

Here are a few that could make news.

Cease-fire in Gaza? That certainly would help among young people and in Michigan, where voters of Arab descent are angry at the Biden administration. But there’s no way Bibi Netanyahu is going to help the Democrats. He wants Trump, who he can more easily manipulate.

Cease-fire in Ukraine? That certainly would help with the substantial number of voters who believe that endless war is a drain on American resources. But there’s no way Putin is going to help the Democrats. He wants Trump, who he can more easily manipulate.

What major last-minute events might tip the election her way?

Another Salacious Trump Revelation? Even if a video emerges with Arnold Palmer in Trump’s shower, it’s doubtful it would make a difference. When it comes to sex scandals or pining for loyal generals like Hitler’s, or even felony charges, there’re more than enough out there already, and they haven’t made much of a difference.

Or how about this...

A Sovereign Wealth Fund for Workers? Imagine that Kamala Harris appeared at a John Deere facility in the Midwest to highlight the company’s plan to move 1,000 jobs to Mexico, while at the same time awarding its shareholders with $12.2 billion in stock buybacks.

Standing In front of the plant gate Harris should say:

To create a meaningful opportunity economy, we must halt the needless layoffs of working people, the goal of which only is to enrich the rich.

On my first day in office, I will institute a new clause in every government contract: No taxpayer money shall be awarded to companies that layoff taxpayers.

If Deere wants to continue to serve as a government contractor, it will refrain from moving jobs out of the country.

Even in a booming economy, more than four million workers will be laid off this year. Many of those layoffs will be used to raise money for stock buybacks, jobs sacrificed to reward the largest shareholders and company executives. (Stock buybacks are a blatant form of stock manipulation – using the company’s money to buy back its own shares and thereby artificially raising the stock’s price. More layoffs, more money for stock buybacks.)

Therefore, also on my first day in office, I will call on Congress to establish a Sovereign Wealth Fund for Workers, which will provide wage insurance for laid off workers. The insurance will pay workers the difference between what they earned on the jobs they were laid off from and the new jobs they find.

The Fund will be financed by requiring that 10 percent of all stock buybacks go into the Sovereign Wealth Fund for Workers. In 2025 this would amount to $100 billion of stock shares.

On my watch, no longer will working people experience downward mobility while the richest of the rich become even richer.

Wall Street, to be sure, will mercilessly attack her. How dare she prevent the wealthy from getting wealthier? How dare she protect the wages of the working class? Don’t the Democrats know who’s buttering their bread?

Wall Street, to be sure, will mercilessly attack her. How dare she prevent the wealthy from getting wealthier? How dare she protect the wages of the working class? Don’t the Democrats know who’s buttering their bread?

In response, Harris needs to prove she has the guts to take on the powerful and truly protect working-class jobs and incomes.

How about going on national television (or FOX News) and quote from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1936 Madison Square Garden speech:

[Wall Street] had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.

Now there’s an October surprise.

This is “Climate week” in New York City, and my inbox has been awash recently in the latest press releases about start-ups and noble initiatives and venal greenwashing. Much of it’s important, and I’ll get to some of it later, but there’s a big new study that came out last week in Science that sets our crucial moment in true perspective. Let’s step back for a moment.

This new study—a decade in the making and involving, in the words of veteran climate scientist Gavin Schmidt “biological proxies from extinct species, plate tectonic movement, disappearance in subduction zones of vast amounts of ocean sediment, and interpolating sparse data in space and time”—offers at its end the most detailed timeline yet of the earth’s climate history over the last half-billion years. That’s the period scientists call the Phanerozoic—the latest of the earth’s four geological eons (we’re still in it), and the one marked by the true profusion of plant and animal life. It’s a lovely piece of science, and it’s lovely too because it reminds us of all we’re heir to in this tiny brief moment that marks the human time on earth. So staggeringly much—strange and extreme and fecund—has come before us.

But it’s also scary as can be, for two big reasons.

The first is that it shows the earth has gotten very very warm in the past. As the Washington Post explained in an excellent analysis yesterday, “the study suggests that at its hottest the Earth’s average temperature reached 96.8 degrees Fahrenheit (36 degrees Celsius).” Our current average temperature—already elevated by global warming to the highest value ever recorded—is about 60 degrees Fahrenheit, or 15 degrees Celsius. For most of the 500 million years the study covers, the earth has been in a hothouse state, with an average temperature of 71.6 Fahrenheit, or 22 Celsius, much higher than now. Only about an eighth of the time has the earth been in its current “coldhouse” state—but of course that includes all the time that humans have been around. It is the world we know and we’re adapted to.

In every era, it’s increases in carbon dioxide that drive the increases and decreases in temperature. “Carbon dioxide is really that master dial,” Jess Tierney, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona and co-author of the study, said. And so the study makes clear that the mercury could go very high indeed as humans pour carbon into the sky. We won’t burn enough coal and oil and gas to reach the very highest temperatures seen in the geological record—that required periods of incredible volcanism—but we may well double the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and this study implies that the fast and slow feedbacks from that could eventually drive temperatures as much as eight degrees Celsius higher, which is more than most current estimates. Over shorter time frames the numbers are just as dramatic

Without rapid action to curb greenhouse gas emissions, scientists say, global temperatures could reach nearly 62.6 F (17 C) by the end of the century — a level not seen in the timeline since the Miocene epoch, more than 5 million years ago.

Now, you could look at those numbers and say: well, the earth has been hotter before, so life won’t be wiped out. And that’s true—there’s probably no way to wipe out life, though on a planet with huge numbers of nuclear weapons who knows. But these temperatures are much higher than anything humans have experienced, and they guarantee a world with radically different regimes of drought and deluge, radically different ocean levels and fire seasons. They imply a world fundamentally strange to us, with entirely different seasons and moods—and if that doesn’t challenge bare survival, it certainly challenges the survival of our civilizations. Unlike all the species that came before us, we have built a physical shell for that civilization, a geography of cities and ports and farms that we can’t easily move as the temperature rises. And of course the poorest people, who have done the least to cause the trouble, will suffer out of all proportion as that shift starts to happen.

But that’s not the really scary part. The really scary part is how fast it’s moving.

In fact, nowhere in that long record have the scientists been able to find a time when it’s warming as fast as it is right now. “We’re changing Earth’s temperature at a rate that exceeds anything we know about,” Tierney said.

Much much much faster than, say, during the worst extinction event we know about, at the end of the Permian about 250 million years ago, when the endless eruption of the so-called Siberian traps drove the temperature 10 Celsius higher and killed off 95 percent of the species on the planet. But that catastrophe took fifty thousand years—our three degree Celsius increase—driven by the collective volcano of our powerplants, factories, furnaces and Fords—will be measured in decades.

Our only hope of avoiding utter ruin—our only hope that our western world, in the blink of an eye, won’t produce catastrophe on this geologic scale—is to turn off those volcanoes immediately. And that, of course, requires replacing coal and gas and oil with something else. The only something else on offer right now, scalable in the few years we still have to work with, is the rays of the sun, and the wind that sun produces, and the batteries that can store its power for use at night.

Another new analysis this week, this one from the energy thinktank Ember, shows that 2024 is seeing another year of surging solar installations—when the year ends there will be 30% more solar power on this planet than when it began. Numbers like that, if we can keep that acceleration going for a few more years, give us a fighting chance.

That’s what all those seminars and cocktail parties and protests in New York over this week will ultimately be about—the desperate attempt to keep this rift in our geological history from getting any bigger than it must. As this new study once more makes clear, raising the temperature is by far the biggest thing humans have ever done; our effort to limit that rise must be just as large.

We need to stand in awe for a moment before the scope of earth’s long history. And then we need to get the hell to work.

In September, North American professional sports leagues had the opportunity to demonstrate their commitment to protecting the planet during a joint panel at Climate Week NYC, the annual affair cosponsored by the United Nations featuring hundreds of events feting local, national and international efforts to address climate change.

They dropped the ball.

Just three months earlier, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres castigated coal, oil and gas companies—which he dubbed the “godfathers of climate chaos”—for spreading disinformation and called for a worldwide ban on fossil fuel advertising. Until that happens, Guterres urged ad agencies to refuse fossil fuel clients and companies to stop taking their ads.

The leagues apparently didn’t get the memo. During their panel discussion, titled Major League Greening, representatives from pro baseball (MLB), basketball (NBA) and hockey mainly talked about their long-term goals to shrink their carbon footprint and, to be sure, they have come a long way since I wrote about their initial efforts to reduce their energy, water and paper use back in 2012. They also talked about their budding alliances with climate solution experts. But there was no talk of cutting their commercial ties with the very companies that are largely responsible for the climate crisis.

A recent survey of pro baseball, basketball, football, hockey and soccer leagues by UCLA’s Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment found that they collectively have more than 60 sponsorship deals with three dozen oil companies and utilities that burn fossil fuels or distribute fossil gas. Depending on the deal, the companies get prominently placed billboards in team facilities, logos on team uniforms, partnerships with team community programs, or—if they spend some serious money—stadium naming rights.

Eight of the oil and utility companies identified by the UCLA survey—Chevron, Entergy, ExxonMobil, Marathon Petroleum, NextEra Energy, NRG Energy, Phillips 66 and Xcel Energy—are among the top 25 U.S. carbon polluters. Four of those companies—Chevron, ExxonMobil, Marathon Petroleum and Phillips 66—along with four other companies with sports sponsorships—ConocoPhillips, Hess, Occidental Petroleum and Shell—have been sued by state and local governments across the United States for climate change-related damage and their decades of deception, which has served to delay the necessary transition to clean energy. ExxonMobil is a defendant in all 39 lawsuits, Chevron has been cited in 28, and Phillips 66 has been named in 21.

Banks that are still investing tens of billions of dollars annually in fossil fuel projects also have sponsorship deals with pro sports teams. Besides routine billboard deals, six of the 12 largest fossil fuel investors since the Paris climate agreement was signed in 2016—Bank of America, Barclays, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Scotiabank and Wells Fargo—are all spending a small fortune on facility naming rights.

Corporations sponsor sports for two main reasons: to build public trust and increase exposure. According to a 2021 Nielsen “Trust in Advertising” study, 81 percent of consumers completely or somewhat trust brands that sponsor sport teams, second only to the trust they have for friends and family. By sponsoring a team, corporations increase the chance that fans will form the same emotional connection they have with the team with their brand, especially when fans see it repeatedly during a game and over a season. Jersey patches, which the NBA approved in 2017 and MLB approved last year, especially attract attention. Nielsen estimates that the average value of the live broadcast exposure a baseball patch sponsor would receive over a full regular season would exceed $12.4 million.

Another rationale for banks and oil and utility companies for sponsoring pro sports is to protect what social scientists call their “social license” by assuring fans that they are public-spirited, good corporate citizens. Critics call it “sportswashing”—using sports to burnish a reputation tarnished by wrongdoing, in this case, endangering public health and the environment.

Fans of the two baseball teams that battled it out in this year’s National League Championship Series are crying foul, but thus far have been ignored.

In March 2023, environmental activists joined New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams to urge the Mets to change the name of Citi Field because Citibank’s parent company Citigroup has invested $396 billion in fossil fuel projects since 2016, second only to JPMorgan Chase’s $430 billion. “Citi doesn’t represent the values of Mets fans or NYC,” Williams wrote in a tweet. “If they refuse to end their toxic relationship with fossil fuels, the Mets should end their partnership with Citi.”

