As people testified before Congress this week about the brutality and violence they’d suffered at the hands of ICE, that massive paramilitary organization was shopping for giant warehouse-style facilities they can retrofit into what they euphemistically call “detention centers.”

Cable news people call them “prison camps” or “Trump prison camps,” but look in any dictionary: prisons are where people convicted of crimes are held. As Merriam-Webster notes, a prison is:

“[A]n institution for confinement of persons convicted of serious crimes.”

Jails are where people accused of crimes but still waiting for their day in court are held, as Merriam-Webster notes:

“[S]uch a place under the jurisdiction of a local government for the confinement of persons awaiting trial or those convicted of minor crimes.”

But what do you call a place where people who’ve committed no criminal offense (immigration violations are civil, not criminal, infractions)? The fine dictionary people at Merriam-Webster note the proper term is “concentration camp”:

“[A] place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard.”

The British originated the term “concentration camp” to describe facilities where “rebel” or “undesirable” civilians were held in South Africa during the Second Anglo‑Boer War (1899–1902) to control and punish a rebellious population.

They were facilities where the “bad elements of society” were “concentrated” into one location so they could be easily controlled and would lose access to society and thus could not spread their messages of resistance against the British Empire.

Future generations of Americans—our children and grandchildren—won’t ask us whether ICE followed civil detention statutes: they’ll want to know why we allowed concentration camps to exist in America at all.

The Germans adopted the term in 1933 when Hitler took power and created his first camp for communists, socialists, union leaders, and, by the end of the year, Hitler’s political opponents. They Germanized the phrase into “Konzentrationslager” and referred to the process of their incarceration as “protective custody.”

The first camp was built at Dachau just weeks after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, and by the end of the year there were around 70 of them operating across the country.

When Louise and I lived in Germany in 1986/87, we visited Dachau with our three children. The crematoriums shocked our kids, but even more so because this was simply a “detention facility” and not one of Hitler’s death camps (which were all located outside Germany to ensure deniability).

The ovens at Dachau were for those who had been worked to death or killed by cholera or other disease, much like the 35+ people who’ve recently died in ICE’s concentration camps.

When American friends would visit us and we’d take them to Dachau (we lived just an hour up the road) they’d invariably be surprised when I told them that by the time of the war there were over 500 substantial camps and an additional few hundred very small ones all over the country.

“How could the people not know what was going on?” they’d ask.

The answer was simple: the people did know. These were where the “undesirables,” the “criminal troublemakers,” and the “aliens” were held, and were broadly supported by the German people. (It wasn’t until 1938, following Kristallnacht, that the Nazis began systematically arresting and imprisoning non-political Jews, first at Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.)

By the end of his first year, Hitler had around 50,000 people held in his roughly 70 concentration camps, facilities that were often improvised in factories, prisons, castles, and other buildings.

By comparison, today ICE is holding over 70,000 people in 225 concentration camps across America, and Trump, Homan, Miller, and Noem hope to more than double both numbers in the coming months.

In Tennessee, The Guardian reports that Miller has been coordinating with Republican leaders to create legislation that would turn every local cop, teacher, social worker, and helper in the state into an official agent of ICE and criminalize efforts by cities to refuse cooperation. It also makes it a felony crime to identify any of ICE’s masked agents or disclose conditions within the concentration camps to the public.

Germans didn’t have the benefit of warnings from a fascist history they could look back on; much of what Hitler did took them by surprise, as I’ve noted in previous articles.

In 2026 America, however, operating with the benefit of historical hindsight, entire communities are rebelling at Trump’s effort to beat Germany’s 1933-1934 prisoner numbers.

In city after city, Americans are organizing to deprive ICE of their coveted spaces, putting pressure on companies not to sell and on cities and counties not to permit any more concentration camps.

Because immigration violations are labeled “civil,” people in ICE concentration camps are stripped of many of the normal constitutional protections that apply to people in criminal incarceration. This has created a legal black hole that ICE and the Trump regime exploit, where indefinite imprisonment, abuse, and medical neglect flourish with little to no oversight or accountability.

Human rights organizations like the ACLU describe pervasive patterns of abuse in ICE detention: hazardous living conditions, chronic medical neglect, sexual assault, retaliation for grievances, and extensive use of solitary confinement.

Detainees who have committed no crime other than being in the United States without documentation report being shackled for long periods, packed into freezing, overcrowded cells under constant fluorescent light, and denied hygiene and timely care. Meanwhile, GOP-aligned private prison companies are making billions off the program.

Inspections and oversight are inconsistent: one recent investigation found that as detentions and deaths surged in 2025, formal inspections of facilities actually dropped by over a third. ICE regularly refuses to allow attorneys, family members, and even members of Congress to access their concentration camps; the issue is now being litigated through federal courts.

History shows us that once a nation builds a mass detention apparatus, it never remains limited to its original targets. Future generations of Americans—our children and grandchildren—won’t ask us whether ICE followed civil detention statutes: they’ll want to know why we allowed concentration camps to exist in America at all.

Germany’s concentration camps didn’t start as instruments of mass murder, and neither have ours; both started as facilities for people the government’s leader said were a problem. And that’s exactly what ICE is building now.

History isn’t whispering its warning: it’s shouting.

California Governor Gavin Newsom has made headlines this winter by vowing to defeat a proposal for a one-time 5 percent tax on billionaires in the state. Many national polls now rank him as the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, but aligning with the ultra-wealthy is not auspicious for wooing the party’s voters. Last year, Reuters/Ipsos pollsters reported that a whopping 86 percent of Democrats said “changing the federal tax code so wealthy Americans and large corporations pay more in taxes should be a priority.”

Newsom has drawn widespread praise for waging an aggressive war of words against President Trump. But few people outside of California know much about the governor’s actual record. Many Democratic voters will be turned off to learn that his fervent opposition to a billionaire tax is part of an overall political approach that has trended more and more corporate-friendly.

A year ago, Newsom sent about 100 leaders of California-based companies a prepaid cell phone “programmed with Newsom’s digits and accompanied by notes from the governor himself,” Politico reported. One note to the CEO of a big tech corporation said, “If you ever need anything, I’m a phone call away.” While pandering to business elites, Newsom has slashed budgets to assist the poor and near-poor with healthcare, housing and food—in a state where 7 million live under the official poverty line and child poverty rates are the highest in the nation.

The latest Newsom budget, released last month, continues his trajectory away from social compassion. “The governor’s 2026-27 spending plan balances the budget by dodging the harsh realities of the Republican megabill, H.R. 1, and maintains state cuts to vital public supports, like Medi-Cal, enacted as part of the current-year budget,” the California Budget & Policy Center pointed out. “Governor Newsom’s reluctance to propose meaningful revenue solutions to help blunt the harm of federal cuts undermines his posture to counter the Trump administration.” The statement said that the proposed budget “will leave many Californians without food assistance and healthcare coverage.”

So far, key facts about Newsom’s policy priorities have scarcely gone beyond California’s borders. “National media have focused on Newsom as a personality and potential White House candidate and have almost completely ignored what he has and has not done as a governor,” said columnist Dan Walters, whose five decades covering California politics included 33 years at The Sacramento Bee. “It's a perpetual failing of national political media to be more interested in image and gamesmanship rather than actual actions, the sizzle rather than the steak, and Newsom is very adept at exploiting that tendency.”

Walters told me that Newsom “has generally avoided direct conflicts with his fellow millionaires, such as discouraging tax increases, and has danced between corporations and labor unions on bread-and-butter issues such as minimum wages. He's also quietly moved away from environmental issues, most notably shifting from condemnation of the oil industry for price gouging and pollution to encouraging the industry to increase production and keep refineries operating.”

Newsom angered climate activists last fall by signing his bill to open up thousands of new oil wells. Noting that “Newsom just championed a plan to dramatically expand oil drilling in California,” the Oil and Gas Action Network said that he “can’t claim climate leadership while giving Big Oil what it wants.” Third Act, founded by Bill McKibben, responded by denouncing “Newsom’s Big Oil backslide” and accused the governor of “backtracking on key climate and community health commitments.”

Great efforts to curb the ubiquitous toxic impacts of PFAS “forever chemicals” hit a wall in October when Newsom vetoed legislation to ban them in such consumer items as cookware, dental floss, and cleaning products. “This bill had huge support from both within the state and beyond, and yet, apparently, the governor was interested only in the one sector opposing it—the cookware industry,” said Clean Water Action policy director Andria Ventura. The organization put the veto in context, observing that “the governor seems determined to move away from his pro-environment past.”

As with the environment, so with workers’ rights. In 2023, Newsom vetoed a bill to provide unemployment compensation to workers on strike. In 2024, he vetoed a bill to help protect farmworkers from violations of heat safety regulations, while temperatures in California’s agricultural fields spike above 110 degrees.

The latest Gallup polling of the party’s rank-and-file indicates a wide ideological gap between Newsom and the party’s base. Fifty-nine percent of Democrats described themselves as “liberal” or “very liberal,” while 32 percent said “moderate,” and 8 percent “conservative” or “very conservative.” And the trendline is striking: Democrats’ self-identification as liberal or very liberal has doubled in the last two decades.

It might be tempting to believe that Newsom’s services to corporatism and the rich are less important than the possibility that he would be an adept Democratic nominee to defeat the GOP ticket in 2028. But pursuit of such “moderate” politics was harmful to Democratic turnout in 2016 and 2024. Newsom’s current political attitude is similar to the timeworn approach that undermined the candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.

Newsom says he’s eager to pitch a big tent for the Democratic Party, declaring that he welcomes the likes of former US senator Joe Manchin as well as New York’s socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani in the fold. “I want it to be the Manchin to Mamdani party,” Newsom said in November. “I want it to be inclusive.” He did not mention that during the Biden presidency, while in the Senate, Manchin wrecked prospects for transformational Build Back Better legislation and other measures that would have benefited tens of millions of Americans.

It’s telling that Newsom and former president Bill Clinton, a longtime backer, have voiced profuse mutual admiration. Interviewed after he came off the stage with the former president in a joint appearance at a Clinton Global Initiative event a few months ago, Newsom praised “the ability to reach across the aisle.” That formula is a throwback to what propelled Clinton into the presidency with a pledge to find common ground, only to toss the working class overboard from the Oval Office. The disastrous results—made possible by Clinton’s reaching “across the aisle”—included passage of the NAFTA trade pact, the “welfare reform” law that harshly undermined poor women with children, the mass-incarceration-boosting crime bill and the media monopoly-enabling Telecommunications Act.

Launching his podcast “This Is Gavin Newsom” a year ago, the host began warmly showcasing extremist bigots by featuring Charlie Kirk as his first guest. When Kirk was assassinated in September, Newsom lavished praise on him, tweeting: “The best way to honor Charlie’s memory is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse.” From the governor’s office, Newsom issued a statement that explained: “I knew Charlie, and I admired his passion and commitment to debate.”

The praise raises the question: how far right would someone need to be before no longer meriting Newsom’s admiration for “passion”? Clearly, Kirk wasn’t far right enough to be disqualified. He only said things like asserting that “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America,” proclaiming “we made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s” and castigating Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee and others as affirmative-action hires: “You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”

Newsom’s show has continued to give a friendly platform to such extreme right-wingers as Steve Bannon and Ben Shapiro. In effect, Newsom is engaged in a podcast form of triangulation—by turns validating and disputing his guests’ attacks on progressivism.

On no issue is Newsom more out of step with the Democratic electorate than US support for Israel. Last summer, a Quinnipiac survey found that 77 percent of Democrats believed Israel was guilty of genocide in Gaza—but last month Newsom said the opposite, declaring “I don’t agree with that notion.” Like most Democratic officeholders who combine their denial of genocide with support for the nonstop weapons flow to Israel, Newsom lays blame narrowly on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying that he is “crystal clear about my love for Israel and condemnation of Bibi.” The same Quinnipiac poll found that fully three-quarters of Democrats were opposed to sending further military aid to Israel, a position that Newsom refuses to take at the same time that he dodges questions about the right-leaning Israel lobby group AIPAC.

Newsom can expect a direct challenge from another California Democrat likely to be on debate stages when the party’s presidential campaigns get underway next year. Congressman Ro Khanna said of Newsom in January: “He doesn’t want to offend the AIPAC donors. He doesn’t want to offend the donor class. And that explains his position on going to give Netanyahu a blank check right after October 7, on not being willing to ever call out the funding we were giving, and not willing to call out that clearly it was a genocide, and then not willing to challenge the billionaire class on tax policy.”

