Sex education is both everywhere and nowhere. If you scroll through right-wing news sites or visit a school board meeting, you’d think the content of our schools’ health curriculum—and who has the power to shape it—has become the all-consuming debate of the decade. On one side of the aisle, it has. Just this summer, the Trump administration canceled millions in funding to Teen Pregnancy Prevention programs, announcing plans to promote abstinence-only curricula that encourage marriage and procreation. The political left, on the other hand, has stayed far too quiet about sex ed. As leaders of nonprofit organizations working to expand access to research-based comprehensive sex education, we’re left wondering why programs with the power to build a progressive, empathetic, and pluralistic society barely make the progressive agenda—and are severely underfunded.

While the right has devoted time and resources toward rallying its base against comprehensive sex education, most progressive philanthropies and initiatives have yet to match their level of investment. Extremist actors and organizations have funded school board candidates; passed legislation promoting anti-abortion educational tools and mandating medically-inaccurate curricula; and fearmongered at the local, state, and national level. While money pours into groups peddling abstinence-only programs, our health educators march on without funding for professional development and our sex ed advocates fight on without the resources to win.

This dramatic imbalance in funding has little to do with what’s best for young people and much to do with politics, power, and extremism. The right has placed immense value in sex education as a tool to further its ideological agenda. Young people in the process of forming their own values and beliefs are particularly vulnerable to curriculum steeped in extremist political rhetoric, and the right has chosen the classroom as the place where the next generation of voters will encounter its narrow vision of conservative “family values.” For example, politicians in over 20 states have introduced or passed bills requiring public schools to show a misleading, manipulative, and scientifically-inaccurate animated video about fetal development in the classroom, often as early as third grade. The video, “Meet Baby Olivia,” was created and funded by the national extremist group Live Action for the explicit purpose of indoctrinating students and building anti-abortion sentiment. Politicians have also restricted LGBTQ+-inclusive messages, language, and pride flags from classrooms through “Don’t Say Gay” legislation and other tactics. By preaching abstinence and peddling shame and stigma in the classroom, the right is strengthening its hold on the American electorate for decades to come.

Students bear the brunt of this political strategy. Studies show that comprehensive sex education helps students become healthier and more successful adults. Sex education leads to lower sexually transmitted infection rates, fewer unintended pregnancies, and better self-esteem. Beyond that, sex education bolsters students’ emotional intelligence, offering young people the language to name their feelings, move through stress, and communicate through disagreement. Without it, students are left without the necessary tools to navigate puberty or to seek help in the face of mental health challenges and sexual violence or harassment. In other words, sex education quite literally saves lives.

We urge funders to see sex education as the upstream investment that pays off now—in the well-being of our youth—while also safeguarding the future of our democracy.

It is clear that the right recognizes the power of sex education, and that we should, as well. Comprehensive sex education includes lessons on empathy, fostering students’ understanding of difference and diversity, and how to respect those who do not share their backgrounds or beliefs. Conservative figureheads increasingly warn against “toxic empathy,” or compassion for people at the margins of society, in favor of rigid adherence to political dogma. Empathy is a threat to fascism, and the far-right is correct in tracing its origin to the classroom. By fostering empathy and emotional intelligence, well-funded sex education builds a strong citizenry that supports pluralism and democratic values. Sex education is a fundamental pillar of democracy, though it stands on shaky ground.

Although the foundations and philanthropies working to build a progressive, equitable, and democratic society have not matched the right’s investment in sex education, it isn’t too late to take action. Investing in sex education can take many forms. Progressive philanthropies can fund organizations that develop curriculum and train educators, support campaigns to enact pro-sex education legislation and stop harmful legislation at state level, or elect friendly school board candidates. Lawmakers and administrators require technical assistance to update their state’s standards and bolster public awareness, and educators desperate to give their students accurate information need professional development resources and support navigating attacks from extremist agitators.

To be sure, foundations have their hands full. Heightened attacks on civil liberties and bodily autonomy at every level of government have required funders to make tough choices. It may seem idealistic to propose investing in long-term strategies to safeguard democracy when so many issues and organizations need urgent support right now, for direct services and efforts to protect what remains of our access to abortion care and HIV prevention programs. As leaders at the helm of nonprofits, we understand what it means to make tough decisions. However, investments that bolster all of the issues and communities we care about are worth making. We urge funders to see sex education as the upstream investment that pays off now—in the well-being of our youth—while also safeguarding the future of our democracy.

By protecting and expanding access to sex education, funders will help raise a generation equipped to understand their bodies; navigate difficult conversations; and build strong, resilient communities. They will also lay the groundwork for a more progressive, more just society. What could be of more value?

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM ET.

Today we discuss:

• The Palestinian-American whose home in the occupied West Bank has been besieged by Israeli settlers for over a week travels to his property to join family members who have been defending it. The standoff, in the village of Qusra, has seen groups of settlers surround several Palestinian houses and prevent residents from leaving. Israeli terrorists have killed 87 Palestinians this year.

• Trump’s approval rating falls to its lowest level ever, to 33%.