More recently, more than 80 public interest groups, scientists and environmental advocates signed an open letter calling on the Dodgers to cut its ties to Phillips 66, owner of the Union 76 gas station chain. “Using tactics such as associating a beloved, trusted brand like the Dodgers with enterprises like [Union] 76,” the letter states, “the fossil fuel industry has reinforced deceitful messages that ‘oil is our friend,’ and that ‘climate change isn’t so bad.’” Since August, nearly 22,800 people have signed the letter, which urges the team to end its sponsorship deal with the oil company “immediately.”

Unlike the North American pro sports leagues, advertising and public relations agencies worldwide are heeding U.N. Secretary-General Guterres’s call. More than a thousand have pledged to refuse working for fossil fuel companies, their trade associations, and their front groups. If the leagues were serious about sustainability, they likewise would sever their relationships with the godfathers of climate chaos and the banks that enable them.

The housing affordability crisis – and how to solve it – has become a major focus during election season, for good reason. Millions of American families struggle to afford and keep a roof over their heads, find themselves unsheltered, or have become frustrated in the hope of owning their own home.

The over-focus on expanding housing supply through for-profit development misses a key contributor to the housing crisis: the concentration of wealth and power. The challenges of the U.S. housing crisis go beyond supply or fixing local land use regulations. The billionaire class and billionaire-backed private equity investors have become a driving force in the U.S. housing crisis.

A new report, Billionaire Blowback on Housing: How concentrated wealth disrupts housing markets and worsens the housing affordability crisis, coauthored by the Institute for Policy Studies and Popular Democracy, examines the myriad ways that billionaire investors are harming local housing markets and diminishing the supply of affordable housing.

With roughly 800 billionaires in the U.S. with combined wealth of $6.2 trillion (and 2,781 billionaires globally with over $14.2 trillion), ultra-wealthy investors tend to diversify their holdings across multiple kinds of assets. A huge amount of this billionaire wealth is invested in property, land, and housing. Billions and possibly trillions of dollars are sucked into predatory investment practices and luxury housing schemes — where global billionaire investors park vast quantities of wealth in U.S markets.

This is not your grandparent’s gentrification, but rather a hyper-gentrification fueled by concentrated wealth driving up land and housing costs, expanding short-term rentals, and treating housing like a commodity to speculate on or a place to park wealth. The billionaires are displacing the millionaires, and the millionaires are disrupting the housing market for everyone else.

Estimates of hidden wealth are as high as $36 trillion globally, with billions parked in U.S. land and housing markets.

Our report found that billionaire-backed private equity firms have wormed their way into different segments of the housing market to extract ever-increasing rents and value from multi-family rental, single-family homes, and mobile home park communities. For instance, Blackstone has become the largest corporate landlord in the world, with a vast and diversified real estate portfolio. It owns more than 300,000 residential units across the U.S., has $1 trillion in global assets, and nearly doubled its profits in 2021.

Global billionaires have purchased billions in U.S. real estate to diversify their asset holdings, driving the creation of luxury housing that functions as “safety deposit boxes in the sky.” Estimates of hidden wealth are as high as $36 trillion globally, with billions parked in U.S. land and housing markets.

Wealthy investors are acquiring property and holding units vacant, so that in many communities the number of vacant units greatly exceeds the number of unhoused people. Nationwide there are 16 million vacant homes: that is, 28 vacant homes for every unhoused person. These investors are also buying up a large segment of the short-term rental market, preventing local residents from living in these homes, in order to cash in on tourism. These are not small owners with one unit, but corporate owners with multiple properties.

The focus on expanding housing supply by giving incentives to for-profit development has failed to add to the stock of permanently affordable housing. For five decades, U.S. taxpayers have subsidized private for-profit investors and developers to build tens of thousands of temporarily affordable units of housing. Federal programs give for-profit investors wasteful tax breaks, but only require the units to remain affordable for 30 years or less, so many have been converted to market-rate housing.

Policy makers should expand the social housing sector of community-controlled or publicly owned housing that is outside the speculative market, such as quality public housing and other forms of nonprofit-owned housing like community land trusts or resident cooperatives. New investment in social housing should come from taxing billionaires, levying mansion taxes, and regulating harmful practices.

Instead of waiting for action from the federal government, local communities can protect residents in existing affordable housing and generate revenue for affordable housing.

Policymakers should require ownership transparency, so community members know who is buying up neighborhoods. They should institute limitations on corporate ownership of housing and pass ordinances giving tenants the right to “first option to buy” apartments and mobile home parks when they come up for sale; and public funding as well as support structures to make these buy-outs possible.

Levying taxes on luxury real estate transactions (known as “mansion taxes”), on speculation, on vacancy, and on the rich, can generate funds that should be dedicated to expanding the supply of nonprofit and social housing.

At least one tactic in this year’s election subversion playbook is clear. Step one: before Election Day, file a slew of lawsuits making baseless allegations of bloated voter rolls, unlawful voting, and problematic election procedures. Step two: if right-wing activists are unhappy with election results, point to those previously filed cases to justify demands to halt certification or change outcomes. This plan is neither secret nor new. It’s a repeat of 2020, now with more advanced planning. And just like in 2020, the plan should fail.

Conservative activists, operatives, and election denial groups have filed dozens of cases. With a particular intensity in swing states, they are suing to give local election board members the right to refuse to certify election results, exclude mail ballots that arrive after Election Day from the count, limit voting by overseas and military voters, restrict the availability of ballot drop boxes, force states and counties to aggressively purge their voter rolls, and limit when absentee ballots can be requested, submitted, and counted. While the legal claims and unsubstantiated allegations differ somewhat from case to case, they share a common goal: cast enough doubt on American elections to excuse subsequent efforts (whether in court or otherwise) to supersede the will of voters.

For Americans primed to believe that voter fraud is rampant and the 2020 election was stolen, partisans who are unhappy with the 2024 results will use the ongoing legal processes in their effort to undermine public confidence and confirm a sense that our democracy is “rigged.”

These cases are — to use a technical, legal term — bogus. We know this for several reasons. First, plaintiffs’ factual allegations are based on conspiracy theories, misinformation, unsubstantiated data, and claims of widespread voter fraud that have repeatedly been disproven. For example, over a dozen cases are premised at least in part on unsubstantiated fears of noncitizen voting. Yet the evidence could not be clearer: with vanishingly rare exceptions, only eligible citizens vote, and states have multiple systems in place to ensure that remains the case. Dressing up misinformation and conspiracy theories in legal jargon and laundering them through court filings doesn’t make the allegations true.

Second, plaintiffs don’t even seem to be trying to win in court. In many of these right-wing activist cases, plaintiffs have not even bothered to file motions to ask the courts to fix the so-called problems before Election Day. If plaintiffs genuinely believed there were issues with our voting systems and had any evidence to back up such beliefs, they would have requested that courts remedy those problems immediately (by seeking a preliminary injunction, for example). A representative from United Sovereign Americans, a right-wing group that has filed at least nine cases challenging various election procedures, conceded that its goal is to “pre-position standing” for the post–Election Day period. Of course, preemptively filing a lawsuit does not confer standing, which requires actual harm, among other things.

Other cases are mere copycats of losing efforts from years past. For example, one Michigan case seeking more aggressive voter purging effectively replicates three similar cases filed in Michigan in the last five years, all of which plaintiffs voluntarily settled or lost. A federal court dismissed the case today.

Third, even if the legal theories that plaintiffs offer were supported by facts (which they aren’t), they would not warrant the extreme remedies that plaintiffs ultimately seek or that they may request after Election Day: stopping the certification of and overturning election results. In more than 20 cases, for example, plaintiffs allege that states have not done enough to remove ineligible voters from their rolls. The remedy for such a claim is for the state to conduct reasonable voter list maintenance at least 90 days before an election, not to throw away the votes of millions of eligible voters afterward. What’s more, certification is not discretionary — state law has long established that officials have a mandatory duty to certify elections. It’s no surprise, then, that courts have already tossed several of these cases, including in Arizona, Georgia, Maryland, Nevada, and Pennsylvania.

We anticipate that courts will largely reject the unsubstantiated claims in these pre-election cases, just as they did overwhelmingly in 2020.

But winning in court isn’t necessarily the point. We expect that activists will point to the mere existence of ongoing litigation as a basis for slowing, stopping, or altering election processes. Their audience is not just the court of law but the court of public opinion. For Americans primed to believe that voter fraud is rampant and the 2020 election was stolen, partisans who are unhappy with the 2024 results will use the ongoing legal processes in their effort to undermine public confidence and confirm a sense that our democracy is “rigged.”

We’ve been here before, and now we know what to expect. The American public, the press, and courts should not be duped into believing that where there’s smoke, there’s fire — because these cases are nothing but smoke and mirrors.

As we head into fall, now is the perfect time for families to plan their next escape from the stresses of school, work, and everyday life—and there’s no better place to go than the outdoors. From Acadia to Everglades to Yosemite, our national parks provide opportunities for relaxation, camping, day hikes, and science education.

We are two people who understand—and love—the outdoors. I, Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.), am a single mom of three kids and an avid national park visitor, and serve on the House Natural Resources Committee, which oversees federal land and our environment. And I, Tigran Nahabedian, am a student and youth adviser at Outdoors Alliance for Kids. We’re both passionate about exploring our national treasures and making it easier for all Americans to experience our country’s beautiful parks and lands.

Some families might be daunted at the idea of visiting our national parks. For some, the cost of entry and other assorted expenses can feel prohibitive. Fortunately, the Every Kid Outdoors program helps remove one of those barriers by granting fourth graders and their families an annual pass that allows them free entry to all federal public lands, waters, and shores. Dedicated park staff, both in person and online, can help families plan a fun, safe trip, appropriate for every level of outdoor experience, fitness, and budget.

If you love visiting our national treasures and agree that everyone should have the ability to enjoy the outdoors, make your voice heard.

Every year, over 200,000 kids and their families get a pass, helping connect them with nature and history. These affordable vacation and recreation opportunities help kids learn about conservation and wildlife, and teach important lessons about our nation’s history, geology, biology, and more. The Every Kid Outdoors program sparks passions that can shape future careers in science or recreation and creates lifelong memories.

But, if Congress doesn’t act to extend and fund the program, it will expire in 2026, leaving families to pay the full cost of admission to our public lands. Respectively, in our roles as parent and congressmember, and as a student and an outdoor advocate, we have seen the benefits of this program firsthand, which is why we are working to build bipartisan support for the Every Kid Outdoors Act. This bill would make permanent the free admission for fourth graders and their families, and expand the program to fifth graders.

Getting families on our federal lands goes beyond the direct benefits of helping kids learn and grow. Our national parks, forests, and marine sanctuaries are cornerstones of our economy, infrastructure, and communities. That diner serving bananas foster pancakes half an hour from the campsite or that roadside shop stocking magnets and bug spray rely on thriving national parks that attract millions of visitors each year. A National Park Service report in 2023 found that over 325 million visitors spent $26.4 billion in communities within 60 miles of a national park. Outdoor recreation alone accounted for $560 billion of the United States’ 2022 GDP.

So, if you love visiting our national treasures and agree that everyone should have the ability to enjoy the outdoors, make your voice heard. Be loud and be proud about your support for the Every Kids Outdoors program and the Every Kid Outdoors Act so that generations of families can continue to make memories in our national parks. Talk about the program with your friends, family, and neighbors—and if you know a fourth grader, tell them to get an Every Kid Outdoors pass. It’s the perfect time to visit a park.

Hurricanes Helene and Milton have once again brought climate change to the attention of many voters. With so much dialogue regarding hurricane response directed toward the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the president, it is important to remember that local governments play a vital role in climate change initiatives.