For anyone who wants a truly progressive Democratic Party, Gavin Newsom is bad news.

The US federal government has announced that it will “immediately” equip all its Homeland Security officers in Minneapolis with body-worn cameras, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, with plans to outfit all federal officers nationwide.

The announcement follows criticisms in response to ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers who killed two protesters last month in Minneapolis. The initiative to require federal law enforcement officers to wear body cameras has bipartisan support and is popular among the public.

But will body cameras effect change?

Research on the efficacy of body cameras is inconsistent. In 2018, a Bureau of Justice Statistics report outlined the primary reasons cited for law enforcement use of body cameras. These included increasing the quality of evidence, decreasing civilian complaints, reducing agency liability, and enhancing officer safety. However, according to a January 2022 National Institute of Justice report, the “research does not necessarily support the effectiveness of body-worn cameras in achieving those desired outcomes. A comprehensive review of 70 studies of body-worn cameras showed no consistent or no statistically significant effects.” Nevertheless, in May 2022 then-President Joe Biden signed an executive order expanding body cameras to federal law enforcement officers.

Will federal body camera footage be manipulated by AI for release? We can no longer be certain.

Why would President Biden sign an order to expand an otherwise inconsistent technology to law enforcement when acknowledged as such by his own government agency? The answer is because the promise of body cameras is based mostly on popular beliefs and assumptions even when the evidence does not support that the devices would deliver the results the public desired.

In our new book Police Body-Worn Cameras: Media and the New Discourse of Police Reform, we trace the broader shift in the rationale for body camera adoption to concerns over transparency and accountability. Indeed, “transparency” was cited as the primary reason in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announcement to equip its officers with body cameras.

Transparency is characterized by visibility. However, the release of body camera footage or agreement over what footage necessarily shows can never be assumed.

In October 2025, a judge in Chicago ordered all ICE agents in the city to wear body cameras after reviewing clips of submitted footage from officers who had already been equipped with the devices. In December, in response to a records request of immigration operations in Chicago, ICE reported that it had no body camera footage despite that it had earlier submitted footage. It remains uncertain if the footage will ever be released.

DHS has indicated it has body camera footage of CBP shooting and killing Alex Pretti last month in Minneapolis. There are widespread calls to release the footage including by politicians like the mayor of Kansas City who said, “Video is only great if we can see it.”

If seeing were only that simple.

Video footage, whether from body cameras or another source, is never some sort of objective arbiter of truth as it is routinely asserted. Instead, narratives are presented that explain footage to viewers, whether it be to the public or in a courtroom to a jury. Research has shown that narratives presented as textual descriptions have had an influence in how audiences judge what is depicted in video recordings, including body camera footage.

The 1991 bystander recording of police beating Black motorist Rodney King in Los Angeles is a standout example of narrative influence. At the time, the recording was considered the most extraordinary recording of police brutality to be shown on television. The footage, which many people believed very clearly showed police beating an unarmed man on the ground, was used as key evidence at the trial that resulted in the acquittal of four officers because of the ability of the defense to offer a counternarrative of the police beating.

The recent use of artificial intelligence has only further complicated such matters.

Last month, the White House released a digitally manipulated image of an ICE arrest. The image was different from other released AI materials in its presumably intended realism, which casts doubt on visual evidence released from the government moving forward. Will federal body camera footage be manipulated by AI for release? We can no longer be certain.

As if all of this wasn’t already enough, research examining online user assessments of video as possible evidence of a crime has found that people mostly interpret what they see as it best corresponds to their worldview. And alternative views are unlikely to sway them. The use of AI has only exacerbated this process, as online users across the political spectrum have manipulated images of bystander recordings of Alex Pretti’s killing to correspond to contradictory politically inspired narratives about his death. How then might body camera footage of Pretti’s killing fit into the discordant political discourse, assuming the video is released?

What this all suggests is that the public should lower their expectations of body cameras, including assumptions that equipping federal officers with the devices will somehow effect change. Moving forward clear policies governing the use of body cameras, like when cameras should be activated and a timeline for release, are important next steps. Policies prohibiting the official manipulation of any evidence including body camera footage should also be enacted.

Since the Cuban Revolution overthrew a US-backed dictatorship and asserted national independence, Cuba has remained in the United States' crosshairs. The country has endured nearly 600 assassination attempts against its leadership, along with countless covert and overt operations aimed at destabilizing its government. For more than six decades, the US has also imposed an economic embargo explicitly designed to bring about regime change.

By any honest measure, this policy has failed. What it has succeeded in doing is fostering deep resentment toward the United States, not only in Cuba, but across much of the world, while inflicting immense suffering on ordinary Cubans.

Basic necessities such as food, paint, printing paper, baby formula, syringes, and other lifesaving supplies, including vaccines and cancer treatment drugs, are either restricted by the embargo or priced far beyond most people’s reach. A simple walk through Havana tells the story: crumbling infrastructure, uncollected trash, and growing numbers of people gathering near tourist areas, hands outstretched in desperation.

Fuel shortages are widespread, inflation is at historic highs, and a sharp decline in tourism, Cuba’s primary economic lifeline, has made daily life nearly unbearable for many.

It is time for the United States to respect Cuba’s sovereignty and lift the embargo and accompanying sanctions.

In response, the Cuban government has expanded the private sector, legalized small- and medium-sized enterprises, decentralized food production, and opened its markets to limited foreign investment, all while attempting to maintain the core socialist principles of the revolution. It has also reduced reliance on fossil fuels, slowly shifting to solar energy. In 2025, renewable energy accounted for more than 10% of Cuba’s energy consumption, an increase from 3% the year before.

Yet these measures alone cannot offset the outsize impact of US policy and the blockade, which has been dramatically tightened in recent months. The latest effort to cut off of nearly all oil shipments to the island has led to daily blackouts and deepened human suffering.

It is time for the United States to respect Cuba’s sovereignty and lift the embargo and accompanying sanctions. They are a cruel and inhumane form of collective punishment that disproportionately harms the most vulnerable. These sanctions, without legitimate justification, have restricted travel for Americans, made remittances far more difficult, and unjustly placed Cuba on the State Sponsor of Terrorism list. That designation effectively cuts the country off from the global banking system, making even basic international transactions nearly impossible. The absurdity is stark: Cuban biotechnology produced five globally used Covid-19 vaccines, while the US embargo restricted Cuba’s ability to purchase syringes to administer them.

Cuba should not be treated as a political chess piece to demonstrate US economic and military might. It is a proud nation of nearly 11 million people who want nothing more than to be good neighbors. It is time for the United States to end its asphyxiation of Cuba and allow the Cuban people to determine their own future, a future free from US interference, coercion, and perpetual threat.

In January 2026, I published an article warning that the world was approaching the final hours of the New START Treaty. On February 5, 2026, that warning has become reality. For the first time since the early 1970s, no legally binding limits exist on US-Russian strategic nuclear forces. This moment is not only a failure of arms control; it is a profound threat to human security, humanitarian disarmament, and the credibility of multilateral commitments across all fields.

New START was the last surviving pillar of bilateral nuclear restraint. Its expiration removes the ceilings on deployed strategic warheads and delivery systems, eliminates inspections and data exchanges, and forces both sides to operate in an environment of opacity and worst‑case assumptions. In my earlier article, I argued that this collapse would deepen the crisis of credibility facing the Nuclear Non‑Proliferation Treaty (NPT), especially the long‑neglected obligations under Article VI. That analysis stands even more firmly today. A world without New START is a world where the NPT’s disarmament pillar is no longer eroding slowly—it is cracking openly.

But the consequences extend far beyond the nuclear domain. The end of New START is a blow to humanitarian disarmament as a whole. Treaties such as the Mine Ban Treaty (MBT) and the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CMC) were built on the belief that international law can restrain the most harmful weapons and protect civilians. When major powers abandon restraint in the nuclear field, they send a dangerous message: that international commitments are optional, norms are negotiable, and humanitarian principles can be sidelined when politically inconvenient.

This erosion of respect for international commitments is not isolated. It is part of a wider pattern visible in multiple conflicts, where the use of explosive weapons in populated areas, attacks on medical facilities, and disregard for civilian protection have become disturbingly normalized. The collapse of New START reinforces this trend by weakening the broader culture of compliance that humanitarian disarmament depends on.

Strengthening humanitarian disarmament—from nuclear weapons to landmines, cluster munitions, and all weapons that devastate civilian life—is now an urgent moral responsibility.

The humanitarian and medical consequences of this moment cannot be overstated. Nuclear weapons are not abstract strategic tools; they are instruments of mass suffering. Their use—even once—would overwhelm health systems, destroy infrastructure, contaminate environments, and inflict irreversible harm on generations. The expiration of New START increases the likelihood of miscalculation, escalation, and arms racing at a time when global humanitarian systems are already stretched beyond capacity.

This is why the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) has gained renewed relevance. Its humanitarian logic—grounded in the lived experiences of survivors and the realities of medical response—offers a principled alternative to the paralysis of traditional arms control. As nuclear‑armed states retreat from their obligations, the TPNW stands as a reminder that disarmament is not only a legal duty but a moral imperative.

Today’s moment demands more than observation. It requires action.

Governments must restore restraint and rebuild trust in multilateral commitments.

Civil society must raise its voice with renewed urgency.

Humanitarian and medical organizations must continue to highlight the human cost of nuclear policies.

And the media must stop treating nuclear risks as distant or technical; they are immediate threats to human life and dignity.

The expiration of New START is not the end of arms control—but it is a warning. A warning that the international system is drifting toward a world where the most destructive weapons are unconstrained, humanitarian norms are weakened, and global commitments lose their meaning.

Strengthening humanitarian disarmament—from nuclear weapons to landmines, cluster munitions, and all weapons that devastate civilian life—is now an urgent moral responsibility, more than ever.

Live at 9 AM Eastern & Streaming 24-7 Thereafter:

Political cartoonist Ted Rall and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.

Today we discuss:

• New Quinnipiac poll: 61% think Trump lied about the shooting of Alex Pretti and 25% believe the Trump administration. Democrats (93%) and independents (65%) say Trump lied, while Republicans (60%) say he was honest. 80% think there should be an independent investigation. 78% have seen the video. Meanwhile, 65% say ICE has “gone too far,” according to the NPR/PBS News/Marist poll.

• In October 2024, a Rikers Island social worker came forward with a bombshell accusation: officers were routinely isolating severely mentally ill men in their cells for weeks and even months, a process known as “deadlocking.” The Department of Investigation (DOI), announced an inquiry. More than 450 days have since passed, and nothing has happened.

• Jeff Bezos axes a total of 2000 out of 2500 jobs in 2.5 years. Is The Washington Post entering a death spiral? Can it be replaced?

JOIN US LIVE ON RUMBLE!

https://rumble.com/c/DeProgramShow

FOLLOW TED:

https://rall.com/

https://x.com/tedrall

FOLLOW JOHN:

https://www.instagram.com/realjohnkiriakou

https://x.com/JohnKiriakou

LISTEN ON SPOTIFY:

https://open.spotify.com/show/2kdFlw2w8sSPhKI8NRx8Zu

LISTEN ON APPLE MUSIC:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/deprogram-with-john-kiriakou-and-ted-rall

The post Americans to Trump: You Lie! | DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

On Wednesday, the Washington Post laid off roughly a third of its staff. For one of the most powerful and historically significant newspapers in the United States to make this decision is a warning to the entire journalism industry. At a moment of political instability, rising authoritarianism, and widespread distrust in institutions, corporate media is choosing contraction over responsibility.

Under the ownership of Jeff Bezos and his puppet publisher Will Lewis, the Post has joined a growing list of outlets responding to financial pressure by hollowing out their newsrooms. These layoffs arrive amid record-breaking, industry-wide cuts that have devastated local and national media alike. Across the country, journalists are losing jobs not because their work lacks value, but because truth telling has become inconvenient for corporate owners.

This erosion of journalism is not inevitable. It is the result of deliberate choices. Bezos, whose net worth hovers around $250 billion, has the resources to preserve jobs and protect institutional integrity. The decision not to do so makes clear that political influence matters more than the labor that sustains public accountability.

In 2019, Palestinian poet Marwan Makhoul wrote, “In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political, I must listen to the birds, and in order to hear the birds, the warplanes must be silent.” Journalism, like poetry, cannot be separated from the conditions under which it is produced. Reporters cannot meaningfully tell stories of joy, culture, or community while working under constant threat of layoffs, censorship, and corporate interference. The warplanes are not silent.