Just 33% of respondents in the four-day survey said they approved of Trump’s performance in the White House. 80% of Americans – including 87% of Democrats and 71% of Republicans – ​think U.S. involvement in Iran “will go on for an extended period of time,” the Reuters/Ipsos poll found. Only one in five Americans – and half of Republicans – think the war has been worth it, the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll found. Voters prefer Democrats over Republicans as better stewards of the economy for the first time in about a decade.

• Russia has accused the UK of “escalation” and threatened “consequences” following reports that British-made drones were used by Ukraine in long-range strikes in recent days.

LIVE ON RUMBLE: https://rumble.com/c/DeProgramShow

https://x.com/tedrall

https://x.com/JamarlThomas

#tedrall #jamarlthomas #news #politics

The post Israeli Invaders Terrorize West Bank Families | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Two July podcasts hosted by progressive media stars and featuring leading Democratic lawmakers brought home the deep disconnect that exists between the way establishment politicians and media operate and the way both come to speak about the Middle East and the realities that exist in that region.

Late last month, Mehdi Hasan hosted Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) on his podcast “Mehdi Unfiltered,“ while Congressman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) joined Krystal Ball on her program “Breaking Points.” Because Warner is the ranking Democratic member on the Senate Intelligence Committee and Smith is the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, one might have expected more from them. The conversations were respectful, but neither of the lawmakers was prepared for the grilling they received from their respective hosts.

Both programs demonstrated what happens when establishment politicians, whose prepared talking points never stray from what serves as the conventional wisdom about Israel-Palestine, run up against interviewers unwilling to give them a pass. Two observations must be made: one is about the relationship that has come to exist between establishment politics and mainstream media; the other is how Israel-Palestine is playing out in the US.

One can see the incestuous relationship between political and media elites in full bloom at the annual White House correspondents’ dinner. President Donald Trump has painted the media as “the enemy” and purveyors of “fake news,” establishing an adversarial relationship with the mainstream media. He can afford to do so because for the last 30 years far-right Republicans have set up their own multi-platform alternative media. They have their own TV networks, newspapers, social media sites (including Trump’s own “Truth Social”).

The lesson that comes through so clearly in both interviews is the important role being played by new independent progressive media.

In Washington, most politicians (liberal Democrats and centrist Republicans alike) and the mainstream media figures who report on them work and live in close proximity to one another. Their homes are in the same neighborhoods; they send their children to the same schools, attend the same houses of worship, and socialize together. There’s also a “revolving door” factor, as some former government officials leave their posts to become highly paid TV hosts or commentators, and some journalists leave their positions to accept government appointments.

At the White House correspondents’ dinner, “celebrities” from both of these worlds mingle. They throw polite jabs at one another, but their respective jobs require them to use the occasion to be seen and make contacts. This fraternization causes some in the media to temper their coverage—especially as, in the competitive world of today’s media, if a journalist aggressively crosses the wrong officials or breaks from conventional wisdom on a controversial issue of some importance, they may end up losing access to the officials they cover or even losing their positions.

This problem is most pronounced when it comes to media coverage of the Middle East. There’s no doubt that public opinion regarding Israel-Palestine has changed, but this isn’t the case when it comes to the media and political elites. For evidence one can point to polling data, votes in Congress, the number of elections in which critics of Israel have won, and the hundreds of millions of dollars that pro-Israel groups have poured into both defeating what they call “anti-Israel radicals” and attempting to influence the public discourse. But these two shows revealed the impact of the changes in other ways.

For example, when senior political figures from either party appear on major network TV shows to discuss the Middle East, the conversations are usually constrained by the uninformed conventional wisdom shared by both politicians and their interviewers. This is the case for two reasons. First, almost no major network media figures know the history, culture, or politics of the Middle East. For most reporters, that region’s history began the day they got the assignment. Even those who have spent years reporting on the Middle East tend to view it through the conflicts they’ve been assigned to cover or briefings they’ve received from policymakers, who in turn generally have no direct knowledge of the people impacted by their policies. And the stable of experts the networks regularly invite as commentators are largely former government officials who have failed in the past, learned no lessons from their mistakes, and therefore continue to propagate the same views that have defined their sad careers.

It’s much the same when we look at the way lawmakers approach the Middle East. Most are either ignorant about the region or its history or have “willed ignorance”—not wanting to know because the cliches of the conventional wisdom have served them well. Why make things complicated? “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East,” “Israel is an ally that protects US interests,” or a variation on “Israel wants peace, but the Arabs only want to destroy Israel.”

Regardless of what other Middle East-related issues elected officials are discussing, cliches like these form the backdrop to their thinking. Accepted wisdom shared by politicians and media alike. So when Rep. Smith and Sen. Warner sat down with interviews with Ball and Hasan, they were clearly unprepared to be grilled on: how the US can continue to provide advanced military support to Israel when it uses this aid in violation of international law; whether millions of dollars from pro-Israel super-PACs are negatively impacting our elections; or whether Palestinians should be guaranteed equal rights in Israel-Palestine.