Local governments are significant actors in climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts through city policy, zoning decisions, funding distributions, and the enforcement of emissions laws. As New York City grapples with the indictment of Mayor Eric Adams and a fast-approaching mayoral election, residents should look south for motivation.

NYC needs a mayor that is a champion for the climate justice movement to curb emissions, increase local resilience, and build adaptive capacity to help avoid the catastrophic scenarios witnessed this month from Florida to North Carolina.

Reign of Error

Following the “reign,” as he recently put it, of Mayor Eric Adams, the city’s emissions projections remain bleak. In 2022, according to the emissions inventories provided by the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice, New York City released 53.7 million tons of carbon-dioxide equivalent into the atmosphere, a 17% decrease from the city’s 2005 benchmark. This is markedly short of the city’s goal to reduce emissions by 40% (from the benchmark) by 2030 and clearly not on track for the goal to achieve an 80% reduction by 2050.

According to the “One City, Built to Last” report released in 2014 under Mayor Bill de Blassio, two-thirds of these emissions reductions will need to come from building efficiency. A goal of 35% building emissions reduction by 2025 was set under this plan. Now, just two months from 2025, the reduction of buildings emissions is just 22%. Law 97, an attempt to decrease building emissions by 40% by 2030, has proven to be largely ineffective. The penalty set in place by the law is much too low for the world’s top financial and real estate companies at just $268 dollars per ton of carbon over the limit. Also, with only 30 staff members dedicated to enforcing the law, the estimated 3,700 buildings that are not complying with the law may never be held accountable. Additionally, Mayor Adams has created another loophole for these non-compliers, Renewable Energy Credits that will allow the owners of these buildings to buy credits to offset their emissions while maintaining their dangerous emissions levels.

Transportation, the second largest emitting sector in the city, has decreased only 3% from the 2005 benchmark. The vast majority of transportation emissions comes from on-road vehicles, 58% of which are privately owned according to a recent New York Times report. A policy passed by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to decrease the number of vehicles in the city, Congestion Pricing, was shot down by Gov. Kathy Hochul before it even took effect. The response from Mayor Adams? He undermined the policy by agreeing with the governor’s decision. NYC was set to be the first city in the country to introduce congestion pricing, which may have served as a model and had a lasting impact on the future of green cities in the U.S..

A City in Peril

As Eric Adams continues to pander to the financiers of the fossil fuel industry, (who helped fund his campaign) and ultra-wealthy real estate owners, climate change projections for the city are becoming increasingly frightening. The New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC) 2022 report on climate risks states that sea level rise (SLR), flooding, and heatwaves will be among the most threatening climate change impacts for the city.

SLR estimates are dependent on global trends in emissions and associated warming so are difficult to predict on a local level. At the low end of the NPCC estimates, SLR is expected to reach 12 inches by 2050 and, at the high end, 23 inches. By the end of the century, SLR will be between 25 and 65inches, making many low-lying areas like Brighton Beach, Rockaway Beach, and Midland Beach uninhabitable, and leaving areas across NYC extremely vulnerable to flooding. Increasingly intense and unpredictable tropical storms and cyclones will make Superstorm Sandy level events more frequent, consequently threatening lives and depleting disaster recovery funding.

Heatwaves are expected to increase in frequency and intensity, which could be detrimental for New Yorkers living and working in an already deadly heat island that claims 350 lives per year. Extreme heat events are increasing at a rate of 0.47 days per decade in Central Park and about one day per decade at LaGuardia. Heatwaves and increasing temperatures will affect low-income communities disproportionately where the heat island effect is greatest due to a lack of tree coverage and green spaces.

The Case for a Climate Justice Mayor

Let us use Eric Adams’ indictment as a moment to not only address the city’s corruption but to turn the page from a local government complacent with climate inaction to one that is invested in climate justice. We need a mayor that does not have deep ties with the funders of global warming but one that has deep ties in community organizing. We need a mayor that understands the dire consequences climate change will have on the city, from the economy to people’s livelihoods. We need a mayor that can help transform the city into a living example of a sustainable and equitable city. We need a mayor that cares about the future.

Of course, a mayor alone cannot not fix the plethora of climate change related issues the city is facing. But here is what a climate and community focused mayor could do for the city.

1. Use New York City’s political and economic power to challenge Gov. Hochul when she makes irresponsible decisions, like shooting down Congestion Pricing and refusing to sign the Climate Change Superfund Act.
2. Enforce existing buildings emissions caps and propose stricter emissions laws.
3. Advocate for zoning laws that will promote renewable energy production.
4. Create building codes that require greater energy efficiency while simultaneously ensuring infrastructural resilience to climate change impacts.
5. Increase the pace of electrifying the city’s fleets and adding solar to all public buildings.
6. Work directly with low-income communities to increase their climate resilience while protecting the areas from climate gentrification.
7. Work directly with young activists and students who will be affected by climate change for their entire lives.
8. Stop cop city, as it is part of a carceral system that disproportionately affects Black and brown communities, leading to inequity and increased vulnerability.
9. Divert funding from the police system to climate change initiatives, homelessness services, and community organizations.
10. Fix the city’s corruption.

As we saw this month in the South, entire cities’ futures rest on our ability to mitigate climate change and adapt to its powerful impacts. A climate justice mayor will lower the city’s emissions and increase the city’s resilience and adaptive capacity by focusing on improving social services; ending the city’s corruption; and working directly with civic groups, young people, and low-income communities. New Yorkers and the media must make climate justice the forefront of campaign issues as the mayoral election heats up.

Sunrise Movement NYC is a youth movement pushing to replace Eric Adams with a mayor who takes bold action to make environmental, economic, and racial justice the NYC standard. Follow the Sunrise Movement NYC Hub or @sunrisemvmtnyc on instagram to get involved and learn more about the future we are fighting for.

Picture a weapon that can level a city block, manufactured in Belgium, assembled in Dubai, financed through Swiss banks, and delivered to militants by a “logistics company” registered in Singapore. This isn’t the plot of a thriller—it’s how modern warfare works.

When a sophisticated drone strike hit Saudi oil facilities in 2019, investigators traced the weapons technology not to a nation-state, but to a complex network of corporate suppliers and militant groups.

When corporations can effectively arm and support militant groups with impunity, concepts like state sovereignty and international law begin to break down.

Welcome to the new face of global conflict, where the most dangerous relationships aren’t between countries, but between corporations and armed groups. These shadowy alliances are reshaping how wars are fought, who profits from them, and why traditional peacekeeping doesn’t work anymore.

The New War Profiteers

The old image of arms dealers as shady men with briefcases full of cash is hopelessly outdated. Today’s weapons trade runs through legitimate-looking corporations, tech companies, and financial institutions that have mastered the art of working in war’s gray zones.

Take the ongoing conflict in Yemen. While media attention focuses on state actors, private military contractors and defense corporations have formed intricate relationships with local militant groups. These companies don’t just supply weapons. They provide training, maintenance, and even operational support, all while maintaining a veneer of legitimate business operations.

“What we’re seeing is the corporatization of conflict,” explains Sarah Martinez, a specialist in non-state armed groups at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “These aren’t simple arms deals anymore—they’re long-term business relationships that create sustained cycles of violence.”

Follow the Money (If You Can)

The financial web supporting these alliances is deliberately opaque and designed to evade accountability. Private military companies, often registered in offshore jurisdictions like Dubai or Singapore, form partnerships with shell corporations based in the Caribbean. These shell entities, in turn, subcontract their operations to ambiguous “logistics companies” operating out of Eastern Europe. This elaborate system of front companies and subcontractors allows weapons and military equipment to flow freely into conflict zones without raising red flags. Responsibility is diffused across a web of corporate structures, making it nearly impossible to trace the ultimate source of arms shipments or hold anyone accountable for fueling conflicts.

In Africa’s resource-rich regions, the situation is becoming even more alarming. Here, private security firms, often funded by Western investors, forge alliances with local militant groups under the pretext of protecting valuable oil and mineral installations. What starts as a “security” operation to safeguard resources often escalates into these firms operating as de facto private armies, controlling entire regions and undermining the authority of national governments. These alliances not only destabilize local politics but also complicate international peacekeeping efforts, creating power vacuums where non-state actors can thrive. In such an environment, financial backing for these operations becomes a critical tool, turning what appears to be routine corporate transactions into a driving force behind some of the world’s most enduring conflicts.

The Tech Factor Changes Everything

Modern conflict isn’t just about guns and bombs. Today’s militant groups need sophisticated technology, which they’re getting from seemingly legitimate sources. Communications equipment, surveillance technology, and cyber tools flow through corporate channels that straddle the line between legal and illegal. These tools allow groups to operate covertly, communicate securely, and execute sophisticated cyber-attacks, which can be as damaging as conventional warfare. For instance, militant groups are using encrypted communication tools to evade state surveillance, while also acquiring drones and other high-tech surveillance equipment through corporate gray markets.

This access to advanced technology extends beyond just weaponry. It’s also about operational capacity. “The real game-changer isn’t the weapons themselves, but the support systems,” notes James Wilson, a former United Nations weapons inspector. When militant groups can access corporate-level logistics, training, and technical support, they become far more dangerous than traditional armed forces. These corporate partnerships allow militant organizations to mimic the structure of formal military forces, combining guerrilla tactics with modern technology to disrupt state control, launch cyberattacks, and even hold territories with a level of sophistication unseen in previous decades

A Pattern Emerges

The pattern repeats across regions. In Syria, corporate entities linked to Russian military industries provide not just weapons but entire support ecosystems to various armed groups. These companies deliver everything from logistical support and advanced weaponry to financial aid, creating a symbiotic relationship with local militias. This dynamic allows both the corporations and the armed groups to thrive in a perpetual state of conflict.

There is a growing call for the development of new international legal frameworks that hold corporations accountable for their roles in conflicts, particularly when they profit from or directly contribute to violence.

Similarly, in the Horn of Africa, Chinese companies, while officially involved in building infrastructure projects, are simultaneously supplying militant groups with equipment and technical expertise under the radar. These companies are benefiting financially from both sides—securing government contracts for infrastructure while also arming insurgents. According to the U.N. Security Council, these arrangements contribute to what conflict researchers call “sustained instability zones”—regions where violence is deliberately prolonged because it becomes profitable for both corporate actors and armed groups.

As a result, traditional peacekeeping missions, which were designed to manage conflict between state actors, are increasingly ineffective. These missions are often incapable of addressing the complex web of corporate and non-state alliances that fuel these conflicts. As the International Peace Institute highlights, peacekeepers find themselves irrelevant in these new conflict ecosystems, where the drivers of violence are no longer solely state actors but profit-driven corporations and armed factions operating outside the bounds of state control.

Why Traditional Solutions Don’t Work Anymore

U.N. peacekeeping was designed for a world where states were the primary actors in conflicts. But what happens when the real power lies with corporate-militant alliances that operate across borders? Traditional diplomatic tools and peace agreements often miss the real drivers of conflict.

“Peacekeepers can monitor cease-fires between armies, but they can’t address corporate supply chains that fuel conflicts,” explains former U.N. peacekeeper Colonel Maria Rodriguez. “We’re using 20th-century tools to fight 21st-century wars.”

These alliances don’t just threaten local stability. They’re undermining the entire international system. When corporations can effectively arm and support militant groups with impunity, concepts like state sovereignty and international law begin to break down.

The numbers are staggering. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, corporate-militant alliances now influence conflicts affecting over 250 million people globally. These arrangements have created shadow economies worth an estimated $300 billion annually.

What Can Be Done?