The future of journalism depends on resisting this erosion. It requires sustained investment in independent and nonprofit outlets, stronger labor protections for journalists, and a collective refusal to accept mass layoffs as the cost of doing business.

As newsrooms shrink, reporters are expected to do the impossible: Cover every breaking story, every election, every conflict, every scandal. What disappears in the process are the beats deemed expendable. Coverage of racial justice, gender equity, LGBTQIA+ communities, labor organizing, and social movements is often the first to be cut. These stories are not eliminated because they lack importance, but because they challenge power and unsettle funders.

The result is a media landscape increasingly shaped by what is safest for advertisers and political elites. More coverage of markets and institutions, fewer stories about Black culture. More horse-race politics, less reporting on trans survival or grassroots organizing. Corporate media follows the wind while ignoring the warplanes overhead.

This narrowing of journalism’s mission weakens democracy itself. A press that cannot afford to tell uncomfortable truths cannot fulfill its role as a public good. When newsrooms prioritize access over accountability and profitability over people, the public loses both information and trust.

Still, journalism is not finished. Independent and nonprofit newsrooms continue to do the work that corporate outlets are abandoning, producing community-rooted reporting that centers justice, accountability, and lived experience. But these outlets operate under immense financial strain, even as corporate media continues to set the terms of what is considered legitimate or newsworthy.

The future of journalism depends on resisting this erosion. It requires sustained investment in independent and nonprofit outlets, stronger labor protections for journalists, and a collective refusal to accept mass layoffs as the cost of doing business. It also requires reporters—especially students, freelancers, and those pushed out of traditional newsrooms—to keep telling the stories that power would prefer remain untold.

The Washington Post layoffs are not just about one newspaper. They are about whether journalism will continue to serve the public, or retreat further into a corporate shell. The industry can cover tragedy while preserving joy. It can hold power accountable while documenting resistance, survival, and hope. We should not accept anything less.

We will not mince words. The 'policy' of the Trump administration is a total siege: a modern mechanism for collective punishment designed to strangle life itself by cutting off fuel for hospitals, schools, water, transport, and food distribution.

Cuba already faces severe fuel shortages, with blackouts stretching daily and essential services collapsing under the weight of sanctions and depleted imports. Cuba’s remaining oil stocks could run out in mere weeks, threatening the lives of millions who have done nothing to justify this escalation.

This is the culmination of a long-standing strategy articulated in US law — from the expansive embargo codified by the Helms–Burton Act in the 1990s to the Cuban Assets Control Regulations first enforced in the 1960s — that openly sought to apply “maximum pressure” to force political transformation in Havana and defeat a vanguard in the struggle against the US's hemispheric domination.

Now, with this new Executive Order, the logic of siege has reached its apotheosis: sanction not only Cuba but every nation that dares show solidarity, effectively demanding that sovereign states choose between the interests of their own people and the dictates of an empire.

Cuba stood with oppressed peoples globally — from defeating apartheid in South Africa to sending doctors to the frontlines of epidemics — and now it is our time to act with audacity, moral courage, and collective force.

Already Mexico — Cuba’s last significant oil lifeline — has been pressed into uncertainty, warned that continued support could trigger tariffs on its economy. In doing so, Trump has revealed so-called 'secondary sanctions' as the empire's principal weapon against international solidarity.

Trump has been clear: this siege is but a springboard toward regime change. It is the same strategic blueprint that saw Venezuela’s sovereignty undermined, its oil lifelines severed, its people plunged into crisis while the world stood by in lethargy.

We cannot repeat that failure. The international community was too slow to prevent the bombardment of Caracas; we must not be passive while the groundwork is laid for similar violence against the people of Cuba.

If Cuba is to survive as an independent nation it will be because of the continued resilience and vitality of its revolutionary project — and the solidarity of movements and nations around the world defying empire and rising to challenge this injustice.

We must organize community support networks, coordinate diplomatic resistance, demand that governments refuse to enforce secondary tariffs, and amplify Cuban voices against this assault on international law, human dignity, and basic human rights.

Those efforts, both from within and beyond the Progressive International, must accelerate — today. History will judge those who saw this moment and turned away. Cuba stood with oppressed peoples globally — from defeating apartheid in South Africa to sending doctors to the frontlines of epidemics — and now it is our time to act with audacity, moral courage, and collective force.

Stand with the Cuban people now; stand against this siege, this economic assault, this unfolding humanitarian disaster; join together in the provision of key supplies to the island, from medicine to food to fuel for its people; and stand for the right of all nations to self-determination and human dignity, or be complicit in its destruction.

When Ben Bagdikian, an esteemed journalist and early FAIR contributor, published his groundbreaking book The Media Monopoly in 1983, he painted a troubling picture of US media consolidation, reporting that 50 corporations controlled the media business. With each reprint, that number dwindled (FAIR.org, 6/1/87). When FAIR replicated his analysis in 2011 (Extra!, 10/11), it stood at 20.

Now, over 40 years after the initial release of The Monopoly Media, the media landscape has transformed drastically. Even Bagdikian’s later editions, written at the dawn of the internet, could not fully anticipate how profoundly digital technology would reconfigure the media oligarchy.

“News” is increasingly synonymous with online news. Over half the US public (56%) say that they “often” get news through their digital devices—compared to less than 1 in 3 (32%) who often get news from TV, 1 in 9 from radio, and only 1 in 14 from print publications like newspapers or magazines (Pew, 9/25/25).

Which raises the question: Who owns the leading online news sites—and, by extension, largely shapes the ideas and information that reach millions of Americans?

The pervasive presence of billionaires and the entrance of private equity firms in FAIR’s Top 7 suggest even further shifts away from democratic, truth-telling media.

Each month, Press Gazette, a London-based magazine for the journalism industry, ranks the top 50 news websites in the US in order of monthly visits, based on data from the marketing firm Similarweb. FAIR tallied Press Gazette’s results over a 12-month span, from December 2024 to November 2025, to get a figure for total US visits to major news sites over that period: 45.6 billion.

More than half of those visits, nearly 25.5 billion, went to news sites controlled by just seven families or corporate entities.

1. Ochs-Sulzberger Family (New York Times): 5.54 billion

The owner that commands the largest share of news site viewership–a staggering 5.5 billion over one year—is the Ochs-Sulzberger family, the media dynasty that acquired the New York Times in 1896. Control of the Times has since passed through four generations, cemented by a family trust; over a century later, scion A.G. Sulzberger currently sits as the chair and publisher. As its reach greatly expanded in the digital age, the paper continues its tradition of allegiance to the establishment and opposition to what it sees as excessively progressive policies.

2. Murdoch Family (News Corp, Fox): 5.46 billion

The No. 2 spot (just under 5.5 billion views) is occupied by the Murdoch family. Billionaire right-winger Rupert Murdoch built an expansive global media empire encompassing Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and British tabloid the Sun, all of which made the US Top 50 list, as well as many other media outlets in the US, Britain, and Australia.

The empire is now under two corporate umbrellas, News Corp (the papers) and Fox Corporation (TV); both are led by Rupert’s billionaire son, Lachlan Murdoch, who inherited the role following a messy succession battle. He was apparently chosen for his dedication to maintaining the right-wing political advocacy that has long characterized the Murdoch media portfolio.

Rupert Murdoch, who has always cultivated political connections, has a relationship with President Donald Trump going back decades, with Murdoch even acting as an informal adviser during Trump’s first administration. That chumminess has not been enough to protect Murdoch from Trump’s assault on the news media: Trump is currently suing the Wall Street Journal for $10 billion for publishing an incriminating birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein that features his signature. Still, Murdoch and Trump were recently reported to be dining together at the White House.

3. Warner Bros. Discovery (CNN): 4.0 billion

Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), a US media and entertainment conglomerate, comes in third in terms of news audience reach (4 billion), solely on the basis of its ownership of CNN. (The media group also owns extensive non-news holdings, including the Warner Bros. movie studio and HBO.)

WBD accepted a buyout bid from Netflix for an estimated $83 billion, but the deal does not include CNN or any of Warner Bros. cable networks, which would be consolidated into the separate corporation Discovery Global next year.

The Netflix-Warner Bros. deal appears to have survived numerous hostile takeover bids by Paramount Skydance that sought to include CNN. But there are more obstacles ahead: Aside from antitrust concerns raised by Democrats over the streaming giant taking over a major Hollywood studio, Trump’s connections to Larry and David Ellison of Paramount—and the fact that ownership of CNN is still very much up for grabs—means that the battle over this set of influential media properties is far from over.

Warner Bros. already has a track record of capitulating to the demands of the Trump administration, but a loud and proud Trump ally at the helm of CNN would be a major escalation.

Trump has pledged personal involvement in the federal government’s review of the merger, warning that “it could be a problem.” He has insisted that CNN be sold in any Warner Bros. deal, signaling his intent to install pro-Trump ownership and steer the network’s political angle.

Gaining control of CNN would bring Paramount to the No. 3 spot, and would grant David Ellison—son of billionaire technocrat Larry Ellison, both vocal Trump supporters who have pledged to use their power to further advance Trump’s own—a new level of control over the US media landscape. Warner Bros. already has a track record of capitulating to the demands of the Trump administration, but a loud and proud Trump ally at the helm of CNN would be a major escalation.

Consider the rapid changes implemented at CBS following Skydance’s August 2025 acquisition of Paramount, which hugely expanded the Ellisons’ media empire. As documented by FAIR (7/24/25, 10/9/25, 11/6/25), this merger has resulted in blatant “ideological restructuring,” with the appointment of “anti-woke” ideologue Bari Weiss to CBS editor-in-chief, the cancellation of the famously Trump-critical "Late Show With Stephen Colbert," and a wave of politically motivated layoffs.

4. Apollo Global Management (Yahoo): 2.7 billion

At No. 4 is private equity firm Apollo Global Management, which since 2021 has owned the Yahoo group. Yahoo News and Yahoo Finance together generated 2.7 billion views during the analyzed period. These sites primarily aggregate content from other news outlets, with occasional original articles, and rely heavily on algorithm-based personalization. Apollo‘s current CEO, billionaire Marc Rowan, has recently donated millions to Republicans.

Rowan was also heavily involved in developing Trump’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” a proposal, as the New York Times (10/3/25) reported, that would provide financial incentives and preferential treatment to schools that sign and, in turn, agree to limit international students, protect conservative speech, generally require standardized testing for admissions, and to adopt policies recognizing “that academic freedom is not absolute,” among other conditions.

5. Brian Roberts (Comcast): 2.4 billion

Ranked No. 5 with 2.35 billion visits during the analyzed period, Comcast is a media and technology company with extensive holdings—of which NBC News, CNBC, MSNBC, and Today all made appearances in the Top 50. Comcast’s billionaire CEO, Brian Roberts, is the controlling shareholder.

FAIR (6/11/16, 4/23/18) has long criticized the corporate skew of Comcast-owned media. More recently, however, this bias has devolved into patent deference to the Trump administration. Trump has repeatedly criticized Comcast and its news subsidiaries for bias against him. In February 2025, his FCC targeted Comcast for its “promotion of DEI.” Comcast quickly “confirmed it had received [FCC chair Brendan] Carr’s letter,” noting that it will be “cooperating with the FCC to answer their questions.” (The Hill, 2/12/25).

Changes to accommodate Trump’s demands were swift and severe. As covered by FAIR (3/6/25), MSNBC overhauled its staff soon afterward:

The news channel has nixed or demoted their most progressive anchors, all of whom are people of color. These are the hosts who have drawn the most ire from Donald Trump’s online warriors, according to Dave Zirin of The Nation (2/28/25).

Comcast further demonstrated its subservience to Trump with a recent donation to the new White House ballroom.

In January 2026, Comcast completed its spin-off of many of its news and cable holdings, including CNBC and MSNBC (rebranded as MS Now), to Versant Media—a company that Roberts retains control over.

6. Microsoft (MSN): 2.1 billion

Coming in at No. 6, Microsoft, the technology conglomerate that owns MSN, also donated to Trump’s ballroom. Similar to Yahoo, MSN is an algorithm-based republisher of news stories, which pulled in 2.1 billion views over the studied time frame. Given Microsoft’s obsession with AI, it is perhaps unsurprising that MSN has started to lean heavily on auto-generated content, coming under fire for promoting unreliable sources and publishing blatant misinformation.