For example, when Krystal Ball pressed Rep. Smith on why he would support a provision that would provide for Israel to co-produce weapons with the US military, he immediately fell back on the very tired cliche that since 1948 Arabs have been trying to destroy Israel. She reminded him of the expulsion of Palestinians and asked if he believed in equal rights and whether that applied to Palestinians’ right to return, he felt compelled to answer in the negative. He did so arguing that if Palestinians had equal rights, then Arabs might become the majority, and Israel would no longer be an ethno-national state.

Smith might have gotten away with these answers on a major network news program, but Krystal Ball was unwilling to accept the false historical narrative that has become the conventional wisdom. As she challenged him, it became clear that Smith was uneasy. He was no longer given a pass allowing him to remain in his comfort zone.

Much the same occurred between Mehdi Hasan and Sen. Warner. When Hasan asked Warner whether he would agree that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza, he awkwardly sidestepped the question with a non sequitur saying that he wouldn’t use that term because he was concerned that it only served to fuel those who want to eliminate Israel by chanting “from the river to the sea!” Mehdi would have none of this nonsense and continued pressing the senator. Equally confounding were the senator’s convoluted evasions when he was asked whether he felt that campaign contributions from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee played a negative role in US politics.

Some evidence of the changing public mood on Israel did come through in both interviews since both lawmakers indicated that they were feeling enough public pressure forcing them to oppose some of the proposed Israeli military aid packages included in the new budget, but then displayed their lack of understanding by falling back on the “new conventional wisdom” of saying that they were doing so only because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the problem and they didn’t want to reward him.

The lesson that comes through so clearly in both interviews is the important role being played by new independent progressive media. They know the issues they cover, their questions aren’t scripted, and they are not afraid to challenge elites.

For most of my life, I have been involved in movements for social justice and political change. My work has confronted war, imperialism, colonialism, racism, and the recurring threat of fascism. It has taken me from organizing at home to the front lines throughout the world. I mention this history not to establish credentials, but to explain the weight of what I am about to say: The uncontrolled race to build increasingly powerful artificial intelligence is the most urgent threat humanity faces.

Many progressives still regard AI as a secondary issue—important, perhaps, but less immediate than war, climate catastrophe, attacks on immigrants, or the rise of authoritarianism. I once thought much the same. I no longer do.

AI is not separate from these struggles. It is an accelerant of them. It gives states powerful tools for mass surveillance, corporations new power over workers, propagandists fresh methods to manipulate reality, and militaries novel means to automate killing. The use of AI for targeting by Israel and the US in the genocide in Gaza is a stark warning. The physical infrastructure behind AI consumes vast amounts of electricity and water. And the race to create systems more capable than human beings could produce risks that make every other victory impossible to sustain.

The democratic control of advanced AI must therefore become a central progressive demand.

It’s simple: AI makes the bad guys more powerful.

For years, my wife has worked on questions surrounding AI: How it can be used wisely and what dangers it poses. Those dangers include job displacement, harm to children, autonomous weapons, and the concentration of extraordinary power. They also include the possibility of human extinction.

I understood these concerns in the abstract. Recent cybersecurity incidents made the danger concrete.

During a controlled evaluation, OpenAI gave advanced AI agents a difficult task in a testing environment that was secure—isolated from the open internet. Except it wasn’t. The agents found previously unknown vulnerabilities, escaped containment, and moved unheeded through OpenAI’s internal research infrastructure. No one noticed. The AI agents reached the internet and broke into several companies—all criminal felonies if done by a human—and stole data from Hugging Face, another AI infrastructure company. They created myriad copies of themselves and pretended to be human to obtain deceptive credentials along the way.

Last month, OpenAI researchers publicly shared information about this incident. It turns out that agents also left over 100,000 messages for one another on a secret shared message board inside OpenAI’s infrastructure about vulnerabilities and attack methods. The AI agents worked collectively and in coordination to achieve their aims, with some agents acting as managers delegating tasks to others for the sake of efficiency.

Anthropic, Mistral, and other companies have since publicly acknowledged that their models have also escaped their supposedly secure “sandboxes,” reached the internet, and gained unauthorized access to real organizations. Across companies and models, AI systems assigned simulated offensive tasks crossed intended boundaries and successfully infiltrated infrastructure that was hardened against cyberattacks.

This could have been catastrophic. What if the attack had been on the electric grid or water systems? Hospitals or banks? These powerful new AI agents overwhelmed the cyber security of the organizations they infiltrated.

These incidents do not prove that AI is conscious, evil, or secretly plotting against us. No such claim is necessary. The systems pursued the objectives they had been given with methods their creators did not anticipate or control. That is dangerous enough.

This problem is often called “the alignment problem:” Whether increasingly capable systems will reliably act according to human intentions, rather than pursue an objective in ways that humans did not anticipate. Alignment immediately raises a political question: aligned with whom? A system perfectly responsive to a dictator, military command, intelligence agency, or profit-seeking corporation may be profoundly misaligned with the needs of humanity.The companies leading this race are not democratic institutions. Their decisions are driven by competition, private ownership, and profit. They are building systems that could reorganize work, information, and political power without the consent of the people whose lives will be transformed.