Traditional sanctions and arms embargo often fail because they target state actors rather than the increasingly influential corporate-militant networks that drive modern conflicts. Some experts argue for a completely new approach to international conflict management. First, they suggest recognizing that these corporate-militant alliances, rather than state actions, are the primary forces behind many of today’s wars. Without this shift in focus, sanctions will continue to miss their mark.

Second, there is a growing call for the development of new international legal frameworks that hold corporations accountable for their roles in conflicts, particularly when they profit from or directly contribute to violence. This would address the legal gaps that allow companies to evade responsibility when operating in conflict zones.

Finally, experts propose peacekeeping operations that disrupt these corporate-militant alliances instead of merely focus on separating armed forces. By cutting off the financial and logistical support that such networks provide to militant groups, peacekeeping efforts could become more effective in curbing conflict.

The real question is whether the international community can adapt fast enough to address this new reality, and whether global institutions are equipped to deal with conflicts that no longer fit neatly within the old rules of engagement.

The future of global conflict isn’t just about nation-states anymore. It’s about complex alliances between corporations and armed groups that profit from sustained instability. As one U.N. official put it (speaking on condition of anonymity): “We’re still playing checkers while they’re playing a much more dangerous game.” This sentiment underscores the growing complexity of global conflict, where traditional methods of diplomacy and peacekeeping are falling behind the rapidly evolving alliances between non-state actors.

The question isn’t whether these alliances will reshape global conflict. They already have, as seen in regions from the Middle East to Latin America. The involvement of multinational corporations in resource-driven conflicts, alongside insurgent and militant groups, adds layers of complexity that traditional state-based frameworks struggle to address. These alliances transcend borders, ideologies, and legal frameworks, creating new kinds of power dynamics that the international system was not designed to manage.

The real question is whether the international community can adapt fast enough to address this new reality, and whether global institutions are equipped to deal with conflicts that no longer fit neatly within the old rules of engagement. This crisis requires not only new thinking about conflict resolution, peace enforcement, and international law, but also a reevaluation of how power is distributed in a globalized world where non-state actors hold increasing sway. Until then, corporate-militant alliances will continue to challenge not just regional stability but the very foundation of the international order, undermining the principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and governance that have long underpinned global relations.

We are two-odd weeks out from a presidential election with one of the contenders the most wildly unqualified candidate in American history and it couldn’t be closer. How can this be?

The fact that it can even be close at all tells us there is a massive failure on the part of the status quo, the “system,” the ruling class—call it whatever you want—such that half of the electorate would rather burn it down than give it any more time to fix itself.

That fact alone—the intractability of the MAGA movement's rage and its possession of half of the electorate—tells us that the country is going to be impossible to govern, no matter who wins.

If Harris wins, we will at best have a simmering, low-intensity Civil War for at least the next four years. If Trump wins, it won’t matter because the country we thought we lived in won’t exist any more.

Here’s a quick, admittedly only cursory, snapshot of who Donald Trump is:

• He’s a 34-time convicted felon.
• He’s an adjudicated rapist.
• He a failed insurrectionist who tried to overthrow the government.
• He’s a convicted tax fraud.
• He’s a six-time bankrupt business failure masquerading as a business tycoon.
• He’s indicted for 50+ other crimes, trials awaiting.
• He’s a twice divorced, swaggering adulterer.
• He’s a pathological liar.
• He’s called those who serve their country “suckers and losers.”
• He continues to rant about immigrants eating people’s cats and dogs.
• He claims Democrats sanction the murder of newly-born babies.
• He says schools are changing the sex of children while they’re at school.
• His jock talk marvels at the size of Arnold Palmer’s Five Iron.
• He says he’s coming after “the enemy within,” meaning you.
• He says his own Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be executed.
• He says we need to terminate the Constitution.
• His Chief of Staff, two Defense Secretaries, National Security Adviser, and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs—those who know him best and are closest to the levers of the highest power—all say he is unfit for the office of the presidency and a danger to the country.

Again, this is only a drive-by chronicling of Trump’s more obvious, odious infirmities and disqualifications for office. There was a time when any one of these would have disqualified a candidate from even being considered by his party.

Yet, Trump is fervently and religiously embraced by, what, maybe 70 million adults? And, it’s not at all clear that he won’t be the next president.

What does this tell us?

First, it tells us that there is a knock-down, drag-out fight between the Olympians and the Titans of our Reigning Oligarchy. The Trump wing of the Oligarchy is what we can call the “Burn it Down” branch. Its brain is Steve Bannon, seconded by Elon Musk.

In that world, chaos follows Trump’s ascension and it’s all turned over to the lesser oligarchs to rearrange the bouncing rubble in whatever fashion they see fit.

Social Security is privatized, handed over to the tender ministrations of Wall Street. Medicare, too, with trillions of dollars of “savings” creamed off to the Oligarchs. Most federal regulations are abolished, including those that protect workplace safety, the food supply, airline safety, the air and water, the integrity of the financial system, and people’s privacy from abuse by their digital overlords. The enemy from within will be quickly silenced, even if that means imprisoned or eliminated.

Don’t imagine that Trump or Bannon are bluffing about any of this. It is precisely their promise to deliver this dystopia—and their capacity to do so—that has their billionaire buddies licking their chops and writing the Big Checks to fund their run at it.

The other branch of our Reigning Oligarchy we can call the “Patch It Up and Try to Salvage It” wing. “Patch It Up,” for short. That is the branch currently in the driver’s seat, the one invested in the slow, steady, methodical but relentlessly successful disenfranchisement of the working and middle classes and the strangulation of democracy in all but appearances.

But they’ve gotta go slow or the people (aka frogs in the pot) will notice the temperature of the water rising too quickly, and they’ll jump out. Barack Obama is the mouthpiece, maybe even the titular brain behind this wing. The truth is we’re not allowed to know. It’s all occluded in the gauzy, unctuous symbology of Democracy and Freedom and Liberty and Opportunity and such.

This was Bill Clinton, passing NAFTA and shafting tens of millions of metal benders in the industrial Midwest. It was his ending welfare as we knew it, while deregulating the banking, financial, and telecommunications industries. It was Obama handing $16 trillion to recapitalize the banks that went bankrupt in the Great Recession that they, themselves, had caused, while letting 10 million homeowners lose their homes to the foreclosure of predatory mortgages that the selfsame banks had issued. It is Biden and Harris funding and lustily cheerleading the 21st Century’s first televised genocide, all the while threatening World War III in Ukraine. Like Upton Sinclair said one time: “An honest politician is one who, once bought, stays bought.”

This wing is more strategic than the Burn-It-Down wing. Its highest priority is to keep hidden the strings on the political puppets that are danced before us to convince us that we have a working democracy. If people can see the strings, then the illusion is blown. And so, it’s all about elections. We are asked to watch "debates" or "participate" in town halls. We attend the rallies and listen to the stump speeches. From the July of 4th parades. to "Stars and Stripes Forever"—it’s all so entrancing, isn’t it? It's all so Hollywood and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. We so love our national mythologies, don’t we, especially the ones that flatter us that we’re in control of our common destiny?

They don’t want us to know that democracy—which is when the will of the people becomes enacted as public policy—requires not just elections, but legislating, as well. There, behind closed doors and in what used to be called “smoke-filled rooms” the real business of government is enacted as legislation. But we know that it is not the will of the people. It is the will of the Oligarchs, which is why they continue to fund it all. It's a Potemkin Democracy. Just don’t tell the people.

The business in those smoke-filled rooms is transferring the nation’s wealth, built up over centuries, to the already wealthiest (boy, is that ever working); slowly removing “burdensome” regulations to liberate the entrepreneurial energies of capitalism; greenlighting monopoly control of all sectors of the economy; privatizing everything that can be sold off; sluicing anything to the weapons makers that they demand; allowing the judiciary to be stuffed by right wing ideologues so that it can constrain anarchic, radical impulses like the right to vote, the right to control your own body, and the right to protest genocide being carried out in our names; it is allowing billionaires and corporations to put any amount of money they want into buying national elections, all the while calling it “Democracy.” That’s the Potemkin part.

This is the battle between the two branches of the Neoliberal Order that is our true, reigning, even if disguised and disavowed, national secular religion.

Beyond this Cosmic Battle Between the Oligarchs, our enrapturement with Donald Trump tells us that major powers in the media back his anointment to the presidency. How else could such a horrifically malignant force be allowed to dominate not just American politics, but American culture, as well? And for now, going on decades.

Watch any of the major cable networks and see how they interview an endless stream of Trump surrogates. It’s 2 minutes of letting the surrogates spew their mesmerizing, psychotic bile, with a feckless “fact check” at the end. Which presence, which narrative, do you think retains resonance with the viewers? It’s clear which one does. The fact that the surrogates keep coming tells you that they believe it’s working.

Or, read the top newspapers and political web sites. There’s the shameless euphemizing (“sanewashing”) of Trump’s most heinous, unhinged issuances. The normalizing of the lying, the grifting, the conspiracy mongering, the hate, the racism, the derogation of national sacraments like democracy and the rule of law. It’s the signaling of social acceptance accorded through the servile issuance of thuggishly perfumed social notice.

It’s like what used to be the status achieved in making the Society pages, or the Social Register, only now it’s the Political Pages and the Election Register. It is fawning, envious sycophancy, masquerading as journalism. It is the signaling from our betters about which cultural totems we are obliged to genuflect and bow down before.

Finally—and this doesn’t begin to exhaust the proctology of public pathology—is the collapse of culture that is signified in Trump’s elevation as our culture’s dominant avatar.

At one time, our culture venerated in its leaders and people such traits as dignity, thoughtfulness, self-restraint, civility, service, depth of character, courage, sacrifice, integrity, steadfastness, and honor. Remember? Even a scofflaw as noxious as Richard Nixon had to pay at least nominal homage to such cultural standards. Remember?

This is how the Greeks invented Western Civilization. Hesiod and Homer and Aesop and Sophocles and Euripides told ennobling stories to themselves, about themselves, in order to birth themselves, as themselves. It worked.

Do you see any of that in the adulation, indeed, the deification of Donald Trump? What you see is exactly the opposite.

You see the desecration of every one of those aforementioned-character ideals. Trump is garbage gilded as golden tennis shoes or a gold-plated toilet. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Entitlement personified. Imperious. Condescending. A coward phony to the core. Never took responsibility for anything. The dirtiest, most derelict, degenerate, dangerous deceiver ever to command the public’s attention. And he is sanctified in our culture, not in spite of these failings, but precisely for them. That is the tipoff.

Trump hasn’t so much failed us as we have failed ourselves in holding ourselves and our institutions to standards that we can respect. We have allowed our culture and media to become sewers, and tolerated in our politics and public personas dirtbags, lowlifes, grifters—are there any words of opprobrium that carry enough odium to awaken us from our besotted, bottom-dwelling revery? It doesn’t look like there are.

Simply put, Trump is who we as a nation have become because he is who we have idolized. Yes, yes, I see Kamala Harris, the standard bearer of the Patch-It-Up wing, dutifully, chirpily, joyfully begging for just one more chance on behalf of her string-pullers to make it all right.

My fear is not only that she might be too late. I’m not even sure anymore that she’s even right. She’s not going to begin to fix the systemic, engineered failings that gave birth to the endemic Burn-It-Down MAGA vengeance that threatens to, well, burn it down. And that surely will. That is precisely not why she is where she is in the first place.

She has spent her entire life as a standard bearer of the Patch-It-Up wing of the neoliberal order, which is to say, follow the same ends as the Burn-It-Down branch, but with more taste, more elan, more discretion, more nuance, more patience, more artfulness, more subtlety, more savoir faire, more grace, more (dare we say it?) Joy. But follow the ends, to be sure.