Microsoft’s ownership is dominated by institutional shareholders, with mutual fund giant Vanguard leading the way at 9%. Microsoft‘s billionaire CEO, Satya Nadella, is known to have a friendly relationship with Trump—they have met and dined together on several occasions. In fact, before helping to fund Trump’s East Wing ballroom, Microsoft contributed $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund.

7. IAC (People): 1.9 billion

No. 7 IAC Inc. owns numerous media and internet brands, including Top 50 sites People and Daily Beast. Taken together, these two sites generated 1.9 billion views over 12 months. Billionaire founder Barry Diller serves as chair, senior executive and the largest individual shareholder of IAC. It should be noted that Diller has publicly criticized Trump on several occasions, standing out as the only one among the Top 7, aside from New York Times publisher Sulzberger, to do so.

Old Wine in a New Bottle

While not a replica of the original Bagdikian study, which took into account all major forms of media rather than focusing on the dominant medium (then television), FAIR’s research shows the continuation of the dynamics he described in a pre-internet age. The internet has not democratized news in any meaningful way; instead, the media monopoly has simply migrated to digital spaces.

At the same time, the pervasive presence of billionaires and the entrance of private equity firms in FAIR’s Top 7 suggest even further shifts away from democratic, truth-telling media.

The growing presence of private equity in media is a relatively new phenomenon, highlighting the usefulness of expansive media portfolios as vehicles for profit extraction. Along with the burgeoning influence of billionaires on the media landscape, the control of capital over media has become, if possible, even more apparent.

Almost three decades ago, the late media scholar Robert McChesney (Extra!, 11–12/97) wrote presciently of the globalization of media behemoths in the digital age:

It is a system that works to advance the cause of the global market and promote commercial values, while denigrating journalism and culture not conducive to the immediate bottom line or long-run corporate interests.

Some once posited that the rise of the internet would eliminate the monopoly power of the global media giants. Such talk has declined recently as the largest media, telecommunication and computer firms have done everything within their immense powers to colonize the internet, or at least neutralize its threat.

What is tragic is that this entire process of global media concentration has taken place with little public debate, especially in the US, despite the clear implications for politics and culture. After World War II, the Allies restricted media concentration in occupied Germany and Japan because they noted that such concentration promoted anti-democratic, even fascist, political cultures. It may be time for the United States and everyone else to take a dose of that medicine. But for that to happen will require concerted effort to educate and organize people around media issues. That is the task before us.

Research assistance: Priyanka Bansal, Saurav Sarkar, Lara-Nour Walton

By now, we have heard the mantra that President Donald Trump was right to close the border, but wrong in his heavy-handed approach to immigration enforcement. We are also told that if he would have simply done what most Americans wanted, that is, arrest and deport violent criminals, then his poll numbers would be higher, and his administration wouldn’t find itself embroiled by crisis in the aftermath of two killings at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis.

But this claim—that the problem with Trump's immigration agenda is mainly about enforcement tactics—is flawed.

Seriously addressing this country's ongoing immigration crisis will require policy change, and to get to that point, there needs to be a narrative shift in this country away from indiscriminately criminalizing all undocumented people to humanizing them.

To put this in perspective, we need to realize that for America to enforce its way out of our current immigration disaster would trigger events like what's happening in Minneapolis all over the country.

The enforcement-first rhetoric put forth by this administration and its supporters is dangerous for the violence it exacts on immigrants and citizens alike.

Considering two sets of numbers makes this clear.

The first is how apprehensions at the border have dropped to zero. Beginning with asylum restrictions put into place at the end of Biden’s term in 2024, the flow of people into the US has fallen steadily. This becomes an issue when noting another figure, specifically, the Trump administration's goal of making 1 million deportations a year.

Of the 14-or-so million undocumented people in the US now, according to the Pew Research Center, the majority are long-term residents with more than 15 years living in the country. Logically then, with border removals no longer a factor in deportation figures as they were in prior administrations, reaching the 1 million mark will mean going after people who have spent years, perhaps decades, living in the US without legal status.

Finding and apprehending those people who have become central to the fabric of their communities is what Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is doing in Minneapolis. The chaos seen in Minneapolis will continue elsewhere, as coworkers, neighbors, and our fellow parishioners will disappear, triggering anger, protest, and perhaps worse wherever federal agents are sent.

Border Czar Tom Homan, claiming that there would be calm in Minnesota if local officials would just let ICE into its jails, and how the government is going after the “worst of the worst,” is also doing nothing more than gaslighting.

Consider Texas, where we find 1 in 4 of every immigrant who has been arrested in the country.

The Lone Star state has the second-most local law enforcement agencies, at 167, trailing only Florida, that have partnered with the federal government to carry out Trump’s immigration agenda. State law that went into effect this year states that every police department must collaborate by year’s end.

Data from Texas don’t lie—ICE is not going after the “worst of the worst.” In fact, according to the Texas Tribune’s analysis of Department of Homeland Security data, nearly 60% of immigrants detained in the state have only the immigration-related offenses of either coming to the county without legal authorization, or residing here after their permits or visas expired. Figures nationwide on the immigrants in detention are the same. Administration officials, including Homan and Kristi Noem, neglect to mention these facts as they cherry-pick individual cases of violent criminals to distract the public from the community-destroying results of their enforcement actions.

Still, even with the numbers belying the administration's official line, immigration offenses are still, well, offenses.

This is why humanizing immigrants, especially by acknowledging their pathways to the US, is needed now more than ever.

Before legislative changes can be made—and there are many options currently in Congress, such as establishing legal pathways for undocumented farmworkers, children, and spouses of US citizens—we need to note that people come to the United States for many reasons outside of their control. How economic and political crises drive people away from their homes—as they did from Mexico in the 1990s in the aftermath of NAFTA, and most recently, from Venezuela and Nicaragua—point to factors beyond individual choice. As the data on detentions show, the vast majority come not to kill people or deal drugs, but to work, escape some form of oppression, or leave natural disasters. If you want further proof of this, then look at research—from Texas—showing that undocumented people commit crimes at a rate lower than native-born people.

The fact that we live in a volatile world also should make people rethink heaping praise on the Trump administration for closing the border, which in reality only asks for humanitarian crisis to take place there. Instead, we need a more durable, flexible approach to immigration that takes into consideration the reality that the world is not perfect, crises occur, and people may consider coming to the US. Thinking that central to immigration policy is sealing the border like a jar, is at best a childish fantasy, or at its worst, ideological fodder for white nationalists.

The point is that the enforcement-first rhetoric put forth by this administration and its supporters is dangerous for the violence it exacts on immigrants and citizens alike. The problem our country has with immigration is not enforcement tactics, but vision and basis for the policy area in the first place.

The latest Oxfam report delivers a stark warning about the direction of the global political economy. In 2025 alone, billionaire wealth surged by $2.5 trillion, pushing total billionaire wealth to $18.3 trillion, the highest level ever recorded. Wealth at the top is now growing three times faster than in previous years, even as poverty reduction stalls and hunger rises. Oxfam calls this not just economic inequality but dangerous political inequality, a world in which the ultra rich increasingly shape laws, media systems, and public policy to serve themselves.

This builds on Oxfam’s earlier finding that the richest 1% own more wealth than the bottom 95% of humanity. The organization describes the moment as one where the shadow of global oligarchy hangs over multilateral institutions, tax cooperation, debt relief efforts, and global public goods. Billionaires are not only accumulating wealth, they are accumulating influence, with an outsize presence in politics, corporate ownership, and media control.

At the same time, another long-term trend has unfolded. Over the last four decades, beginning with Reaganomics in the United States and Thatcherism in the United Kingdom, neoliberal reforms normalized austerity, privatization, and shrinking public welfare. The welfare state was reframed as a burden rather than a foundation of stability and dignity.

This shift was not only economic but moral: Market efficiency displaced social solidarity, and welfare came to be viewed as dependency rather than dignity.

The irony is that once in power, many populist leaders deepen the very insecurity that propelled them to office.

Today the richest 1% have more wealth than the bottom 95% of the world’s population put together, while the welfare state has steadily eroded. What has followed has worsened inequality; fueled resentment; broken trust in state institutions; weakened the social contract; and led to feelings of exclusion, helplessness, and marginalization. The result has been a rise in populist anger and right-wing governments characterized by anti-immigrant sentiment and hostility to multilateralism.

This trajectory has not only reshaped economies, but politics itself. So who is to blame? Is it the right-wing populists who are now eroding democratic norms, or the neoliberal austerity that hollowed out welfare systems long before them. In reality, the link between the two is the helplessness and anger felt by ordinary citizens who feel invisible in a world marked by inequality and social injustice. As Oxfam International executive director Amitabh Behar notes, being economically poor creates hunger, being politically poor creates anger. It is this economic and political poverty that fuels today’s rage, and much of it traces back to economic disenfranchisement and austerity.

A recent report to the United Nations by Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights Olivier De Schutter reinforces this picture. He warns that welfare retrenchment, harsher conditions for benefits, digital surveillance of claimants, and stigmatizing systems have increased insecurity and humiliation rather than reducing poverty. These punitive approaches erode trust in public institutions and create fertile ground for far-right movements that claim to speak for those left behind.

The irony is that once in power, many populist leaders deepen the very insecurity that propelled them to office.

The United States offers a clear illustration of this paradox. Donald Trump returned to power on a message of defending forgotten citizens and challenging elites. Yet recent policy directions have narrowed the social safety net. Cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, stricter work requirements for food assistance, and the expiration of enhanced healthcare subsidies have increased costs and reduced access for low-income households. Earlier efforts to weaken the Affordable Care Act and promote short-term insurance plans with thinner coverage followed a similar logic. While framed as efficiency or fiscal responsibility, these measures shift burdens downward even as tax and regulatory environments remain favorable to corporations and wealthy interests.

What the world needs now is a serious reset where the common citizen feels seen and their rights and needs are valued. The state must play its role as an active dispenser of social protection, justice, and welfare. As the UN Special Rapporteur De Schutter notes, social protection and welfare should not be seen as a cost to be reduced, but as part of a strategy that has been proven to deliver security and well-being for all

If billionaires continue to shape political systems while states become hostage to corporate and neoliberal agendas, we should expect more authoritarianism. The outcome will be deeper division, fragmentation, and conflict. The world cannot afford that trajectory.

What is missing in today’s political economy is empathy, a basic regard for human welfare that has been crowded out by indifference and market logic. Without restoring that moral foundation, neither democracy nor social stability can endure. Reclaiming democracy therefore requires not only restoring welfare states, but curbing the political power of extreme wealth through taxation, regulation, and democratic accountability.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Political cartoonist Ted Rall and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.

Today we discuss:

•  National Security and Foreign Affairs Correspondent at Dropsitenews Murtaza Hussain joins Ted and John to discuss the Epstein Files and the disgraced financier’s links to foreign intelligence. Among the latest Epstein stories: Who sent Epstein cloth pieces from the Kaaba? How did he leverage the collectible art market?

• Trump threatens to nationalize elections by taking them away from Democratic states.

• A collision between a Greek Coast Guard patrol boat and a migrant boat leaves 15 people dead.

• Israeli border goons terrorize some of the first Palestinian women to return to Gaza via Rafah.

JOIN US LIVE ON RUMBLE!

https://rumble.com/c/DeProgramShow

FOLLOW TED:

https://rall.com/

https://x.com/tedrall

FOLLOW JOHN:

https://www.instagram.com/realjohnkiriakou

https://x.com/JohnKiriakou

LISTEN ON SPOTIFY:

https://open.spotify.com/show/2kdFlw2w8sSPhKI8NRx8Zu

LISTEN ON APPLE MUSIC:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/deprogram-with-john-kiriakou-and-ted-rall

The post Epstein Exposed (with Murtaza Hussain) | DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

When federal agents arrested journalist Don Lemon and independent reporter Georgia Fort in connection with a protest inside a Minneapolis church, many commentators rushed to frame the incident as a straightforward defense of sacred space: Worship was disrupted, congregants were frightened, and the law intervened to restore order. That framing captures part of the truth—but it obscures the deeper constitutional and moral stakes at play.The arrests are not simply about a protest in a house of worship. They are about whether journalists can witness and document contentious public events—especially those where power, conscience, and institutional authority collide—without facing criminal charges for the act of seeing itself.

The legal action stems from a January demonstration at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, where protesters interrupted a service after learning that one of the church’s pastors also serves as an official with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. For demonstrators, that dual role represented a profound moral contradiction: How can a religious leader entrusted with spiritual care also participate in an agency responsible for detention, deportation, and family separation?