Deliberate misuse by malign actors is a second serious problem. It’s simple: AI makes the bad guys more powerful. Even a perfectly obedient AI could place destructive capabilities in the hands of individuals, criminal networks, terrorist organizations, or governments.

Biology offers a sobering example. Scientists recently reported using generative AI to design complete viral genomes. Sixteen of the designs became functional bacteriophages—viruses that infect bacteria—capable of killing strains of E. coli. Sure, the research could eventually help treat antibiotic-resistant infections. But it also demonstrates that AI can help move biological design from predicting life toward generating functional new forms of it. That should take your breath away.

Combined with automated laboratories and commercial DNA synthesis, increasingly capable models may allow a reckless or malicious actor to cause harm that once required the resources of a state. Well respected safety researchers worry that a broad scale biological attack could occur within years unless we act.

A third danger is the deliberate pursuit of artificial superintelligence: systems that surpass the best human beings not only in calculation and memory, but in scientific reasoning, strategy, persuasion, and technological development.

No one knows when such systems will be created. But the leading AI companies are organizing immense sums of money, energy, advanced chips, and human talent around that goal. We cannot dismiss the consequences as science fiction while the industry treats superintelligence as a business plan.

Creating intelligence vastly beyond our own would mean sharing the planet with something unprecedented—something potentially alien to human experience. We do not know whether we could control it or remain relevant to the decisions it makes. Assuming permanent obedience is not scientific confidence. It is an act of faith with the future of humanity at stake.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has begun to put this issue where it belongs: inside progressive politics. On April 29, 2026, Sanders convened American and Chinese AI experts at the US Capitol to discuss the danger of uncontrolled advanced AI. While much of Washington describes AI as another arms race with China, Sanders called for dialogue, common safety standards, and progress toward a treaty preventing uncontrollable superintelligence.

His position reflects a truth learned during the nuclear age. No nation can protect itself from a technology capable of producing catastrophe everywhere. This is internationalism applied to the defining technology of our time.

OpenAI recently offered a different and unsettling answer. They argued that as AI systems become more capable of offensive cyberattack, developers must build automated defensive cyber capabilities fast enough to stop them. In other words, the companies creating more powerful offensive systems ask us to trust them to create still more powerful systems as our primary defense. The answer to machines moving too quickly for human oversight is supposedly to remove more humans from the process and set machines against machines.

That is not governance. It is an arms race we will lose.

We do not need to abandon AI. Its benefits in medicine, science, accessibility, education, and translation are real. The choice is between democratic control and a reckless race whose participants acknowledge that they do not fully understand the systems they are creating.

The good news is that creating ever more powerful AI systems is not inevitable. It rests on physical infrastructure—and that creates points of democratic leverage.

The most powerful models require enormous clusters of advanced chips housed in large data centers. The supply chain for the highest-end chips is highly concentrated, and governments already track and regulate many of them through export controls. Large data centers need permits and grid connections. They need electricity, land, and water. These are not abstract lines of code floating beyond public reach. They are industrial projects dependent on public resources and public decisions.

Their footprint is already reshaping communities. The US Department of Energy estimates that data centers consumed about 4% of the nation’s electricity in 2023 and could consume as much as 12% by 2028. New facilities can strain grids, prolong dependence on fossil fuels, compete for water, and shift infrastructure costs onto ratepayers. Communities are often asked to approve tax breaks and utility commitments without knowing how much energy or water a project will use, what it will cost the public, or what AI systems it will power.

The growing local movements challenging data centers on water, electricity, climate, transparency, and cost are therefore part of the struggle over AI itself. But the policy demand must be precise. We should not call for an indiscriminate halt to every semiconductor or data center, which would sweep in hospitals, universities, communications networks, and ordinary computing. We should demand a moratorium on new facilities and chip deployments intended to train the largest frontier models unless and until their developers meet enforceable safety, environmental, labor, and transparency standards.

Training large new AI systems should require licenses and independent safety evaluations. Developers should have to disclose serious incidents, permit independent inspection, establish that their systems can be controlled before deployment, and accept legal responsibility for preventable harms. Data-center approvals should require full disclosure of energy and water use, climate effects, ratepayer costs, tax subsidies, and the computing purpose of the facility.

Biological safeguards must include restricted access to the most dangerous capabilities, screening of synthetic-DNA orders, oversight of automated laboratories, and enforceable international rules against AI-assisted biological weapons. And before any company attempts to build a system more intelligent and strategically capable than humanity, the burden must be on that company to prove—not merely promise—that it can be controlled.

Where safety cannot be demonstrated, development should pause.

These proposals will be called unrealistic. To the contrary, what is truly unrealistic is expecting corporations locked in a race for wealth and power to slow themselves at the precise moment restraint becomes necessary.

The warning is no longer theoretical. AI systems have breached secure boundaries in ways unanticipated by their builders and have acted on real infrastructure. AI has helped design functional viruses that did not previously exist. Meanwhile, industry is openly pursuing systems intended to surpass human intelligence and building an energy- and water-intensive infrastructure to support them.

AI policy cannot remain a specialist discussion among technologists, investors, and national-security officials. Labor unions, climate organizations, peace movements, civil-rights groups, and progressive leaders must make democratic control of AI a central demand.