That is why Harris is who she is, and is where she is. You can’t let the temperature rise too quickly or the frogs will jump out of the pot, as the MAGA folks already have. Ultimately, that is why we are where we are today: perilously poised on the precipice of presidential perdition. Meanwhile, the shelf life of redemptive Joy—with all of the gravitas it ever deserved—is long since expired.

While it is rarely a top campaign issue, Americans care deeply about our health and well-being, the food we put in our bodies, and what corporations put into our food—especially when it comes to our children. We all want to know our food is safe and free of dangerous chemicals and additives that can cause serious health problems.

This electoral season, many Americans are asking: Who will make America healthier, Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump?

The difference is stark: Widespread evidence shows that Trump’s presidency rolled back many regulations governing toxic chemicals, while the Biden-Harris Administration acted to reduce our exposure to toxic chemicals.

In July 2017, a few months after taking office, Trump reversed a pending ban on the insecticide chlorpyrifos—a brain-damaging chemical linked to ADHD and autism. Chlorpyrifos is so toxic there are no determined safe consumption levels for infants and children. The reversal came after Trump met with the CEO of Dow Chemical, chlorypifos’s biggest manufacturer—and after the company donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration ceremony.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found levels of this pesticide are up to 140 times the limits deemed safe for adults in foods kids regularly eat.

On taking office, Biden-Harris restored that ban to protect our health.

Trump’s EPA approved more than 100 new pesticide products, many containing ingredients so toxic that they have been banned in other countries. Half a dozen new products, for example, contained the chemical paraquat, a substance so deadly that ingesting a spoonful can be fatal. Seventeen of these products contained the potent hormone disruptor atrazine, and several other Trump-approved products included the dangerous airborne fumigant methyl bromide.

Trump’s EPA also failed to act on PFAS, known as “forever chemicals,” found in our food, air, water, and even breast milk. These substances are linked to cancer, birth defects, thyroid disease, weakened immunity, and reproductive harm.

In contrast, Biden-Harris issued the first-ever drinking water standard for PFAS, investing more than $1 billion to protect Americans from these deadly chemicals.

The Trump Administration appointed a former chemical industry lobbyist to head the EPA’s division on chemical oversight. Under Trump, the agency rolled back a whopping 112 environmental protections, including regulations protecting our air and water and controlling many toxic substances. The Biden-Harris Administration has revived and strengthened many of these critical protections.

Trump further endangered our food and health by abolishing stronger organic animal welfare rules aimed at making our meat supply healthier for both people and animals. The Biden-Harris Administration restored these protections. Trump caused additional harm when he reversed limits on bee-killing and neurotoxic neonicotinoid (or “neonic”) pesticides in national wildlife refuges and signed an executive order scaling back regulations on GMOs.

Now, as if to magically erase these truths, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has launched a “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) campaign on Trump’s behalf. Kennedy insists Trump would end Big Food’s influence over federal health policies, “ban the hundreds of food additives and chemicals that other countries have already prohibited,” change policies and regulations to reduce processed foods, and “clean up toxic chemicals from our air, water and soil.”

While Kennedy raises important points about the corporate capture over food and health policy, the facts show these claims have no basis in reality. Kennedy’s MAHA bid is completely contradicted by Trump’s track record and the interests of his biggest corporate backers, including Big Agriculture and the chemical industry.

And Project 2025, a blueprint for a second Trump term authored in large part by Trump’s former staffers, is a repudiation of Kennedy’s “MAHA” goals—calling for massive deregulation that will only exacerbate the problems Kennedy rightly identifies. This includes removing GMO labeling and federal inspection requirements for meat and poultry processing; weakening the Endangered Species Act; reducing the influence of EPA science on pesticide approvals; and undermining or even eliminating the science-backed Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

That’s not a recipe for a healthier, less toxic America. For all Americans, especially parents, who are rightly concerned about toxic chemicals in our food and environment, Kamala Harris is by far the better choice.

This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.

“War is not healthy for children and other living things,” reads a poster titled “Primer” created by the late artist Lorraine Schneider for an art show at New York’s Pratt Institute in 1965. Printed in childlike lowercase letters, the words interspersed between the leaves of a simply rendered sunflower, it was an early response to America’s war in Vietnam. “She just wanted to make something that nobody could argue with,” recalled Schneider’s youngest daughter, Elisa Kleven, in an article published earlier this year. Six decades later, Schneider’s hypothesis has consistently been borne out.

According to Save the Children, about 468 million children — about one of every six young people on this planet — live in areas affected by armed conflict. Verified attacks on children have tripled since 2010. Last year, global conflicts killed three times as many children as in 2022. “Killings and injuries of civilians have become a daily occurrence,” U.N. human rights chief Volker Türk commented in June when he announced the 2023 figures. “Children shot at. Hospitals bombed. Heavy artillery launched on entire communities.”

It took four decades for the United Nations Security Council to catch up to Schneider. In 2005, that global body identified — and condemned — six grave violations against children in times of war: killing or maiming; recruitment into or use by armed forces and armed groups; attacks on schools or hospitals; rape or other grave acts of sexual violence; abduction; and the denial of humanitarian access to them. Naming and shaming, however, has its limits. Between 2005 and 2023, more than 347,000 grave violations against youngsters were verified across more than 30 conflict zones in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, according to UNICEF, the U.N. agency for children. The actual number is undoubtedly far higher.

From the extreme damage explosive weapons do to tiny bodies to the lasting effects of acute deprivation on developing brains, children are particularly vulnerable in times of conflict. And once subjected to war, they carry its scars, physical and mental, for a lifetime. A recent study by Italian researchers emphasized what Schneider intuitively knew — that “war inflicts severe violations on the fundamental human rights of children.” The complex trauma of war, they found, “poses a grave threat to the emotional and cognitive development of children, increasing the risk of physical and mental illnesses, disabilities, social problems, and intergenerational consequences.”

Despite such knowledge, the world continues to fail children in times of conflict. The United States was, for instance, one of the members of the U.N. Security Council that condemned those six grave wartime violations against children. Yet the Biden administration has greenlit tens of billions of dollars in weapons sales to Israel, while U.S. munitions have repeatedly been used in attacks on schools, that have become shelters, predominantly for women and children, in the Gaza Strip. “Make no mistake, the United States is fully, fully, fully supportive of Israel,” President Joe Biden said recently, even though his administration acknowledged the likelihood that Israel had used American weaponry in Gaza in violation of international law.

And Gaza is just one conflict zone where, at this very moment, children are suffering mightily. Let TomDispatch offer you a hellscape tour of this planet, a few stops in a world of war to glimpse just what today’s conflicts are doing to the children trapped by them.

Gaza

The Gaza Strip is the most dangerous place on Earth to be a child, according to UNICEF. Israel has killed around 17,000 children there since the current Gaza War began in October 2023, according to local authorities. And almost as horrific, about 26,000 kids have reportedly lost one or both parents. At least 19,000 of them are now orphans or are otherwise without a caregiver. One million children in Gaza have also been displaced from their homes since October 2023.

In addition, Israel is committing “scholasticide,” the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Palestinian education system in Gaza, according to a recent report by the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, a Palestinian advocacy group. More than 659,000 children there have been out of school since the beginning of the war. The conflict in Gaza will set children’s education back by years and risks creating a generation of permanently traumatized Palestinians, according to a new study by the University of Cambridge, the Centre for Lebanese Studies, and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East.

Even before the current war, an estimated 800,000 children in Gaza — about 75% of the kids there — were in need of mental health and psychosocial support. Now, UNICEF estimates that more than one million of them — in effect, every kid in the Gaza Strip — needs such services. In short, you can no longer be a healthy child there.

Lebanon

Over four days in late September, as Israel ramped up its war in Lebanon, about 140,000 children in that Mediterranean nation were displaced. Many arrived at shelters showing signs of deep distress, according to Save the Children staff. “Children are telling us that it feels like danger is everywhere, and they can never be safe. Every loud sound makes them jump now,” said Jennifer Moorehead, Save the Children’s country director in Lebanon. “Many children’s lives, rights and futures have already been turned upside down and now their capacity to cope with this escalating crisis has been eroded.”

All schools in that country have been closed, adversely affecting every one of its 1.5 million children. More than 890 children have also been injured in Israeli strikes over the last year, the vast majority — more than 690 — since August 20th, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health. Given that Israel has recently extended attacks from the south of the country to the Lebanese capital, Beirut, they will undoubtedly be joined by all too many others.

Sudan

Children have suffered mightily since heavy fighting erupted in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. More than 18,000 people have reportedly been killed and close to 10 million have been forced to flee their homes since the civil war there began. Almost half of the displaced Sudanese are — yes! — children, more than 4.6 million of them, making the conflict there the largest child displacement crisis in the world.

More than 16 million Sudanese children are also facing severe food shortages. In the small town of Tawila in that country’s North Darfur state, at least 10 children die of hunger every day, according to a report last month in the Guardian. The population of the town has ballooned as tens of thousands fled El Fasher, North Darfur’s besieged capital. “We anticipate that the exact number of children dying of hunger is much higher,” Aisha Hussien Yagoub, the head of the health authority for the local government in Tawila told the Guardian. “Many of those displaced from El Fasher are living far from our clinic and are unable to reach it.”

More than 10 million Sudanese children, or 50% of that country’s kids, have been within about three miles of the frontlines of the conflict at some point over the past year. According to Save the Children, this marks the highest rate of exposure in the world. In addition, last year, there was a five-fold increase in grave violations of Sudanese children’s rights compared to 2022.

Syria

More than 30,200 children have been killed since the Syrian Civil War began in 2011, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights. Another 5,200 children were forcibly disappeared or are under arrest.

However little noticed, Syria remains the world’s largest refugee crisis. More than 14 million Syrians have been forced from their homes. More than 7.2 million of them are now estimated to be internally displaced in a country where nine in 10 people exist below the poverty line. An entire generation of children has lived under the constant threat of violence and emotional trauma since 2011. It’s been the only life they’ve ever known.

“Services have already collapsed after 14 years of conflict,” Rasha Muhrez, Save the Children’s Response Director in Syria, said last month. “The humanitarian crisis in Syria is at a record level.” More than two-thirds of the population of Syria, including about 7.5 million children, require humanitarian assistance. Nearly half of the 5.5 million school-aged children — 2.4 million between the ages of five and 17 — remain out of school, according to UNICEF. About 7,000 schools have been destroyed or damaged.

Recently, Human Rights Watch sounded the alarm about the recruitment of children, “apparently for eventual transfer to armed groups,” by a youth organization affiliated with the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration for North and East Syria and the U.S.-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, its military wing.

Ukraine

Child casualties in Ukraine jumped nearly 40% in the first half of this year, bringing the total number of children killed or injured in nearly 900 days of war there to about 2,200, according to Save the Children. “This year, violence has escalated with a new intensity, with missiles, drones, and bombs causing an alarming rise in children being injured or killed in daylight blasts,” said Stephane Moissaing, Deputy Country Director for Save the Children in Ukraine. “The suffering for families will not stop as long as explosive weapons are sweeping through populated towns and villages across Ukraine.”

There are already 2.9 million Ukrainian children in need of assistance — and the situation is poised to grow worse in the months ahead. Repeated Russian attacks on the country’s infrastructure could result in power outages of up to 18 hours a day this winter, leaving many of Ukraine’s children freezing and without access to critical services. “The lack of power and all its knock-on effects this winter could have a devastating impact not only on children’s physical health but on their mental well-being and education,” said Munir Mammadzade, UNICEF representative to Ukraine. “Children’s lives are consumed by thoughts of survival, not childhood.”