Lemon was present to report. He did not identify as a participant, did not lead chants, and did not incite the crowd. He documented the scene, spoke with parishioners and protesters, and relayed what was happening to the public. Georgia Fort, a Minnesota-based independent journalist, was live streaming coverage of the protest and later live streamed her own arrest outside her home. Both were subsequently detained and charged.

Federal prosecutors allege that Lemon, Fort, and others conspired to interfere with religious worship, invoking the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, a 1994 law that also applies to religious spaces. Lemon and Fort were released after initial court appearances. A judge placed limits on Lemon’s travel and contact but did not require pretrial supervision. No violence occurred during the protest.

Don Lemon and Georgia Fort did not interrupt worship. They interrupted silence.

That fact matters—but it does not end the ethical inquiry. Fear, particularly in contemporary America, is not abstract. Houses of worship have been sites of mass shootings, and the threat of violence is a lived reality for congregants across faith traditions. No one can read another person’s mind, and no one can fully know the intentions of a group entering a sanctuary in a volatile political moment. Even actions intended as nonviolent moral protest can be experienced as frightening.

Holding this truth is essential. Civil disobedience does not exist in a vacuum, and claims of nonviolence do not erase the perception of danger felt by others. Moral confrontation can be principled and still deeply unsettling. Ethical seriousness requires acknowledging that tension rather than dismissing it.

But fear alone cannot become the standard by which constitutional rights are curtailed—especially the rights of journalists whose role is to observe, document, and inform the public. The central question is not whether congregants felt afraid. It is whether that fear justifies arresting reporters who were not organizing, directing, or participating in the protest.

After his arrest, Lemon emphasized that he was being punished for doing what he has done for decades: covering the news. The First Amendment, he argued, exists precisely to protect that work. Fort echoed this concern, warning that criminalizing documentation of public events—particularly protests—poses a grave threat to journalism itself.

Almost immediately, a familiar dismissal surfaced: Don Lemon is not a “real journalist.” The argument is both unserious and dangerous. Who decides what journalism is? Cable news hosts routinely blend reporting, commentary, and political advocacy, often with privileged access to power. Independent journalists, freelancers, and live streamers—many of whom take on greater personal risk—are frequently denied legitimacy after the fact, especially when their reporting makes institutions uncomfortable.

If journalism is defined by function rather than branding, Lemon and Fort clearly qualify. They observed. They documented. They informed. For that, the state sent federal agents to their doors.

The irony is that Christianity itself has a long and uneasy relationship with disruption. In the Gospels, Jesus repeatedly confronted religious authorities, challenged imperial power, and disrupted ritualized comfort in the name of justice. The early Christian proclamation “Jesus is Lord” was not a private devotional claim; it was a public rejection of imperial sovereignty.

That tradition carried forward. The civil rights movement drew deeply from Christian theology to justify nonviolent confrontation with unjust laws and complicit institutions. Figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day, Pauli Murray, and James Lawson understood that faith divorced from justice becomes hollow.

Acknowledging this history does not negate the fear congregants may have felt. It clarifies why moral confrontation so often occurs in places of symbolic authority. Sacred space has never been immune from ethical challenge—nor should it be.

This is where the Department of Justice’s response raises deeper concern. The arrests do not merely defend religious freedom; they signal to journalists that covering morally charged protests—particularly those implicating powerful institutions—may carry criminal risk. The chilling effect is unmistakable.

This pattern is not new. Over the past decade, journalists covering protests have faced arrests, equipment seizures, subpoenas, and legal threats. While the legal contexts vary, the cumulative message is consistent: Some forms of witnessing are increasingly treated as suspect. When journalists are punished for observation, the public loses access to contested truth. Fear becomes a tool of narrative control.

This is not a choice between religious freedom and press freedom. Both matter. But when the state treats observation as interference, the balance collapses in favor of power. Protection becomes insulation. Accountability becomes disruption.

Journalism is not a threat to faith. It is a threat to unaccountable authority—especially when that authority cloaks itself in moral or divine legitimacy. A functioning democracy depends on contested spaces, on the ability to observe power where it gathers, even when that power claims holiness.

Don Lemon and Georgia Fort did not interrupt worship. They interrupted silence.

The question now is not only whether Lemon and Fort will prevail in court. It is whether witnessing itself will remain a protected act in American public life—or whether fear, once invoked, will become a legal solvent capable of dissolving press freedom wherever power feels exposed.

If journalists can be arrested for documenting protest inside a church, the precedent will not remain confined to sacred spaces. It will travel—to campuses, courtrooms, town halls, and streets—wherever institutions claim moral authority and demand insulation from scrutiny.

A democracy that punishes witnessing does not preserve order. It preserves silence.

This past January 15, the 2025 Nobel Laureate for Peace, Maria Corina Machado, took her prize medal, encased in a gold (of course) and glass frame, to the White House and presented it to our president. Beneath the medal, Machado had inscribed these words:

Presented as a Personal Symbol of Gratitude on behalf of the Venezuelan People in Recognition of President Trump’s Principled and Decisive Action to Secure a Free Venezuela. The Courage of America and its President Donald J. Trump, will Never be Forgotten by the Venezuelan People.

While our “peacemaker-in-chief” was no doubt gladdened by Machado’s unprecedented gesture, he still sounded a bit pouty by claiming that having “put out eight wars, in theory, you should get [a Nobel Peace Prize] for each war” in which he boasted that he had “saved millions and millions of lives.”

The eight “wars” he takes credit for ending—Israel-Hamas, Israel-Iran, India-Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo-Rwanda, Armenia-Azerbaijan, Cambodia-Thailand, Serbia-Kosovo, and Egypt-Ethiopia—on the one hand, were all short-lived ceasefires or border skirmishes rather than the end of formal wars and, on the other, are places where tensions persist and conflict continues. Bottom line regarding all these faux wars is that Trump is as entitled to claim Machado’s Nobel Peace Prize as he is to take credit for walking on the moon long before Neil Armstrong did.

Where are our patriots—progressive patriots, five, eight, ten-million strong—called to the nation’s capital, like the “patriots” of January 6, willing to take our stand and storm the White House?

Closer to home, has anyone noticed how much peace has broken out in the USA ever since Donald Trump descended that golden escalator onto the stage of American politics?

In his very first very “presidential” campaign speech, he launched his first anti-immigration salvo: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best… They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

Since Trump entered politics, a 2020 report from the FBI revealed that hate crimes increased by just under 20% in America.

According to CNN (January 26, 2026), the Obama years (2009-2016) saw 213 mass shootings at schools, churches, or shopping areas—an average of 26.6 shootings per year. Since Trump (2017-2025), the total number has risen to 556 and an average of 61.8 per year.

At Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, Trump contrasted his approach to campaigning to that of Charlie Kirk—himself no saint in the political arena:

He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That's where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent, and I don't want the best for them… maybe they can convince me that that's not right, but I can't stand my opponent.

Since Trump, instances of school bullying and antisemitic attacks have risen precipitously. These included the mass shootings in the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and in a Walmart supermarket in El Paso, Texas, conducted by white supremacists who embraced racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theories popular in their circles. As to instances of bullying, just after Trump’s 2024 election victory an elementary school teacher in Georgia reported, “This is my 21st year of teaching. This is the first time I’ve had a student call another student the N-word.”

In 2022 a deranged attacker broke into the San Francisco home of then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Finding her husband at home, he asked, “Where’s Nancy?” Learning she was in Washington DC, he began assaulting Paul Pelosi, beating him with a hammer and fracturing his skull. Several days later, a number of Republicans, including the president, made light of the attack.

The president’s official coin commemorating the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution bears the face of Trump on one side and on the other his post-assassination image of a bloodied but defiant Trump admonishing his fellow Americans to “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

During his 2016 campaign rallies, he urged his followers to punch protesters in the mouth, promising to pay their lawyers’ fees.

In his first term, on immigration he wondered why the US could not get more migrants from, say, Norway instead of from “shithole countries” in Africa or elsewhere.

In his first off-year election (2018) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) were all elected to the US House of Representatives and became known as “The Squad.” On July 14, 2019, Trump publicly advised them to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done.”

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) led the fight(s) to impeach Trump, one of whose followers left Schiff a warning in the congressman’s voice mailbox: “I’m gonna f-ing blow your brains out,”

As his first term was ending, Trump encouraged some 2,500 of his closest friends to march on Congress and “fight like hell” on January 6, 2021. Later, very early in his second term he pardoned them and awarded some of them the Presidential Medal of Freedom. When informed that the “patriots” had hung a noose from makeshift gallows on Capitol grounds to “hang Mike Pence,” as the chant admonished, Trump, the defender of evangelical Christians, replied, “So what?”

All through his second campaign for the presidency (2024) he centered his message on anti-immigration, frequently referring to immigrants as “not even human. They’re animals.” He warned that these newcomers would increase crime in the streets and, in a quotation from Hitler’s Mein Kampf, “poison the bloodstream” of America.

All the while, America’s megalomaniacal monster waved an imaginary Christian flag and promised to fight for it. That is one reason evangelicals were less than unenthusiastic about a potential Mike Pence presidency. As sociologists of religion Phillip Gorski and Samuel Perry explained, “[T]he fight was more important than the faith… Pence had the faith, but Trump had the fight. And the fight was really all they cared about.” (The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy, 3.)

All of which has brought us through several weeks of clashes between masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and American citizens using their First Amendment right of free speech to protest Trump’s dragnet of blue states, searching and destroying Black and brown families—some illegal, some documented, some American citizens—that have brought the nation to the boiling point.

Nowadays we have no “Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young” lamenting “four dead in Ohio.”

But we do have a president who makes Richard Nixon look like a Boy Scout. And we have Bruce Springsteen:

King Trump's private army from the DHS
Guns belted to their coats
Came to Minneapolis to enforce the law
Or so their story goes

Against smoke and rubber bullets
In the dawn's early light
Citizens stood for justice
Their voices ringing through the night
And there were bloody footprints
Where mercy should have stood
And two dead, left to die on snow-filled streets
Alex Pretti and Renee Good

Oh, our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
We'll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
Here in our home, they killed and roamed
In the winter of '26….

Now they say they're here to uphold the law
But they trample on our rights
If your skin is black or brown, my friend
You can be questioned or deported on sight….

Oh, our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
Here in our home, they killed and roamed
In the winter of '26

We'll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
We'll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis...
Peace, it would seem, is not what it’s cracked up to be. In Trumplandia, it appears, P-E-A-C-E spells MURDER.

But where are our patriots—progressive patriots, 5-, 8-, 10-million strong—called to the nation’s capital, like the “patriots” of January 6, willing to take our stand and storm the White House?

In 1970, massive numbers of protesters marched to Kent State University. Millions of others showed America that nonviolent protest could work. So where are those of us willing to chant; spill some of our own blood, if necessary; and chant, “Hey, hey, Donald J, how many protesters did you kill today?” until “We the People” come face to face with Mr. Trump, call on Congress to invoke the 25th Amendment, and tell them all: “NO MORE KINGS!?”

We’ve all seen those masked-up, militarized ICE goons charging through American city streets. Sure, we wonder about the future of democracy. But we also wonder: what are they carrying in all those many, many pockets?

The post The Things They Carry appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Shifting justifications for a war are never a good sign, and they strongly suggest that the war in question was not warranted.

In the Vietnam War, the principal public rationale of saving South Vietnam from communism got replaced in the minds of the war makers—especially after losing hope of winning the contest in Vietnam—by the belief that the United States had to keep fighting to preserve its credibility. In the Iraq War, when President George W. Bush’s prewar argument about weapons of mass destruction fell apart, he shifted to a rationale centered on bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq.

Now, with President Donald Trump threatening a new armed attack on Iran amid a buildup of US forces in the region, the Washington Post’s headline writers aptly describe the rationale for any such attack as being “in flux” and, for the online version of the same article, ask, “What’s the mission?”

A related question about the latest threat to attack Iran is: “Why now?” The initial peg for Trump talking up the subject during the past month was the mass protest in Iran that began in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar in late December and rapidly spread through Iranian cities during the next couple of weeks. Trump urged Iranians to “keep protesting” and promised that “help is on the way.” This rhetoric led to widespread expectations, not least of all inside Iran, that US military action was imminent.

The answer to the question “why now?” is to be found... in domestic politics, including the motivations of diverting attention from political troubles and being able to claim some accomplishment regarding Iran that is bigger or better than what a predecessor achieved.