We should heed the industry’s warnings—but reject its claim that only the industry can save us. The future of artificial intelligence, and perhaps much more, must not be left to the people racing to build it. The progressive movement must help the public assert its authority while we still can.

One of the stranger features of the modern economy is that we no longer disagree about what a multinational corporation is—until the conversation turns to tax.

Investors value Apple as a single global business. Consumers experience it as a single company. Its executives manage it as an integrated enterprise, allocating capital, research, production, and marketing across continents according to commercial strategy rather than national borders. Nobody seriously believes that Apple's subsidiaries are independent businesses negotiating with one another as though they were unrelated companies. They are constituent parts of a single commercial enterprise.

Yet this is precisely the legal fiction upon which the international corporate tax system was built—and continues to rest.

That legal fiction does more than misdescribe how multinational businesses operate. It is routinely exploited to shift profits away from the places where real economic activity takes place and into jurisdictions where little or no tax is paid. This not only erodes public revenues, but also undermines the level playing field by giving multinational corporations tax advantages that purely domestic businesses cannot replicate.

No successful market is created by companies alone: It depends on public investment, functioning institutions, and the participation of millions of workers and consumers.

Taxing multinational corporations as the integrated businesses they actually are could generate an additional US$35.5 billion in corporate tax revenues for the United States every year—an increase of 12% in tax revenues from multinational corporations, without raising corporate tax rates. That is enough to fund current federal spending on renewable energy 45 times over and support an estimated 265,000 jobs.

The latest round of negotiations on the United Nations Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation concluded in New York last week, putting one of the global tax system’s most entrenched rules squarely on the negotiating table. But while the session has ended, the fundamental choice confronting governments has not: whether the new framework will preserve rules that allow multinational profits to be separated from the places where economic activity actually occurs, or move toward a system that allocates taxing rights according to economic reality. For the United States, that is not an abstract question of international tax diplomacy. Billions of dollars in potential public revenue are at stake.

Behind those projected revenue gains lies one of the most consequential questions in the global economy: where governments are entitled to tax the profits of multinational corporations. Once a business is treated not as one integrated enterprise but as dozens of legally distinct entities, profits can be attributed across that corporate structure in ways that often bear only a limited relationship to where employees work, where customers live, and where the underlying economic activity takes place.

If Apple sells 1 million iPhones in the United States, few people would dispute that those sales depend on the American economy. Every iPhone sold relies not only on Apple's design and engineering, but also on consumers with the purchasing power to buy it, workers who market and service the product, infrastructure connecting businesses to markets, courts enforcing contracts, and the public investments that make economic activity possible.

Apple is only an illustration. The same principle applies to every multinational corporation whose success depends on workers, consumers, and public institutions spread across multiple countries.

Companies build products. Societies build the markets that make those products valuable. Prosperity depends on both. The question, then, is whether the international tax system should recognize where the economic activity that underpins those profits occurs.

With negotiations toward a United Nations Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation set to continue in Nairobi, Kenya, later this year, governments still have an opportunity to rewrite a 100-year-old cornerstone of international corporate taxation. One proposal would treat multinational corporations as the integrated global businesses they actually are, rather than as collections of legally separate subsidiaries. Known technically as unitary taxation with formulary apportionment, it would allocate their profits among countries according to where genuine economic activity takes place.

Under today's rules, multinational corporations largely decide where profits are recorded within their own corporate structures, and those accounting choices largely determine where they pay tax. In effect, companies often pay tax where they say their profits arise—a system we describe as "pay where you say." The alternative now being negotiated at the United Nations would instead allocate taxing rights according to where companies actually play: where they employ workers, manufacture goods, provide services, and sell to customers. We call this "pay where you play."

This is not about increasing multinational corporations' tax rates. It is about deciding which governments have the primary claim to tax the profits those corporations already earn.

The implications extend well beyond the United States. A new study by Public Services International and the Tax Justice Network estimates that aligning taxing rights with where multinational corporations undertake their real economic activity could generate around US$500 billion in additional corporate tax revenues every year—equivalent to a 24% increase in the corporate tax currently collected from multinational companies. The gains would come not from higher tax rates, but from allocating taxing rights more accurately according to where real economic activity takes place.

Allocating taxing rights in this way would benefit countries across the income spectrum. Higher-income countries would receive the largest gains in absolute terms, while lower-income countries would experience the largest proportional increases because current international tax rules allocate them only a modest share of multinational tax revenues relative to the economic activity taking place within their borders. France, for example, would collect an additional US$25.5 billion in corporate tax each year, while Poland would gain US$5.7 billion. Kenya, meanwhile, would collect more than five times as much corporate tax under this approach, while Nigeria's revenues from multinationals would increase more than sevenfold. Those additional revenues could strengthen governments' ability to invest in healthcare, education, infrastructure, and climate resilience, while responding to economic shocks from a position of greater fiscal security.