Ukraine also estimates that Russian authorities have forcibly removed almost 20,000 children from occupied territories there since the February 2022 invasion. A Financial Times investigation found that Ukrainian children who were abducted and taken to Russia early in the war were put up for adoption on a Russian government-linked website. One of them was shown with a false Russian identity. Another was listed using a Russian version of their Ukrainian name. There was no mention of the children’s Ukrainian backgrounds.

West and Central Africa

Conflicts have been raging in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for decades. World Vision has called the long-running violence there “one of the worst child protection crises in the world.” A 2023 U.N. report on children and armed conflict documented 3,377 grave violations against children in the DRC. Of these, 46% involved the recruitment of children — some as young as five — by armed groups.

Violence and intercommunity tensions in the DRC have forced 1,457 schools to close this year alone, affecting more than 500,000 children. And sadly, that country is no anomaly. In May, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, reported that more than 5,700 schools in Burkina Faso had been closed due to insecurity, depriving more than 800,000 children of their educations. And by mid-2024, conflicts had shuttered more than 14,300 schools in 24 African countries, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council. That marks an increase of 1,100 closures compared to 2023. The 2024 closures were clustered in West and Central Africa, mainly in Burkina Faso, the DRC, Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria, and Niger. They have affected an estimated 2.8 million children.

“Education is under siege in West and Central Africa. The deliberate targeting of schools and the systemic denial of education because of conflict is nothing short of a catastrophe. Every day that a child is kept out of school is a day stolen from their future and from the future of their communities,” said Hassane Hamadou, the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Regional Director for West and Central Africa. “We urgently call on all parties to conflict to cease attacks on and occupation of schools and ensure that education is protected and prioritized.”

Feet of Clay

It’s been six decades since Lorraine Schneider unveiled her poster and her common-sense wisdom to the world. She’s been proven right at every turn, in every conflict across the entire planet. Everywhere that children (not to mention other living things) have been exposed to war, they have suffered. Children have been killed and maimed. They have been physically, psychologically, and educationally stunted, as well as emotionally wounded. They have been harmed, assaulted, and deprived. Their bodies have been torn apart. Their minds – the literal architecture of their brains – have been warped by war.

In the conflict zones mentioned above and so many others — from Myanmar to Yemen — the world is failing its children. What they have lost can never be “found” again. Survivors can go on, but there is no going back.

Schneider’s mother, Eva Art, was a self-taught sculptor who escaped pogroms in Ukraine by joining relatives in the United States as a child. She lost touch with her family during World War II, according to her daughter Kleven, and later discovered that her relatives had been killed, their entire shtetl (or small Jewish town) wiped out. To cope with her grief, Art made clay figurines of the dead of her hometown: a boy and his dog, an elderly woman knitting, a mother cradling a baby. And today, the better part of 100 years after the young Art was forced from her home by violence, children continue to suffer in the very same ways — and continue to turn to clay for solace.

Israa Al-Qahwaji, a mental health and psychosocial support coordinator for Save the Children in Gaza, shared the story of a young boy who survived an airstrike that resulted in the amputation of one of his hands, while also killing his father and destroying his home. In shock and emotionally withdrawn, the boy was unable to talk about the trauma. However, various therapeutic techniques allowed him to begin to open up, according to Al-Qahwaji. The child began to talk about games he could no longer play and how losing his hand had changed his relationship with his friends. In one therapy session, he was asked to mold something out of clay to represent a wish. With his remaining hand, he carefully shaped a house. After finishing the exercise, he turned to the counselor with a question that left Al-Qahwaji emotionally overwhelmed. “Now,” the boy asked, “will you bring my dad and give me my hand back?”

While the name of the next president is unknown, some outcomes of the election can be foreseen. For instance:

• President Biden’s successor will be a dangerous militarist.

Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are supporters of boosting already-huge Pentagon budgets along with continuing U.S. warfare in many forms. Trump likes to pander to voters who don’t want endless wars, but his actual policies as president kept them going. Harris’s glimmers of senatorial interest in scaling back military largesse faded into standard bellicosity. Both candidates beat cold-war drums, with Trump focusing on China rather than Russia.

• If Trump wins, corporate Democrats and mainstream media will blame the Harris campaign for not moving rightward enough.

Progressive ideas, as usual, will be convenient scapegoats for the failures of Democratic Party elites.

• If Harris wins, corporate Democrats and mainstream media will immediately warn that she must steer clear of the left.

The establishment is ever alert to the danger that progressive populism could majorly reduce income inequality and subdue corporate power.

• If Trump wins, progressives will be on the defensive for at least four years -- unable to accomplish anything of substance at the federal level and trying to mitigate the damage under an unhinged and fascistic president.

The disasters with a second Trump administration will include unleashed nativism and official bigotry. As one liberal commentator observed weeks before the election, “More than ever, Trump’s rhetoric is steeped in racism, xenophobia and dehumanization. He routinely calls immigrants ‘vermin’ and says they are ‘poisoning the blood’ of the country. He claims they are ‘stone-cold killers,’ ‘animals’ and ‘the worst people’ who will ‘cut your throat.’ . . . He called migrants from Latin America, Congo and the Middle East ‘the most violent people on Earth.’ . . . He’s even suggested that nonwhite immigrants have ‘bad genes’ that make them genetically inferior.”

• As in the past, the Green Party will again congratulate itself on the tiny percentage of votes for its latest presidential candidate (after the party’s nominee received 0.36 percent in 2012, 1.07 percent in 2016 and 0.26 percent in 2020).

In October, this year’s Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein campaigned in swing states and declared: “This is a very dire situation that will be continued under both Democrats and Republicans. So we say there is no lesser evil in this race.”

Really?

• If Harris wins despite his best efforts, Benjamin Netanyahu will be disappointed that he was unable to sufficiently help get Trump elected.

“For anyone who doubts Trump will be even worse than Biden is on Gaza,” Mehdi Hasan tweeted a mid-October video clip of Trump saying that Netanyahu “is doing a good job, Biden is trying to hold him back... and probably should be doing the opposite. I'm glad that Bibi decided to do what he had to do.’”

• Whether Trump or Harris wins, the U.S. government will continue to support Israel’s killing of Palestinian civilians under the guise of its “right to defend itself.”

If Trump wins, virtually all Republicans and many Democrats in Congress will support his unequivocal backing for whatever Israel does. If Harris wins, we can expect her policies toward Israel to be dreadful, while she’ll be subject to increasing pressure from much of her party’s base and some Democratic members of Congress for an end to arming Israel.

• In response to the climate emergency, Harris has foreshadowed that her policies would be predictably inadequate, while Trump has repeatedly denied that a climate crisis even exists.

The burden will be on activists to demand actions commensurate with the realities described in The 2024 State of the Climate Report: “We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.”

• No matter whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris is inaugurated on Jan. 20, the challenges for progressives will be enormous.

A Trump presidency will push progressives back on our heels, in a dire defensive position as we fight to protect rights and programs won during many previous decades. With a Harris presidency, progressives will have some space to organize, with potential to actually move some U.S. government policies in a positive direction.

The election will be over in a few short weeks, but there are still many progressives who are angsting over who to vote for at the top of the ticket. Might a better understanding of the role elections play in people-powered social change help us make our decision?

Distilling hard-earned lessons from election dilemmas faced by earlier social movements, here are seven key insights you can bookmark and carry with you into the voting booth:

1. Vote Today for the Candidate You Want to Pressure Tomorrow

As generations of grassroots organizers have said: Elections are just one small part of larger movements for progressive change, so “vote for the candidate you want to organize against!”

Former U.S. President Abraham Lincoln doesn’t deserve credit for ending slavery any more than former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt deserves credit for the massive labor movement of the 1930s, or Lyndon B. Johnson for the accomplishments of the Civil Rights Movement. These huge historic victories were won by the hard and dedicated work of social movements—millions of everyday people taking concerted action.

Voting is not a love letter, it’s choosing a bus, so choose the one that can get you closer to where you want to go.

At the same time, each of these presidents were an important part of the equation, inasmuch as they were responsive to the pressure exerted by people’s movements.

Who sits at the top matters for our chances at big progressive wins. And there’s no question that in 2025 and onwards, we are more likely to win progressive victories if we are lobbying, pressuring, protesting Vice President Kamala Harris (a rational actor who knows what it’s like to be a women, immigrant, and POC), than former President Donald Trump (an irrational actor who has shown more willingness to repress the left than listen to us.). Also, progressives are the junior partners in Harris’ coalition and she is at least partially accountable to us.

As Aurora Levins Morales says, “We are choosing an opponent, not a leader.” We’re picking our fight. Voting is not a love letter, it’s choosing a bus, so choose the one that can get you closer to where you want to go.

2. Who Are You Taking Into the Polling Booth With You?

When you go into the voting booth on November 5, you are not just voting for yourself. Think of all the people you are in solidarity with—often the most marginalized and vulnerable people—who will be brutally impacted by a future Trump presidency: Muslim Americans when Trump issues his Muslim Ban 2.0; the 15 million undocumented immigrants who he plans to “round up,” cage, and forcibly deport; women who will increasingly lose the right to make decisions over their own bodies; Palestinians whose lives will be further brutalized under Trump; Ukrainians who will be abandoned by Trump’s sycophancy to Russian President Vladimir Putin; transgender students when Trump uses federal law as a cudgel to override critical state-level protections; working people who will lose hard-won rights, safety, and pay while the rich get runaway tax breaks; not to mention how one of our very last chances to preserve a livable planet will be lost to Trump’s climate denialism and plan to “drill baby, drill.” These are the people who will be impacted by your vote. Bring them with you to the voting booth.

3. Even on Palestine, Trump will be far worse than Biden-Harris

President Joe Biden has been terrible on Palestine. (As has pretty much every other U.S. President.) We don’t know if a future President Harris would break with Biden on Palestine, but with statements like, “I will always fight for the Palestinian people to be able to realize their right to dignity, freedom, security, and self-determination,” who knows. It’s evident to anyone on the left that Democrats should take concrete action to halt the violence (including an arms embargo, immediate humanitarian aid delivery, and an end to settler violence) not only because it’s the moral course of action, but because not doing so will likely cost them crucial votes from the Arab-American community and beyond. Right now, however, Harris seems unwilling to take that risk; instead, she is courting Republicans, taking money from the Israel lobby, and pursuing a broadly centrist election strategy. Once elected, however, she may be more susceptible to pressure than her predecessor, and certainly than her opponent. Not to mention, a fresh Democrat in the Oval Office could bolster senators to join Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) call for an arms embargo when his bill comes to the floor mid-November.

We don’t know how any of this will play out, but we do know that, with Trump promising to “give Bibi whatever he wants” and calling for repression of student protesters on campuses, progress on Palestine will be much harder under Trump. Don’t take our word for it; here’s how the co-founder of the Uncommitted Movement, Abbas Alawieh, describes how hard it would be to organize for a free Palestine under a future Trump presidency:

Trump’s son-in-law is fantasizing about million-dollar condos on Gaza’s beach. He’s taking campaign contributions from people who want the full annexation of the West Bank. So we also have to be very clear about the rise of global authoritarianism, of which Trump and the Republican Party’s MAGA extremism is a face. We have to take stock of what it would look like for Trump to be president and whether we’re doing the difficult work of this moment—which is not pretty, and a lot of folks don’t want to hear it—in the sense of telling people and being clear about what our organizing would look like under Donald Trump. 4. I Want a Better (Climate) Catastrophe

Regardless of who we vote for in 2024, we’re in for a very rough climate future. Neither Harris nor Trump are going to do what is truly necessary on climate (just like no existing government anywhere in the world is doing so.) But under Trump—who is a full-on climate denier—we know that it will be far, far worse: He will pull the U.S. our of Paris accords; “start drilling on day one”; he’s already made a $1 billion deal with fossil fuel CEOs to give them “whatever they want”; and the official blueprint for Trump’s program, Project 2025, calls for a “whole-of-government unwinding” of U.S. climate policy. So when you fill out your ballot, are you going to vote for a better catastrophe (Harris) or the worst possible climate catastrophe (Trump)?