No such action materialized, and perhaps a valid reason it did not is the difficulty in identifying targets for military attack that would be more likely to help the protesters than to hurt them. If a regime is gunning down innocent citizens in the street, there is no target deck an outside military power can devise that would distinguish the gunners from the innocents on that street.

A brutal crackdown by the Iranian regime that has quelled the protests leaves a couple of implications. One is a sense of betrayal among Iranians whom Trump encouraged to risk their lives by protesting without delivering any help that supposedly was “on the way.”

The other implication is that, without an ongoing protest, the link between any US military action and favorable political change inside Iran is even more tenuous than it would have been a month ago. Iranians—like Americans or any other nationalities—can distinguish between their domestic grievances and external aggression. Another Israeli or US attack out of the blue risks helping the Iranian regime politically by enabling it to appeal to patriotic and nationalist sentiment. Statements from such prominent reformist leaders as former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi and former parliament speaker Mehdi Karroubi are simultaneously calling for sweeping constitutional change and explicitly rejecting foreign intervention, including military intervention.

An alternative view is that with the Iranian regime at least as weak as it has been for years, an armed attack from outside might constitute just enough extra pressure to precipitate the regime’s collapse. But the idea that the Islamic Republic is just one nudge away from falling has been voiced many times before, including during previous rounds of protests.

Moreover, the operative word is “collapse,” with all that implies regarding uncertainty about what comes next. Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared to recognize that uncertainty when asked in a Senate hearing last week about what would happen if the Iranian regime were to fall and he replied, “That’s an open question.” The Iranian opposition lacks a unified leadership and structure ready to take power comparable to the movement led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini that toppled the shah in 1979.

Regime decapitation to oust current Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei would be even less likely to yield a regime responsive to US wishes than the ouster of President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. A more probable successor regime in Iran would be some kind of military dictatorship dominated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Regime change in Iran is a classic case of needing to be careful what one wishes for.

Trump has been vague about what Iran would need to accept to avoid being attacked, but there appear to be three issues at play. One is a demand for Iran to end all enrichment of uranium. But Iran is not enriching uranium now and does not appear to have done any enrichment since the Israeli and US attacks last June. If this issue is to make a difference in determining whether the US attacks Iran, it means war or peace would hinge on a demand that makes no practical difference, at least in the short term.

A formal commitment by Iran to forgo enrichment forever conceivably could have value over the long term, but history shows that expecting such a commitment is not realistic. Moreover, to place importance on such a commitment is a tacit admission that Iran is better at adhering to its obligations on such things than the United States is, given Trump’s reneging on an earlier nuclear agreement despite Iran observing its terms.

A second issue involves limiting the range and number of Iran’s ballistic missiles. There is a strong case to be made for a region-wide agreement limiting missiles in the Middle East, but neither the Trump administration nor anyone else has explained why Iran should be singled out for such restrictions while no one else in the region is, or why one should expect Iranian policymakers to accept such disparate treatment. Iran considers its missile capability to be a critical deterrent against the missile and other aerial attack capabilities of adversaries. A deterrent—to be used in response to being attacked—is how Tehran has used its missiles, as in responding to the US killing of prominent IRGC leader Qasem Soleimani in 2020 and to Israel’s unprovoked aerial attack on Iran last June.

The Israeli government would, of course, like to see Iran’s retaliatory capability crippled. This would leave Israel—the Middle Eastern state that has started more wars and attacked more states than any other country in the region—freer to indulge in more offensive operations without having to worry about even the amount of retaliation that Iran mustered last year. Those operations may include attacks that, like the one in June, drag in the United States. This sort of Israeli freedom of action is not in US interests.

The third reported US demand is that Iran cease all support to groups in the region it considers allies, including the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in Palestine. Despite the habitual application of the label “proxy” to such groups, they are separate actors with their own agendas, as illustrated by how the Houthis acted against Iranian advice in capturing the Yemeni capital of Sanaa.

As with uranium enrichment, Iranian support to these groups is a “problem” that is being solved without new Iranian commitments. Iran’s severe economic difficulties, coupled with popular demands within Iran to devote scarce resources to domestic programs rather than foreign endeavors, are already making it difficult for Iran to sustain its support to regional allies.

As with the missile issue, a demand to end such support as part of an agreement disregards how much that support is a response to aggression or predations of other governments. Aid to the Houthis, for example, became of significant interest to Iran only after Saudi Arabia launched a large-scale offensive against Yemen that was the most important factor in turning that country into a humanitarian disaster. The Iranian-supported establishment of Hezbollah and the group’s early rapid growth were a direct response to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The nature and methods of Hamas, like those of many other Palestinian resistance groups, have been responses to Israeli subjugation of Palestinians.

Also like the missile issue, any such demand disregards the outside support that other governments give to parties to some of the same conflicts in the Middle East. This includes, of course, the voluminous US aid to Israel. Iran is being told it cannot have a full regional policy while others do. It is unrealistic to expect any Iranian leader to agree to that.

None of these issues, individually or collectively, constitutes a casus belli. The answer to the question “why now?” is to be found less in those issues than in domestic politics, including the motivations of diverting attention from political troubles and being able to claim some accomplishment regarding Iran that is bigger or better than what a predecessor achieved.

Claimable accomplishments that serve not just such domestic political needs but also the US national interest are possible through diplomacy with Iran. President Trump is correct when he says that Iran wants a deal, given that Iran’s bad economic situation is an incentive to negotiate agreements that would provide at least partial relief from sanctions. Feasible diplomacy would not entail Iranian capitulation to a laundry list of US demands but instead a step-by-step approach that might start with an updated nuclear agreement, which could build confidence on both sides for coming to terms on other issues.

The Trump administration’s saber-rattling is not building such confidence but instead is having the opposite effect. The Iranian regime’s lethal response to the recent popular protests shows that it believes the regime’s survival depends on not showing any weakness in the face of pressures either domestic or foreign. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said last week that Iran would negotiate directly with the United States only if Trump stops threatening a military attack against Iran. Araghchi also ruled out any unilateral limitations on Iranian missiles, which he described as essential for Iran’s security.

A new US attack on Iran, besides being an act of aggression contrary to the United Nations Charter and international law, would only exacerbate rather than resolve any of the issues that have been raised as possible rationales for war.

A US attack would disadvantage Iranian oppositionists by associating them with an assault against the Iranian nation. It would strengthen the position of those within the regime who argue that Iran should seek a nuclear weapon. It would raise, not lower, the importance Tehran places on its alliances with nonstate groups in the region. And Iran would use its missiles to retaliate in ways that probably would hurt US interests more than its response last June did.

You may be thinking that Trump and his Republicans have lost the immigration issue because voters are disgusted by ICE’s indiscriminate roundups, thuggish behavior and their killings of peaceful protesters who happen to be U.S. citizens. Indeed, the polls are clear. Voters have turned against ICE’s methods—but only their methods. Republicans are feeling heat.

Democrats hope they’ll benefit from anti-ICE backlash in the midterm elections. If that pans out, they’ll be winning a battle while losing the war.

Most people still want to deport illegal immigrants. When Democrats were in power, they promoted open borders—and Americans hate that. Both parties are losing the immigration game.

“Why?” my best friend asked me recently. “Why are people so angry at immigrants?”

I tried to explain. I’m white and male and able-bodied and cis and Ivy-educated and well-connected—big pluses—yet if I set out to find a 9-to-5 job, I told him, I probably wouldn’t be able to find one. All my life (I’m 62), finding work has been nearly impossible. Countless, demoralizing rejections, ridiculous hoops, stupid certifications, lengthy interviews, withdrawn job offers. Finding good work? I hardly ever did—and then it felt like winning a lottery. The job market always sucks.

I don’t know anyone—white, Black, rich, poor, male, female—who would dispute that.

Anything that contributes to America’s crappy job-finding landscape—as immigration, legal or illegal, does—is going to piss off workers.

When resources are abundant, human beings are generous. Charitable giving soars along with the stock market. When things are scarce, people are disinclined to share—like the rats in a cage who turn mean when food rations are reduced. In the U.S., jobs are an exceedingly rare resource.

It has always been tough to find a job in the U.S., especially a good one. And it keeps getting tougher. 9.7% of recent college graduates are unemployed. More than half of workers over 55 lose a job that results in a permanent loss of half their income. Many online listings are for “ghost jobs” that employers have no intention of filling. More than 25% of Americans are functionally unemployed, meaning that they are jobless, reduced to working part-time or earning poverty-level wages. Another third are overqualified, working jobs that are beneath their education and experience.

60% of Americans say they’re toiling at a low-quality job or aren’t working at all.

They tell us to study STEM. But even going full nerd doesn’t guarantee employment. Between 6.1% and 7.8% of recent computer engineering and physics majors are unemployed; 45% of STEM majors are forced to take non-STEM jobs.

Given how hard it is in our piss-poor excuse for a capitalist economy for a hardworking American to find any job, much less a decent one, the last thing our misérables need is competition from new immigrants. People aren’t as angry at immigrants in particular as they are at immigration in general. Why is the U.S. importing workers from overseas when millions of Americans who were born here can’t find work?

Employers and pro-immigration politicians offer two standard rebuttals: skills mismatches and laziness. Americans, they say, don’t have the skills they need. And they don’t want to work backbreaking jobs like picking fruits and vegetables.

American companies have all but eliminated on-the-job training to the point that half of all workers, of all ages, say they don’t know what their boss expects from them. Expecting every new hire to hit the ground running is insane­—yet it’s become standard. Employers have no one but themselves to blame for the “skills gap.” Want skilled workers? Train them. Bring back the corporate educational institutions and apprenticeships that turned promising workers into skilled workers a century ago.

The same goes for companies who whine that they get no takers for hard jobs that offer low wages. Pay more. Americans that a ton of hard, dirty and dangerous jobs—oil rig worker, crime scene cleaner, sanitation, commercial diver/welder, crab fisherman, mortician—because they pay decently. A farmer who can’t find a fruit picker for $15 an hour may have to offer $20. No takers? Offer $25. Repeat as necessary. Go high enough and eventually you will find U.S. citizens happy to work for you.

Can’t afford to pay the market rate—i.e., a salary high enough to find applicants? Raise your prices or close your farm; you can’t afford to stay in business. Will higher wages increase inflation? Yes. So tweak monetary policy.

The H-1B visa program epitomizes how immigration policies have been cynically deployed in order to depress wages. To qualify for the program, tech and other companies certify to the federal government that they can’t find the skilled workers they need here in the United States, so they need to import them, typically from India. Yet, in countless well-documented instances, H-1B workers are hired by well-heeled corporations to displace American workers—who have the right skills­—whose final assignment is to train their replacements before they join the ranks of the unemployed. There was no skills gap, only corporate greed. Why wouldn’t victims be angry?

No sane American can begrudge the ambition and desperation of those who leave the land of their birth to seek their fortunes here. Most of us are descended from foreigners who did exactly that. In most of those cases, however, Americans’ ancestors arrived in great waves of immigration who were permitted entry into an economy suffering from labor shortages as the nation was expanding.

I don’t blame immigrants. They just want to survive, even thrive. Like native-born American workers, they’re victims of greedy capitalists who pit us against each other. It’s too bad not everyone can see that.

In the end, however, a government’s first duty is to protect and help its citizens. No one younger than 80 can remember a time when employers needed to turn abroad to fill their employment rosters. So I have a question for corporate America and the government officials it owns: Why, as long as the unemployment rate is higher than 0.0%, are we inviting people from other countries to fill American jobs?

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou.”)

 

The post Both Parties Are Losing the Immigration Game appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The pro-democracy protesters in Iran deserved so much better. They deserved the support of a democratic United States that could sincerely urge the rule of law and habeas corpus (allowing people to legally challenge their detentions) be respected, not to speak of freedom of speech, the press, and assembly in accordance with the Constitution. Unfortunately, President Donald J. Trump has forfeited any claim to respect for such rights or a principled foreign policy and so has proved strikingly ineffective in aiding those protesters.

The arbitrary arrests and killings committed by agents of Trump’s authoritarian-style rule differ only in number, not in kind, from the detainments and killings of protesters carried out by the basij (or pro-regime street militias) in Iran. In fact, they rendered his protests and bluster about Iran the height of hypocrisy. Above all, the killing of Renee Nicole Good in her car in Minneapolis by a Trumpian Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent haunted his response, providing the all-too-grim Iranian regime with an easy rebuttal to American claims of moral superiority.