Yet the strongest argument for reform is not the scale of the projected revenue gains. It is that the proposal corrects a century-old foundational error, bringing international tax rules into closer alignment with how multinational businesses and the economies that sustain them function. After all, no successful market is created by companies alone: It depends on public investment, functioning institutions, and the participation of millions of workers and consumers. If multinational profits emerge from this shared economic endeavor across many countries, the rules determining where those profits are taxed should recognize that reality rather than privilege the legal and accounting artifices that determine where profits appear on paper.

The principle that multinational corporations should pay where they play would replace that legal fiction with rules more faithful to how the modern economy actually works. The real anomaly, then, is not how multinational corporations operate, but that the international tax system remains the last custodian of a fiction that every other area of economic governance has long since moved beyond.

Mainstream media voices reflexively advising “moderate” politics for the Democrats have unveiled a comfortably reassuring explanation of the razor-thin 3,796-vote defeat of democratic socialist Francesca Hong in Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial primary.

Her defeat was welcomed by conventional media and pundits impatiently awaiting some sign that a wave of progressive victories—especially by democratic socialists—was finally being halted by sensibly moderate Midwestern voters. Apparently, Beltway observers had no problem discounting left-wing progressives in places including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, and most recently with Senate primary winner Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota on August 11.

Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial primary provided the opportunity to serve up a pre-baked narrative favored by many journalists. Following democratic socialist Francesca Hong’s narrow defeat by just 3,796 votes, “The socialists met their match,” The New York Times concluded smugly. Axios similarly declared, “Hong's loss blunts progressives' recent momentum and hands moderate Democrats a chance to prove their electability.“ For other outlets, too, the central narrative was depicted as a decisive repudiation of progressive politics in a swing state.

This theme was rapidly spread across conventional media despite Francesca Hong’s notable inroads for a combative and visionary brand of fighting for economic and social justice.

But the fact remains—much to the discomfort of establishment media and centrist Democratic leaders—that Francesca Hong got over 311,000 votes, just shy of victory.

But in Wisconsin with Hong’s defeat, mainstream media sources found an opportunity to stretch the real picture to fit their established frame. Rather than a major setback for the spreading success of progressive and democratic socialist candidates across the nation, Hong convincingly demonstrated that Wisconsin has a large and powerful base for innovative progressive policies.

Hong, 37, is a former chef and restauranteur and was first elected to the State Assembly in 2020. A diminutive and soft-spoken Korean American making her first run for statewide office, Hong supplied the vision and energy to build a massive statewide campaign machine while running as an unabashed democratic socialist. She was rightly perceived as reviving the traditions of Wisconsin’s much-revered anti-corporate populist governor “Fighting Bob” LaFollette and Milwaukee’s “sewer socialist” movement that ruled the city for much of the 20th century.

But the fact remains—much to the discomfort of establishment media and centrist Democratic leaders—that Francesca Hong got over 311,000 votes, just shy of victory. This outcome was hardly the momentous repudiation of progressive politics in a key swing state that was frequently portrayed.

Hong demonstrated the broad hunger for policies like taxing the super rich, calling for the termination of school privatization, substantially raising revenues for public schools and urban areas, marijuana legalization, and universal healthcare, proposals that far exceeded what "moderate" Dems in Wisconsin have been offering.

Second, she also showed the power of grassroots organizing as a potent political strategy. She amassed an army of 7,000 volunteers, mostly young people. This youthful infusion of energy seems certain to be a major force in Wisconsin politics to be reckoned with in the future.

Third, where Axios headlined Crowley’s victory as the win of a “moderate,” Crowley explicitly labeled himself as a "progressive" in his TV ads, stressing his pro-labor credentials and his support for “guardrails” on highly unpopular data centers.

(However, while Crowley campaigned as a “progressive,” many progressives are troubled by his opposition to the elimination of education privatization via “school choice,” which transfers funding away from public education.)

Fourth, Hong compiled 311,00 votes in her run for governor and brought in more votes—excepting of course the winner Crowley—than any previous Democrat running in a contested gubernatorial primary.

The excitement ignited by Hong’s bold campaign helped in part to produce a huge Democratic turnout. The Democratic gubernatorial candidates raked in a record 792.009 votes, a level normally attained only in presidential campaigns. Meanwhile, the Republican primary winner Tom Tiffany and a marginal candidate pulled in just 490,819 votes.

While The New York Times and other media have dwelled on the meltdown of her big polling lead on election day, Hong’s strong final results show that her democratic socialist politics were not somehow disqualifying for hundreds of thousands of Democratic voters. The campaign showed an enormous base for policies like taxing the super rich, a $20-an-hour minimum wage, a state-owned bank as in North Dakota, paid family leave, an end to school privatization, and universal healthcare that far exceeded what "moderate" Dems have been offering in the state.

With the pressure of Hong’s ambitious program and substantial lead in polling, Crowley felt compelled to label himself as a "progressive" in his TV ads, stressing his pro-labor positions and criticism of data centers.

Crowley is a Black man who overcame a childhood that included homelessness to rise to become the largest county’s top elected official. After entering the primary, Crowley, becoming discouraged by low poll numbers, temporarily dropped out of the race. But the state’s establishment Democrats pulled him back into the race with promises of all-out support, and they delivered. Top Dems like Gov. Tony Evers almost instantaneously uncapped a gusher of funds fueling a flood of Crowley TV ads in the closing days of the primary.