People and the planet are suffering, and under a second Trump term, people would suffer worse. So, let’s defeat Trump today and fight for a Green New Deal tomorrow.

5. How Will You Feel the Morning After?

Pause for a moment. Imagine it’s Wednesday morning, November 6, and you’re waking up to a Trump victory. How do you feel?

Take that terrible gut-check feeling to the polls with you. When a friend of mine did this thought experiment with herself, she immediately headed to Pennsylvania to knock on doors.

Take a cue from these sorry notes from real voters who recall waking up on a brisk morning in 2016 to the nightmare that Trump had taken the election and imagining the ensuing chaos.

6. Things Getting Worse Won’t Get Us Closer to Things Getting Better

If you’re considering staying home in November because “maybe things have to get worse before people wake up,” or abstaining to “put the Dems on notice,” you should know that this notion is unsupported by historical evidence. Worsening conditions are not correlated to larger-scale progressive mobilization. Indeed, the opposite is more true.

What does put wind in progressive sails is seeing people’s movements win, and the belief in the possibility that things could change for the better—what social movement scholars call “raised expectations.” From Black Lives Matter to Medicare for All to the Green New Deal, we have been on a trajectory of raising expectations for over a decade now.

Think about it: Are four more years of having to fight defensive actions against Trump’s mass deportations, climate denial, even more weaponry to Israel, and the possible end of democracy itself (“Vote for me once and you’ll never have to vote again.”) really going to help your cause?

No. But what will help our cause is a partial victory now—defeating Trump and his fascist posse—that’ll also put us on more fertile political terrain for more victories to come. This election is not about our own personal expression. It’s about stopping fascism. It’s about mitigating pain and suffering.

7. Voting Your Conscience Means Voting Strategically

Too often it feels like we’re made to choose between two bad options. Harris is hardly an ideal candidate, and it’s hard for some of us to cast our individual vote for her “in good conscience.” But isn’t that the capitalist logic of our era tricking us into thinking that voting is primarily an individual choice, an act of personal expression?

A truly discerning conscience considers the broader context and the collective consequences of our actions, not just how we might feel in the moment. It’s not about staying “pure”; it’s about building and wielding collective power and putting ourselves on a trajectory to win structural change. It’s not about “me”; it’s about “us.” Voting is a strategic—and collective—act of harm reduction.

And, reality check: We are voting in a broken two-party system in which corporations are people and a handful of states get to call the election due to an outdated Electoral College. Our massive national election could come down to a few thousand votes in seven key swing states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.)

So dithering over whether to vote for Harris in California is somewhat of a waste of time. Better to phone a friend in Pennsylvania and see if they have a plan to vote. And what if friends in swing states still can’t bring themselves to pull the lever for Harris? Luckily there’s a time tested way to vote with both our head and heart: Vote swapping. Voters across the country are teaming up to defeat Trump in swing states and cast protest votes in safe states. And you can join them.

It Really Is up to Us

We’re living through an epoch that is defined by crisis. Decades of neoliberal policies*—passed under both Republican and Democratic administrations—have culminated in crisis after crisis, where millions of Americans have been harmed, and no one has been held accountable.

Somewhere along the way we started waking up to the fact that the people who broke America aren’t going to fix it; and that it’s up to us to win an America that works for the many, not just the few.

However, we do not yet have enough people power to win the changes we want—to defang Big Oil or stop weapons shipments to Israel—but progressive forces have more momentum than we’ve had in decades. To continue to gain ground, we need to keep building our movements and elect more people’s candidates.

But right now our forward trajectory depends on stopping Trump in his tracks. Our organizations, movements, and people’s candidates are engaged in an incredibly consequential contest for the future. It’s up to us to defeat Trump in 2024. We can’t count on anyone to do it for us. We need all hands on deck. That means voting for Harris and working to persuade others to do the same.

But even as we give that absolutely critical task all we’ve got, we must remember that a single presidential election won’t get us out of this mess. Voting is just one tool in a larger landscape of struggle that we engage in together. In fact, we can use this election to build long-term progressive power.

Rather than volunteering with the Harris campaign or the Democratic Party, we can volunteer for grassroots people’s organizations, like Working Families Party and Seed the Vote, and donate through Movement Voter Project, which funds long-term progressive grassroots organizations who do voter mobilization cycle after cycle. All these efforts are also working to elect people’s champions in down-ballot races.

And join forces with these organizations who are preparing to pressure a Harris administration. We’ve got to get ourselves ready to go on Day One—because no one is going to do that for us either.

So let’s power through this election, and in January 2025 unite to advance a non-fascist, as-progressive-as-we-can-make-it agenda. Another world is possible—if we build it.

*To list all the elite failures of the past decades would blown us way past the max word count on this article, but here’s a sampling: from the Iraq War to the Deep Horizon oil spill; from Hurricane Katrina to Helene; from the financial meltdown and the foreclosure crisis to runaway rents and skyrocketing inflation; from the opioid crisis to the expanded carceral state; from runaway economic inequality to persistent racial injustice; from pandemic deaths to toxic misinformation; from sending weapons to the Israeli bombardment of Gaza to unfolding climate catastrophe.

Some language was incorporated with permission from the 2020 project NOT HIM, US, written by Jonathan Matthew Smucker and Andrew Boyd.

Although barely mentioned in the mainstream media, in granting cert to Interim Storage Partners, LLC v. Texas, a case about the storage of spent radioactive fuel from nuclear power plants, the U.S. Supreme Court may have taken on potentially the most consequential case of its new term.

SCOTUS will decide whether or not to uphold a Fifth Circuit decision that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) does not have the legal power to license a private corporation to construct an off-site storage facility to hold deadly radioactive waste from nuclear power plants.

Depending on the legal rationale for SCOTUS’ decision, it could further enhance the power of courts to overturn decisions of regulatory agencies.

The case could determine whether artificial intelligence companies like Microsoft and Google can build a new generation of nuclear power plants to service the voracious hunger of artificial intelligence for electricity. Depending on its rationale, it could also impact the ability of regulatory agencies to function efficiently without being second guessed by courts.

The issues in the case have brought together an unlikely coalition of environmentalists, Texas Republicans, New Mexico Democrats, and the oil and gas industry against an equally unlikely grouping of the Biden administration, the nuclear power industry, and AI tech companies like Microsoft and Google.

The Legal Substance Issues

The environmental and legal issues in the case have a long history. The nuclear power industry has accumulated nearly 100,000 metric tons of radioactive waste that need to be deposited in a place that could be safe for millions of years. Most of the waste is now stored in temporary facilities adjacent to the power plants that create them, but such sites are running out of space and may not be safe long-term. During the 1980s Congress passed and amended the Nuclear Waste Policy Act providing for a permanent waste site and then designating Yucca Mountain, Nevada as the sole site. But plans for the site were abandoned due to environmental and political opposition, leaving no permanent site for disposable nuclear waste.

In response, for the first time the Nuclear Regulatory Commission began to grant licenses for “interim” storage facilities which were off-site (and often hundreds of miles away) from the power plants which generated the waste, claiming authority under the Atomic Energy Act. One such license was for an off-site storage facility in the Permian Basin, Texas. Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton and a private oil and gas company sued, claiming that the federal government lacked the statutory authority to issue a license for interim off-site storage.

The conservative Fifth Circuit agreed with the plaintiffs, opining “Texas is correct. The Atomic Energy Act does not confer on the commission the broad authority it claims to issue licenses for private parties to store spent nuclear fuel away-from-the-reactor. And the Nuclear Waste Policy Act establishes a comprehensive statutory scheme for dealing with nuclear waste generated from commercial nuclear power generation, thereby foreclosing the commission’s claim of authority.”

The Fifth Circuit vacated the license. The U.S. Supreme Court just granted cert and will hear the case this term. Its decision will likely be highly consequential, both for environmental and AI development reasons, and for legal reasons.

Environmentally, the building of new nuclear power plants has been stalled for decades, both because of cost and because of environmental catastrophes like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima and anti-nuclear films like Mike Nichols’ Silkwood starring Meryl Streep.

The Role of High-Tech Companies in Expanding Nuclear for AI

But largely under the radar, the voracious demand for electricity to power AI is leading top high-tech companies like Microsoft and Google to reinvigorate nuclear energy. Goldman Sachs analysts say it takes nearly 10 times the energy to power a ChatGPT than a Google search—data center power center demand will grow by 160% in the next five years. Morgan Stanley projects global data center emissions to accumulate 2.5 billion metric tons carbon-dioxide equivalent by then.

Microsoft has contracted for the currently mothballed Three Mile Island plant to reopen and access its entire output for Microsoft’s data centers. The operator is seeking hundreds of millions in tax breaks from the federal government under President Joe Bidens’s Inflation Reduction Act, which it says are necessary to make the reopening economically feasible. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm has said in the past that federal subsidies could cut the cost of bringing a new plant online by as much as half.

In March an Amazon affiliate purchased a nuclear-powered data center in Pennsylvania for $650 million.

It will be highly consequential if SCOTUS simply upholds the Fifth Circuit’s result, which would greatly slow high tech’s attempts to kick start nuclear power without time to reexamine the environmental dangers.

Just this week Google announced that it will support building seven small nuclear-power reactors in the U.S., to help power its growing appetite for electricity for AI and jump-start a U.S. nuclear revival.

The tech companies claim that reviving nuclear power will decrease CO2 emissions and help with global climate change. But they ignore the long-standing warnings of environmentalists of the potentially catastrophic dangers of nuclear power.

If SCOTUS upholds the Fifth Circuit decision outlawing the licensing of off-site nuclear waste dumps, it could considerably slow the renewed push for nuclear power, particularly by high-tech companies. That might give more time to evaluate the potential dangers of widespread renewal of nuclear power.

But depending on the legal rationale for SCOTUS’ decision, it could further enhance the power of courts to overturn decisions of regulatory agencies.

The Fifth Circuit used several rationales to block the license of temporary off-site nuclear waste facilities. The first, and least concerning, is its statutory holding that the Atomic Energy Act is “unambiguous” and “nowhere authorizes issuance of a materials license to possess spent nuclear fuel for any reason, let alone for the sole purpose of storing such material in a standalone facility.” If SCOTUS upholds the Fifth Circuit purely on statutory interpretation grounds, it would create few problematic precedents for regulatory agencies in general.

The Major Questions Doctrine

But the Fifth Circuit unnecessarily went further, holding that “even if the statutes were ambiguous, the [government’s] interpretation would not be entitled to deference by the courts” pursuant to the Chevron Doctrine, under which for previous decades, until recently rejected by the Roberts Court, judges deferred to the expertise of regulatory agencies when reasonably interpreting ambiguous statutes.

The Fifth Circuit cited SCOTUS’ precedent-setting 2022 decision in West Virginia v. EPA, in which, for the first time, a conservative majority of SCOTUS justices relied on the “major questions” doctrine to overturn a major Environmental Protection Agency rule. Under the newly invented “major questions” doctrine, SCOTUS ruled that courts should not defer to agencies on matters of “vast economic or political significance” unless the U.S. Congress has explicitly given the agencies the authority to act in those situations.