Rioters and Terrorists

Trump’s threats of intervention in Iran came after the latest round of demonstrations and strikes there this winter. In late December, bazaar merchants in Iran decried the collapse of the nation’s currency, the rial. For many years, it had been under severe pressure thanks to Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanctions, renewed European sanctions over Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, and incompetent government financial policies. In December, the rial fell to 1.4 million to the dollar—and no, that is not a misprint—having lost 40% of its value over the course of the previous year. Inflation was already running at 42%, harming those on fixed incomes, while the rial’s decline particularly hurt the ability of Iranians to afford imported goods.

Such currency instability contributed to economic stagnation, as many merchants went on strike and halted commercial transactions altogether, given the heavy losses they were suffering. For the rest of December and early January, those striking traders were joined by professionals, workers, and students nationwide, some of whom wanted not just a better economy, but a less authoritarian government. The government responded, of course, with grimly repressive tactics, but the size of the crowds only grew, even in the capital, Tehran, while some of the protesters began demanding an end to the Islamic Republic.

Trump’s America now stands on increasingly shaky ground when it accuses other regimes of atrocities.

A turning point came on January 8, when security force thugs began shooting down demonstrators en masse and stacking up bodies. Until then, the demonstrations had been largely peaceful (though instances of vandalism had been reported), but the government began alleging that more than 100 police had been killed. Human Rights Watch reported that “verified footage shows some protesters engaging in acts of violence.” That some dissidents had turned to violence, however, can’t in any way justify the scale of the slaughter by security forces that followed.

By mid-January, human rights organizations were estimating that thousands of demonstrators had been mown down by the Iranian police and military. Even Iran’s clerical leader, Ali Khamenei, confirmed that thousands were dead, though ludicrously enough, he blamed Donald Trump for instigating their acts. On January 9, perhaps as a cover for its police and military sniping into crowds, the government cut the country’s internet off, while denouncing all protesters as “rioters” and “terrorists.”

Antifa-Led Hellfire

And here’s the truly sad thing: While such unhinged rhetorical excesses were once the province of dictatorships and other authoritarian regimes like those in Iran and North Korea, the White House is now competing with Tehran and Pyongyang on a remarkably even playing field. The Trump White House, for instance, excused the dispatch of the National Guard to Portland, Oregon, last year on the grounds of a “Radical left reign of terror,” “antifa-led hellfire,” and “lunatics” committing widespread mayhem in that city, even deploying “explosives.” Of course, Trump’s image of Portland as an apocalyptic, anarchist free-fire zone bore no relation to reality, but it did bear an eerie relation to the language of the authoritarian regimes in Iran and North Korea.

That means Trump’s America now stands on increasingly shaky ground when it accuses other regimes of atrocities. Similarly, Washington’s full-throated backing of Israel’s genocidal actions against Palestinians in Gaza raised questions about its alleged support for populations in the Global South demanding freedom. Nor could Trump’s naked power grab in Venezuela, explicitly carried out for the sake of stealing that country’s petroleum, have been reassuring to the inhabitants of a petrostate like Iran.

The killing of poet and mother of three Renee Nicole Good, a Christian who had done mission work, by a belligerent ICE agent on January 7 in Minneapolis and similar killings (which continue, as with Alex Pretti) don’t, of course, compare in scale to Tehran’s grim treatment of Iranian protesters in January. This country may, however, be considered closer to such a—can I even use the word?—model, if we include those who were brutalized and killed once Trump offshored them to the notorious CECOT mega-prison and torture facility in El Salvador (about which, by the way, right-wing Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s new propaganda outlet, CBS News, attempted to avoid informing us).

We may come closer still if we include Iranian-American dissidents and those of other nationalities deported by Trump, after he arbitrarily denied them asylum, raising questions about the fate of hundreds or possibly thousands of activists being returned to despotic home countries–or sometimes to third countries like South Sudan in the midst of civil war. That the Trump regime (like the Iranian one) is willing to sacrifice massive numbers of people for the sake of ideology is clear. Oxfam estimates that Trump’s destruction of the US Agency for International Development led to the deaths of 200,000 children globally in 2025 (and that, of course, isn’t even counting dead adults).

The point, however, is not equivalency in scale. There’s an anecdote from the 1930s about then-media-magnate Max Aitkin (also known as Lord Beaverbrook), a British-Canadian politician. He was said to be at a cocktail party conversing with an attractive woman, when the conversation turned to ethics. He then asked her if she would sleep with someone for a million British pounds. She replied that she would. He then asked, “Would you sleep with someone for five pounds?” She replied indignantly, “Certainly not, what sort of woman do you think I am?” And he observed dryly, “Madame, we have already established that. Now we are just haggling about the price.”

In the same vein, we’ve already established that Trump’s minions are lawless kidnappers and killers—now we’re just haggling about the number of their victims (so far) compared to those of other authoritarian regimes. In truth, the offing of Renee Nicole Good didn’t differ in kind from the deaths inflicted on dissidents by the Iranian state. She was murdered by an ICE agent in a fit of pique for a nonviolent protest. He (or one of his compatriots) then muttered of that gentle Christian, “Fucking bitch!”

An American Basij?

Even the spin the Iranian and American governments put on their crackdowns was essentially indistinguishable. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called the Iranian protesters “saboteurs” and “vandals.” Similarly, cartoonish Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and ghoulish White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller denounced Renee Nicole Good as a “domestic terrorist,” while the spineless Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) accused her of “impeding law enforcement.” Administration officials also denounced her as a “professional agitator” and President Trump justified her killing, saying that her actions had been “tough.”

Such allegations fly in the face of the straightforward record offered from the many videos of the incident released by bystanders and even by the killer, which show that an inoffensive Good said, “I’m not mad at you, dude,” just before her life was taken. In other words, the Trump regime vindicated ICE on that killing on the same grounds that Khamenei and his officials excused the carnage against protesters in Iran.

The Good slaying came on the heels of numerous Trump administration attempts to provoke civil unrest by illegally sending the National Guard into the cities of Los Angeles, Portland, Washington, DC, Memphis, New Orleans, and Chicago, all politically controlled by Democrats, allegedly to “protect” masked, armed ICE goons. The intent was to erode the 1888 Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits using federal troops in local law enforcement. Nevertheless, National Guardsmen in Los Angeles detained American citizens. Even ICE does not have any statutory authority to arrest, order around, or tear-gas citizens not reasonably suspected of immigration offenses or of violence toward persons or property. (Nor are the plainclothes members of the basij paramilitary in Iran, loyal to Khamenei’s person, properly considered “law enforcement.”)

Though it’s not mentioned in our news world, it couldn’t be clearer that Ayatollah Trump and Ayatollah Khamenei share a bloodthirsty perspective on “law and order.”

Yet ICE now routinely arrests (and in Good’s case executed) Americans doing no harm, while attempting to interfere with their right to assemble peaceably or record public actions. As one such victim told journalist Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic, “My name is George Retes Jr. I’m 25 years old. I was born and raised here in Ventura, California. I’m a father of two, and yeah, I’m a US citizen. The day I was arrested by ICE agents was July 10.” Similarly, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, sometimes basing themselves at historic sites of genocide against Indigenous nations, have arrested some of their members, whose families began coming to North America 30,000 years ago.

Such ironies have not been lost on Iranian officials. As Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in Beirut recently, speaking of Good’s death: “We have seen Trump trying to deploy the National Guard in his own country. In the last two days we saw how [ICE] killed a 37-year-old woman.” He then added, “And we found Trump is the one who defended this action by the police. But in his dealings with the Iranians, we see him telling the government if you shoot a bullet against those protesters, then I’ll come for you.”

It’s One of Those Things

The autocrats in Tehran proved all too capable of bringing Trump around to their point of view, at least for a moment. In mid-January, after he had spent a week threatening war against Iran’s ayatollahs over their atrocities, he heard Araghchi’s interview on Fox News and abruptly executed an about-face. “They said people were shooting at them with guns, and they were shooting back,” Trump remarked. “And you know, it’s one of those things. But they told me that there’ll be no executions, and so I hope that’s true.”

Though it’s not mentioned in our news world, it couldn’t be clearer that Ayatollah Trump and Ayatollah Khamenei share a bloodthirsty perspective on “law and order.”

Trump has no principles, and so he didn’t back off even temporarily in mid-January from initiating a war on Iran on ethical grounds. Instead, the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Oman, who have cultivated close relationships with the American president, argued that bombing Iran could work against the protesters, uniting the country against a foreign attacker. They also worried about the regional instability and disruption to oil markets that a US strike might bring about. After all, in the summer of 2025, after Trump ordered the bombing of Iranian nuclear sites, that country struck out at al-Udeid Air Force Base in Qatar, which is leased to the US military.

Above all, however, at that moment of indecision, Trump seemed unable to imagine a way personally to profit from an assault on Iran, unlike Venezuela.

In short, Trump is the least plausible critic imaginable when it comes to the Islamic Republic’s human rights record. After all, how can an administration promoting a fundamentalist attack on science and sexual rights lecture fundamentalist Iran? How can an administration that arranged for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to balloon into a $75 billion agency, that routinely disregards the First, Fourth, and Sixth Amendments, criticize Iran for maintaining a force of 90,000 pro-regime basij militiamen? How can Trump, with his white Protestant nationalism dedicated to expelling untold numbers of Hispanic Catholics, lecture Iran over deporting 1.5 million Afghans in 2025?

Ringing Fatally Hollow

Notoriously, US administrations apply a hectoring human-rights discourse only to states they view as enemies, not to friendly ones. Absolute monarchies, autocracies, or dictatorships that routinely jail, torture, and execute dissidents like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and El Salvador are neither singled out for public denunciation nor threatened by the White House, as long as they are seen as serving Washington’s interests.

The extremist government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, still committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and assiduously pursuing the crime of apartheid in the Palestinian West Bank, is showered with praise and billions of taxpayer dollars in weaponry. State Department spokespeople deal with such Himalayan-sized hypocrisy by a studied silence or by weasel words (which some of them may later repent).

Trumpism can’t possibly succeed in the necessary work of human-rights advocacy because his American form of fascism doesn’t believe in constitutional or human rights, not abroad or, for that matter, at home.

Don’t misunderstand. I’m not arguing that what’s happening in Iran is no different from tolerated atrocities elsewhere and therefore should be disregarded. The egregious violence of the Iranian government toward protesters this winter far outstripped even what’s grimly normal in that country. In the much more sustained and widespread demonstrations of the Green Movement in Iran in 2009, the agents of the ayatollahs killed between 70 and 200 people. Now, the government itself admits that its victims are in the thousands.

Nothing hurts more than the image of idealistic young Iranians pawing through corpses searching for loved ones. Nothing would please me more than to see Iran move toward democracy. The problem is that Trumpism can’t possibly succeed in the necessary work of human-rights advocacy because his American form of fascism doesn’t believe in constitutional or human rights, not abroad or, for that matter, at home. In short, if Donald Trump can’t denounce the killing of Renee Nicole Good, his denunciations of the killings in Iran ring fatally hollow.

The past stretch of days—say, since the murder of Renee Good—has been marked by brutality, but also by a dishonesty so deep and stupid that it’s begun to finally turn on the liars. Following the execution of Alex Pretti, for instance, various White House officials were quick to start just plain lying: He was an “assassin” and a “domestic terrorist” who "wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement."

As many videos emerged in the course of the day, those lies were shown for what they were. Pretti was, at worst, trying to help a woman who was being unnecessarily gassed; for his pains he was executed once he’d been disarmed; the only “weapon” he’d “brandished” was a cell phone. Oh, and instead of being a domestic terrorist he was a VA nurse who treated former soldiers with compassion and dignity.

Politicians, it goes without saying, have sometimes engaged in dishonesty, often with hideous consequences. The Gulf of Tonkin “attacks” that gave America an excuse for war in Vietnam were at least in part fabrications; the “weapons of mass destruction” weren’t in Iraq and there was no compelling reason to think they were. Hell, we had a president—Richard Nixon—known as Tricky Dick for the smears and fibs that marked his whole career, from his first congressional race to the last days of Watergate. But the presidents who told those lies generally attempted to manufacture cover stories or cloud them in enough shadows that they might pass for mistakes. By now, however, we’ve reached a point where the president and his party just recite up-is-down lies constantly. Consider this reckoning of President Donald Trump's first term:

When The Washington Post Fact Checker team first started cataloguing President Donald Trump’s false or misleading claims, we recorded 492 suspect claims in the first 100 days of his presidency. On Nov. 2 alone, the day before the 2020 vote, Trump made 503 false or misleading claims as he barnstormed across the country in a desperate effort to win reelection. This astonishing jump in falsehoods is the story of Trump’s tumultuous reign.
By the end of his term, Trump had accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency—averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day. What is especially striking is how the tsunami of untruths kept rising the longer he served as president and became increasingly unmoored from the truth. Trump averaged about six claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims day in his second year, 22 claims day in this third year—and 39 claims a day in his final year.