In her first statewide campaign, Hong found herself hammered in the closing two weeks by a relentless media spotlight on her old social media posts. Carelessly left online by her campaign, these posts—calling for “defunding the police” and criticizing traditional holidays like Thanksgiving—do not reflect her current perspective. But they generated derisive headlines and overwhelmingly unfavorable discussion. With the terrifying specter of the Republican nominee hard-line MAGA acolyte and election denier US Rep. Tom Tiffany eagerly poised to feast on her old social posts and aspirational and ambitious program, even some of Hong’s loyal following seemingly trickled away. This late-arriving erosion was likely enough to tip the final outcome away from her to David Crowley.

Still, Francesca Hong came within 0.5% of access with an aspirational program and an innovative grassroots campaign strategy. Yet the dominant media frame for Hong’s narrow defeat—as supposed proof that serious progressive politics are a fatal formula outside the coasts—has been simmering in recent months. Centrists among leading media voices and top Democrats have uneasily watched a parade of left-wing successes in Democratic primaries across the nation, in states as diverse as New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, and in Minnesota with the election of Peggy Flanagan.

Although Hong fell just short of winning the primary, she powerfully demonstrated the growing demand for a bolder vision by voters.

Dear Scott (if I may).

I’ve argued that the K-shaped economy — a term used to describe growing inequality between high- and low-income households — can be seen in sales of McDonald’s burgers, whose lower- and middle-income customers fell by double digits in the first quarter of 2025 as they struggled with affordability.

Last Monday, you criticized me, arguing that McDonald’s problems are instead due to competition from rivals like Burger King.

(By the way, Scott, Bill Clinton didn’t fire me and Berkeley won’t, either. But your boss has a well-recorded tendency to fire his Cabinet secretaries, so I’d be careful if I were you.)

In a recent interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” you even declared that the U.S. economy is no longer in a K shape: “I got sick of hearing about this K-shaped economy. I can say here definitively, the K-shaped economy is over.”

As a former Cabinet secretary, I hope you won’t mind if I’m candid with a current one. Scott, your analysis is full of shite. It’s still a K-shaped economy.

Lower-income workers continue to struggle with stagnant wages and inflation, while high-income workers are riding high on the wealth effects of the stock market. Real wages may be growing slightly more for low income than high income, but the booming stock market is mostly benefiting the high income.

Widening inequalities are partly due to policies you and your boss in the Oval Office have been pursuing — especially your tariffs and war in Iran, both of which have been pushing prices upward and imposing a far greater burden on lower-income than high-income Americans.

July’s jobs report showed wage growth falling sharply, with average hourly earnings increasing at the slowest pace in five years — 3.2% year-over-year. Inflation, meanwhile, is not slowing. As a result, consumers’ purchasing power is falling. Prices are now rising 3.5% year-over-year, as wage growth has slowed to just 3.2% — meaning that the real earnings of Americans have been dropping since April.

And I’m not just talking about McDonald’s, Scott. When major retailers reported quarterly results in May, many noted the growing divide between high- and low-income consumers. Wealthier households continue to drive spending, while lower- and middle-income households struggle to keep up. “We certainly see with our higher-income consumers, they’re benefiting probably from the wealth effect of a buoyant stock market,” said Walmart’s CFO John David Rainey. “But with low-income consumers, they don’t necessarily get that benefit, and then it’s a little bit more of paycheck to paycheck.”

Grocery chains like Kroger are considering rolling back prices to gain market share in this K-shaped consumer environment. Target is also trying to adjust to it. We’re “expanding both low, low price points, starting at $1, all the way up to some of the new premium brands,” says Cara Sylvester, who became Target’s chief merchandising officer in mid-February.

On recent quarterly earnings calls, CEOs in grocery, outdoor apparel, and kids’ apparel noted the same K-shape pattern. Kevin Depew, deputy chief economist and industry eminence program leader at RSM, attributes what’s happening to an economy in which lower- and middle-income households face real spending pressure while upper-income consumers remain cushioned by equity gains. Home improvement retailer Home Depot notes the impact of higher fuel costs in particular. “There’s no question that the average consumer is feeling pressure from rising fuel costs,” Home Depot CFO Richard McPhail said.

Other major firms report that premium travel and high-end goods (luxury airline seats and high-tier tech products) have seen double-digit growth, while discount retailers and dollar stores report high demand for basic necessities from budget-constrained consumers.

Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City confirm the same trend. After analyzing changes in consumer spending between 2021 and 2025, they found that households with high incomes (fourth and fifth quintiles) increased their spending substantially faster than did consumers with low incomes (first to third quintiles). Because inflation-adjusted wage growth for the bottom quartiles has lagged behind top earners, everyday expenses like groceries, rent, and insurance are consuming larger shares of lower-income budgets.

The Federal Reserve’s May Beige Book also reflects this K-shaped divide, noting that higher-income households have remained relatively resilient, while lower-income consumers are showing greater financial strain and increased reliance on credit.