Citing West Virginia v. EPA, the Fifth Circuit held that “[D]isposal of nuclear energy is an issue of vast ‘economic and political significance.’ What to do with the nation’s ever-growing accumulation of nuclear waste is a major questions that—as the history of the Yucca Mountain repository shows—has been hotly contested for over half a century.”

It’s questionable whether the Fifth Circuit needed to reach the issues concerning the major questions doctrine in order to block the waste depository. It had already decided that the statutes were “unambiguous” and therefore it was not necessary to decide what would happen if they were “ambiguous,” which is the only situation in which the major questions doctrine might arguably apply. If SCOTUS wants to affirm the Fifth Circuit’s result, it can simply agree that the statutes were unambiguous and treat the parts of the decision involving the major questions doctrine as mere dicta. That would set no additional precedent for when courts can question the expertise of regulatory agencies.

What Party Has the Right to Sue?

There’s also a procedural issue in the case, that depending on SCOTUS’ rationale, could set precedent allowing a wider range of entities to legally challenge regulatory agency decisions. Under the Hobbs Act, a “party aggrieved” by an agency’s final order may seek judicial review in a federal appeals court.

The NRC argued, however, that the plaintiffs were not parties aggrieved by the NRC’s licensing order because they were not parties to the underlying administrative proceeding. The Fifth Circuit cited its own precedent asserting that the Hobbs Act contains an “ultra vires” exception to the party aggrieved requirement when the petitioner attacks the agency action as exceeding its authority and therefore the plaintiffs had a right to sue.

In granting cert SCOTUS agreed to rule on two questions. First is the substance issue on whether the government exceeded its authority in granting the off-site nuclear storage license. The second is the procedural issue of whether an allegation of ultra vires can override statutory limitations on jurisdiction, as the Fifth Circuit held. If SCOTUS rules that the Fifth Circuit was wrong to grant jurisdiction to the plaintiffs, the likely result would be that the licenses for off-site nuclear waste facilities would go forward and expand.

It will be highly consequential if SCOTUS simply upholds the Fifth Circuit’s result, which would greatly slow high tech’s attempts to kick start nuclear power without time to reexamine the environmental dangers. At the same time, if SCOTUS also rules that the plaintiffs had an ultra vires right to sue, it could further cripple the ability of regulatory agencies to act to protect the public interest under broad grants of power.

He’s the man of the hour (and you can choose your hour), win, lose, or draw. I mean, who can deny it? Certainly not the crowd at his debate with U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris that, as he reminded us recently, absolutely “went crazy” over what he had to say. (And it couldn’t matter less that the event had no live audience whatsoever.) In a sense, he isn’t wrong. After all, it’s still all too possible that, in a couple of weeks, he could once again be elected—yes!—president of the United States.

Indeed, it’s as yet unclear whether American voters will decline The Donald, but what is increasingly clear—there can’t be a doubt on the subject—is that he himself is on the decline in a typically wild and mad sort of way. And yet he might indeed still be elected to lead (even if that hardly seems the right word anymore) this country. And what exactly does that tell us about this all-American world of ours?

All too much, I fear. Above all, that it’s increasingly anything but all-American.

The United States is not just going down as a global power but potentially, in some fashion, beginning to disintegrate domestically as well, even possibly as a democracy.

Can you believe that only 30-plus years ago, after the Soviet Union collapsed, this country, the very one Donald Trump might once again preside over, was considered (at least in Washington) the “lone superpower” on planet Earth? And in some sense, it actually was. After all, the great European imperial powers were ancient history by then, the Russians in a state of post-Cold War devastation, and communist China had yet to truly begin its rise. But like all great imperial powers, it should now be far clearer that, in the wake of a seemingly endless series of lost wars abroad, its global “moment” has long been ending. Its ability to command or direct the world now seems largely a thing of the past. There can be little question any more that the (increasingly dis-)United States is an imperial power on the decline.

Make America Grotesque Again?

Don’t misunderstand me. This country remains all too powerful when it comes to its military and nuclear forces. Just check out the latest Pentagon budget or the more than 40,000 American military personnel, battleships, aircraft carriers, jet fighter planes, and who knows what else deployed to a Middle East that Israel is now blowing sky-high. But if you want a measurement of just how far the Lone Superpower has fallen, keep in mind that, once upon a time not so terribly long ago, an Israeli leader like Benjamin Netanyahu would never have dared to pay so little attention to the desires of Washington when it came to his actions in the Middle East. Once upon a time, a figure like Netanyahu couldn’t have ignored the wishes of the top officials of the very country still arming his own in a staggering fashion, while doing whatever he damn well pleased to tear his region to shreds.

Consider him visible evidence that this country is indeed no longer the world’s lone superpower (and not just because of the rise of China either). Yes, the Pentagon budget remains a staggering (and still increasing) affair, but something has certainly changed. Consider it anything but symbolic (though it is that, too) that 81-year-old Joe Biden is by far the oldest president in American history. (Ronald Reagan left office at age 77.) Worse yet, should Donald Trump win re-election this November and last until the end of his term, he would set a new record and leave Biden in the aging dust of history.

While it no longer even occurs to observers to use a phrase like “lone superpower” when it comes to the United States, it still seems that, in a deeper sense, the reality of this country’s imperial decline has yet to be fully taken in here, even by those who no longer see it as the operative great power on Planet Earth. In truth, it’s not just that it has lost much of its grandeur and influence abroad but that, though this is seldom mentioned in such a context, it’s visibly coming apart at the seams right here at home and that should, of course, be a significant part of any definition of imperial decline. As it happens, such a decline of a major global power will always prove anything but a distant foreign affair.

Whether Donald Trump wins or loses Election 2024, this country is in trouble deep and, four years from now, its situation could be almost unimaginable.

Even if it’s not normally thought about or written about that way, it is, in fact, happening right here, right now, in these increasingly dis-United States of America in a distinctly up close and personal fashion. At this point, you can, in fact, see evidence of it almost any time you turn on the news. In some sense, it couldn’t be more graphic or literal. After all, former president Donald Trump, once again running for president, is, symbolically speaking, declining before our very eyes as he rants and verbally stumbles in a distinctly declinist fashion, even if to the cheers of striking numbers of his MAGA fans and followers. (By the way, in light of recent history, isn’t it perhaps time to redefine MAGA as Make America Grotesque Again?)

And yes, in these years of imperial decline, Donald Trump has gotten (whether positively or negatively) almost unprecedented attention here at home. Sometimes, in fact, it seems as if he (and he alone) is the news. But here’s the truly strange thing: He, the MAGA movement, and Election 2024 are seldom seen for what (at least in part) they really are. He, that MAGA phenomenon, and the 20 million—yes, 20 million!—military-style AR-15 automatic rifles (the best-selling rifle in America) now in private hands—mainly the mitts of those who are White, male, between the ages of 40 and 65, and have accompanied him into this version of America—actually represent the truest sign of imperial decline imaginable in the place its leaders still like to think of as the greatest on Planet Earth.

Yes, Donald Trump is living, breathing evidence that this country is none too slowly coming apart at the seams. I mean, when in our history could you count on the fact that, if one candidate for president loses the upcoming election, he (and yes, it distinctly is a he) will undoubtedly claim that it’s been stolen from him and that he actually won? And his followers, significant numbers of them armed to the teeth, will agree with him and do who knows what (but nothing good). And of course, were he instead to win, four years later you can count on one thing: In some sense, this country is likely to be politically unrecognizable. If you don’t believe me, just check out the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to get a sense of the direction that a whole crew of his former officials and other Trumpian types think it should head. In other words, the United States is not just going down as a global power but potentially, in some fashion, beginning to disintegrate domestically as well, even possibly as a democracy. And if that isn’t both the functional and the literal definition of “decline,” what is?

Let me just say that, if I could bring my parents back from the (long) dead and tell them the fantastic story of Donald Trump and how he became president or, for that matter, how the Supreme Court, led by six right-wing (including three Trump-appointed) justices, essentially immunized a significant range of his illegal acts in office by granting him “presumptive immunity” for them, I guarantee you they wouldn’t have believed such a thing possible. Nor would they have believed that a “businessman,” without the slightest political background, who survived multiple (and I do mean multiple) bankruptcies and was best known for hosting a reality (or perhaps irreality) TV show, The Apprentice, for 14 seasons that tested the supposed business skills of its contestants, could become president of the United States.

Trump’s very victory in 2016 should, in other words, have instantly been seen as the functional definition of American imperial decline—a crucial sign of the weakening and potential collapse of this country’s position in the world translated into domestic politics. And an election victory this November could, in the end, mean both the figurative and literal bankruptcy of the American system, while his defeat, in a nation now armed to the teeth, could give chaos a new name in the imperial homeland.

In other words, whether Donald Trump wins or loses Election 2024, this country is in trouble deep and, four years from now, its situation could be almost unimaginable. It could be run by a degenerating 82-year-old madman or, even with Kamala Harris in the White House, a country in an ever more deeply divided and increasingly violent state of mind. It will not be, as it proudly proclaimed itself once upon a distant time, “the leader of the free world,” nor is it likely to be a fully functional global superpower (though what chaos or devastating violence its “fall” could bring the world, including future conflicts with China, remains hard to imagine).

Chill, Baby, Chill?

And let’s not forget that, in some sense, that may be the least of our problems. After all, as we’ve experienced all too recently with hurricanes Helene and Milton, whatever devastation may lie ahead socially and politically for this country, another kind of devastation is fast becoming a distinct (and distinctive) part of everyday life, here and in the world at large. Whether we’re talking about increasingly powerful storms or ever more devastating fires and floods, we’re on a planet that’s heading for trouble in a big-time fashion.

The fact is that we all now live on a different Earth, one that’s clearly going to experience devastating weather of every imaginable sort. Climate change, in other words, is truly our new reality, and it’s clear that the devastation has only begun.

As ever more homelands on this planet become ever less livable and ever greater numbers of us begin wandering in search of places to inhabit—yes, Donald, climate change is indeed creating a previously inconceivable world of “illegal immigrants”!—imagine the once greatest power on planet Earth with a president who still insists that global warming is a “hoax.” Imagine a president on this very planet right now who plans, above all else, to “drill, baby, drill” from his first day back in the White House—and that’s in the nation that’s already the world’s record producer of oil and natural gas.

You might almost imagine that climate change had grasped the withering global power of the United States and decided to act accordingly.

That should, of course, be the definition of creating a dysfunctional country on an increasingly dysfunctional planet, one where the old imperial dreams of so many “great powers” will have ever less meaning.

Yes, the Middle East is now in ever greater chaos as the Biden administration’s support for Netanyahu only continues, even as he draws even more of the region into disastrous conflict, while hardly bothering to consult with Washington’s top officials. Still, count on one thing: The chaos you see out there now is, in its own eerie fashion, already coming home to roost and if Donald Trump ends up back in the White House, believe me, we’ll need another term entirely than “lone superpower” to describe this country.

Might the planet’s “great stupid power” work?

And mind you, despite the rise of China, it still remains an open question, whether there can be another lone superpower of any sort or even a truly great power on a planet all too literally going to hell in a (flaming) handbasket, one whose land surface and ocean temperatures have already hit record levels with far worse to come.

You might almost imagine that climate change had grasped the withering global power of the United States and decided to act accordingly. In some fashion, we now seem to be on a post-imperial planet in which—if only—the best approach would be: chill, baby, chill.