Put another way, it took him 27 months to reach 10,000 claims and an additional 14 months to reach 20,000. He then exceeded the 30,000 mark less than five months later.

The second term, obviously, is far worse than the first. At this point, it would be far easier for the Post to assign a reporter to list the true things the president says—a list as short as his… temper. (And of course the second-term Post wouldn’t do this, since its owner has castrated one of America’s great papers in an effort to curry favor with the fibber-in-chief). Every lie he tells is then repeated by his satraps in the administration and Congress—the closest they come to shame is when they lie and say that they haven’t heard his latest lies so they don’t have to publicly swallow them. Here at home we’ve gotten so used to this that the lies often barely register—but when Trump went to Davos and gave a speech literally filled with whoppers, European leaders were astonished. He was telling them things that they knew to be absurd—that China has no wind farms, say—and expecting them to go along.

Where the GOP learned to lie as a matter of course is an interesting question, and I’m afraid I’ve had a front row seat. I think it’s the climate fight, more than anything else, that taught them to regard reality as optional. And I think this because I remember the start of it all. When Jim Hansen first testified before the Senate that global warming was real, it caused a society-wide stir; running for the White House, the sitting vice-president George Herbert Walker Bush said he would combat the greenhouse effect with “the White House effect.” He made no attempt to deny it, or pretend it wasn’t a problem; it was reality, he wanted to lead the world, he had to at least pretend to deal with it.

And of course he could have—he could have resurrected Jimmy Carter’s plans (only eight years old) for a rapid solar research and development program, for instance. He seemed like he might; during the campaign he promised to convene a "global conference on the environment at the White House" during his first year in office. That didn’t happen, and it’s fairly easy to figure out why.

At about this same time—1989-1990—the fossil fuel industry was making a fateful decision. They were well aware that global warming was real; as a series of archival documents and whistleblowers have now laid out in excruciating detail, the big oil companies had conducted their own research programs, and reached conclusions just like Hansen’s. (Indeed, Exxon’s internal estimates of how hot the world would be by 2020 turned out to be even more accurate than NASA’s). We know that the executives of these companies believed their scientists—Exxon, for instance, began building drilling rigs higher to compensate for the rise in sea level they knew was coming, and plotting which corners of the Arctic to lease for drilling once it had inevitably melted.

It always has seemed to me that the worst fate would be to walk over this cliff without knowing it was there. Dignity demands understanding.

But they decided, across the industry, that the price of telling the truth would be too high. Inevitably it would mean having to leave at least some of their reserves of coal, gas, and oil in the ground, and those reserves were valued in the tens of trillions of dollars. And so they started forming the coalitions and councils, hiring the veterans of the fights over tobacco and asbestos and even DDT—they started lying.

Their lies were, at first, made concessions to some notion of plausibility. The science was “uncertain.” It was mostly China’s fault. Climate always fluctuates. Computer models are “unreliable.” And so on—these were never good-faith objections, they were always the arguments from selfishness. And as time went on they became more and more outlandish. Before the 1990s were over, the CEO of Exxon was telling a key crowd of Chinese leaders that the Earth was cooling and that it would make no difference if we waited a quarter century to start phasing out fossil fuels. Again, his scientists had assured him that this was nonsense years before.

It took a while for this to filter down through the entire GOP ecosystem. George W. Bush actually ran for president in 2000 promising to officially establish that carbon dioxide was a pollutant and to regulate its emissions. Shortly after taking office, however, his vice-president—oil-patch CEO Dick Cheney—held a series of private meetings with his industry brethren, and before long W. announced that he had made a mistake and that CO2 was not in fact a problem.

That was the signal for the rest of the Republican party—save for a few iconoclasts like John McCain—to fall in line, and by the time he ran for president even McCain had pretty much given up talking about global warming. The biggest donors by far to GOP campaign funds were the Koch brothers and the vast network they had assembled of right-wing billionaires—and the Koch brothers were the biggest oil and gas barons in America, owners of an unrivaled fleet of pipelines and refineries. The efforts of this group of oil-adjacent cronies became ever more extreme—eventually they were funding groups to put up billboards equating climate scientists with Charles Manson.

And eventually, inevitably, it produced a president who felt no compunction about just saying that climate change wasn’t real, and using all the power he could muster to kill off both the scientific effort that had alerted us to the crisis, and the policy effort to do something about it. His crew assisted in this cover-up in all the usual ways—we learned January 30, for instance, that a federal judge had ruled that the Department of Energy’s effort to produce a report pooh-poohing climate danger had violated all manner of federal law.

Judge William Young of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts said the Energy Department did not deny that it had failed to hold open meetings or assemble a balance of viewpoints, as the law requires, when it created the panel, known as the Climate Working Group.

“These violations are now established as a matter of law,” wrote Judge Young, who was nominated to the bench by Ronald Reagan. He said the Climate Working Group was, in fact, a federal advisory committee designed to inform policy, and not, as the Energy Department claimed, merely “assembled to exchange facts or information.”

What makes this campaign of deception all the more remarkable is that it’s happened even as the actual facts of global warming have become painfully clear. Back in 1988 it was still pretty much theory; now it’s flood and fire, storm and sea-level rise. We live on a planet losing the ice at its poles, and the vast coral reefs in between, where tens of millions of humans are already on the move because their homes can no longer support them. It’s also remarkable because in 1988 the solutions were hard—solar power was still the most expensive energy on Earth. Now it’s the cheapest. Most of the world has recognized these truths, coming together if fitfully to try and least talk about it. But whenever America is in the hands of Republicans it just walks away.

Perhaps, given this long history, I can offer a few hard-earned ideas about how to try and deal with Trump’s many assaults on the truth. They won’t do all that we might hope, but they’re nonetheless important.

1. Don’t give up. Telling the the truth repeatedly actually can work. Because more than 80% of Americans saw the video of Alex Pretti’s execution, the lies backfired. And at least in part because 95% of Americans live in counties that have had a federally declared disaster since 2011, it’s hard to convince most people that there’s not something afoot. Indeed, polling demonstrates that public concern and understanding of climate change has held relatively stable for the last 30 years, with about two-thirds of Americans acknowledging that we’ve got trouble. And since it’s clear that about one-third of America is beyond the reach of fact or feeling, that’s not bad.
2. More than ever we need to support independent media. Throughout Trump’s second term, it’s been as much Substackers, YouTubers, and others of this breed who’ve been keeping things straight as it has the ‘legacy media.’ (As one small example, check out this epic—in both content and length—rant about renewable energy’s benefits that appeared on YouTube over the weekend). That legacy media is increasingly craven and corrupted (see, for instance, CBS News), or just simply out of business—we now have big cities in America without daily newspapers. The administration clearly recognizes this trend—that’s why they’re trying to prosecute Don Lemon, Georgia Fort, and others covering the Minnesota debacle. Many of these independent journalists have a point of view—I certainly do. And I can tell you that, though I continue to work for and love brave institutions like the New Yorker, I’m also very grateful for things like Substack that are increasingly taking up the slack. (Tips on how to support Lemon and Fort here)
3. Even on days when one despairs (and that’s an awful lot of days) it’s good to remind oneself that the truth has real value in and of itself. I’ve written more words than anyone else on the climate crisis—one motivation was to try and spur action, but another was simply to record and spread this news. It always has seemed to me that the worst fate would be to walk over this cliff without knowing it was there. Dignity demands understanding.

I have no idea if I’ll live to see the day when the truth regains a strong footing in our culture, but I do have a certain amount of faith it will happen eventually, if only because reality reality ultimately trumps (not Trumps) political reality. Physics and chemistry are functional truth, despite their liberal bias. I remember the week after Hurricane Sandy hit New York shutting down the financial district, and the cover of Business Week magazine was simply a big block of text: “It’s Global Warming Stupid.” Eventually that message will get through; our job is to see if we can make that happen before the damage is any worse than it has to be.

Oh, and word on the street is that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is going after Springfield Ohio this week—home of the biggest lie of the last election campaign. Haitians are not eating cats and dogs. ICE is killing good people. The last three years are the hottest on record. Pass it on.

Among the critical issues facing our country today, nuclear arms control is seldom top of mind for most people, understandably, given our myriad political, social and economic crises. Recent books and films such as Annie Jacobsen’s 2004 non-fiction tome Nuclear War: A Scenario and last fall’s A House of Dynamite, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, garnered needed attention for the still-existential threat of nuclear weapons, yet the problem remains mostly absent from our political discourse.

Part of the fault for that lies with President Donald Trump, who while constantly touting his ability to “make deals,” is missing in action on a simple agreement that would make the US and the world safer. New START, the arms control treaty negotiated by President Barack Obama and extended by President Joe Biden, will expire on February 5. However, Russia offered last September a one year, or longer, extension of the treaty’s key limits of 1550 deployed, strategic nuclear warheads and 700 launch systems each.

Trump simply needs to say “Da” (yes) to the Russian proposal, which would cost very little politically at this time. While both countries, along with the seven other nuclear weapons states, are in the midst of dangerous and exorbitant nuclear weapons “modernization” programs, neither are in a position to rapidly exceed the current New START limits, nor should they, for global security and financial reasons. While both countries tout their in-development bombs and missiles that could end most if not all life on Earth, at the cost of more life-affirming investments in human needs and protecting our planet, the reality is these systems, such as the new Sentinel Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), are boondoggles that mostly benefit the financial interests of the large weapons contractors rather than the Common Good.

Should Trump blow this chance, his global approval, already dismal, will doubtless decline further.

Then there is Trump’s fantasy of building a “Golden Dome” missile defense shield. Such a chimera is more properly seen as part of a potential offensive nuclear war fighting scheme rather than mere defense; that is if it works, which it is extremely unlikely to do. So it could be a lose-lose-lose scenario, whereby it spurs other countries to deploy more missiles and counter-measures to overcome such a missile “defense;” and it likely would not work to shoot down all incoming missiles (and would be useless against other forms of attack); and it could be used to argue arms control and disarmament treaties are unnecessary, because the shield will protect us, providing a dangerously false sense of security.

One does not need to engage in all the arguments against Golden Dome, or for investing in other, more economically productive pursuits, or think a nuclear weapons-free world is achievable any time soon, to agree that ditching the benefits of New START is a stunningly bad idea at this time.

The US and Russia (formerly the Soviet Union) have had a series of treaties limiting and reducing nuclear weapons since 1972. If New START limits go away, we will enter a very dangerous brave new world.

Trump’s famously insatiable ego could be slaked by not only agreeing to the Russian proposal, but by challenging Moscow to initiate new talks to go lower. At the end of the Obama Administration and in its aftermath, there were conflicting claims by the US and Russia on which side whiffed at a chance to go lower, to 1,000 deployed strategic warheads each. So Trump could propose something his nemesis Obama failed to do. Such an agreement might take a sustained period of negotiation, or Trump could do as President George H. W. Bush did in 1991 in announcing a unilateral nuclear weapons cut, which was coordinated with and matched by Russia, with mutually agreed verification procedures.

Trust between Moscow and Washington is low for various reasons, but neither country can afford, politically or economically, to engage in a futile, costly new arms race, and global public reprobation would be deservedly harsh for both countries. And it would further erode any credibility for the US to insist China engage in arms reduction talks regarding its arsenal, which is still much smaller than those of Russia and the US. Even at the height of the Cold War, with the Soviet Union and United States competing for global dominance and engaging in deadly “proxy wars” and armed interventions around the globe, the two sides saw the wisdom of not blowing up the planet, and collaborated on a series of treaties that dramatically reduced their nuclear arsenals, which made the world safer.

Should Trump blow this chance, his global approval, already dismal, will doubtless decline further. Upcoming international review conferences of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) this spring and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) this fall, both at the United Nations in New York, will likely lay the blame for a renewed arms race at his feet.

It is not (yet) too late. A coalition of US peace and disarmament organizations is mobilizing public action to press Congress and the White House to accept the Kremlin’s offer, if not by Thursday’s deadline, then as soon as possible. For more information on how to raise your voice on this critical issue, concerned individuals can consult Peace Action’s FaceBook page.

Time is of the essence. We only have one planet.