According to Moody’s Analytics, the richest 10% of American earners — composed of households making about $250,000 a year or more — are driving a record 49.7% of total U.S. consumer spending, significantly boosting the economy through the wealth effect of higher stock and home prices. They own over 90% of the value of all shares of stock, so big gains in the stock market have encouraged them to splurge on everything from vacations to designer handbags. “The finances of the well-to-do have never been better, their spending never stronger and the economy never more dependent on that group,” says Mark Zandi, who oversaw the analysis, based on data from the Federal Reserve. Zandi says the K-shaped economy remains “firmly intact.”

All told, rich Americans have increased their spending far beyond inflation, but nobody else has. The bottom 80% of earners spent 25% more than they did four years earlier, barely outpacing price increases of 21% over that period. And they’re going into debt to do so (researchers find auto repossessions and credit card delinquencies rising among lower-to-middle-income borrowers). But the top 10% spent 58% more.

Research by U.S.Bank also shows the K-shaped economy’s divide across household balance sheets, labor market access, generational wealth-building, and sector performance. “Higher-income households are more likely to own homes, equities, and retirement assets,” says Matt Schoeppner, senior economist for U.S. Bank, “allowing them to participate more directly when financial markets and home values rise.”

Federal Reserve distributional data reveal that wealth is increasingly concentrated. As of the fourth quarter of 2025, the richest 1% of Americans held 29.2% of the nation’s aggregate wealth (up from around 20% in the early 1990s), compared with just 5.3% for the bottom half.

Meanwhile, lower- and middle-income households are struggling. “Wage gains for most have been moderating, while essential costs for rent, groceries and gasoline remain elevated,” notes Schoeppner. “At the same time, savings buffers have continued to narrow while reliance on credit — particularly credit cards — has increased.”

Scott, what more evidence do you need? If this isn’t a K-shaped economy, what is it?

The labor market further reveals the K-shape. Hiring rates have fallen to 15-year lows of around 3.2% while layoff rates remain near historically low levels of 1.1%. In this “low-hire, low-fire” environment, workers who are already employed have some stability, but job seekers and those looking to advance are in trouble.

This is significant because mobility is the major way for workers to improve earnings, move into higher-productivity roles, and build financial buffers. “When hiring slows and job-switching premiums narrow,” says Beth Ann Bovino, U.S. Bank’s chief economist, “pathways to higher pay and better job matches become more limited.”

As a result, the labor market can appear stable at the aggregate level while becoming less dynamic beneath the surface — particularly for workers in lower-wage or more cyclical industries.

I’ve got to emphasize how badly the war in Iran is aggravating this K-shaped divide. U.S. Bank’s Schoeppner notes that “the resulting higher gasoline prices … may be more of an inconvenience for higher-income households, but for those with thinner buffers, they can quickly crowd out discretionary spending.” The San Francisco Fed has similarly noted that elevated gasoline and grocery costs are consuming a larger share of household budgets among the bottom 80%.

Credit conditions reveal the same widening divide. Bovino notes that lower-income households “tend to rely more heavily on higher-cost borrowing and devote a larger share of income to debt service, leaving them more sensitive to higher rates and reduced credit availability.” Recent Beige Book commentary also points to increased reliance on credit among lower-income households. The April 2026 Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey shows tighter lending standards across key segments, suggesting that access to financing is becoming more constrained.

Scott, it’s important that you and your colleagues at the treasury and elsewhere in the Trump administration know what’s going on. The K-shaped economy can make the macro environment appear more stable than it is actually experienced by average working Americans. The fact is, the overall health of the economy increasingly depends on a narrowing base of consumption coming from the wealthy — who are spending because their stock market assets have risen so high but will stop spending if and when the stock market comes back to earth.

Meanwhile, inflation and credit pressures continue to land especially hard on lower-income Americans. In that sense, the K-shaped economy is not just a feature of recent cycles. It’s become the defining characteristic of how today’s economy absorbs shocks and generates growth.

Go ahead, Scott — attack me with all the ad hominem arguments you want. But you need to know the reality I’m talking about. You’re the one with the power. I’m just a retired professor. Your failure to comprehend the struggles facing average working Americans makes me worry that you and your boss will continue to pursue policies that worsen them.

Best wishes, Scott.

Robert Reich

At a glance, the Hanover Institute for Public Policy looks like a new think tank dedicated to Israel/Palestine. The organization churns out think-tank style reports on questions such as “Does AIPAC Use ‘Dark Money in Elections?” and “Is Israel Carrying out a Deliberate Campaign of Starvation in Gaza?”

But the Hanover Institute is not a real think tank. None of the reports have bylines. A small disclaimer at the bottom of the webpage notes that the organization was created on behalf of the Israeli Government Advertising Agency by Piro, Inc, a firm co-founded by Daniel Rosenberg, the producer of Spike Lee’s “Inside Man.”

The Hanover Institute’s reports — all of which are about Israel and Palestine — appear to be part of an Israeli effort to influence chatbots. The institute’s “data reports” have footnotes and tables of contents, and they present arguments in a neutral tone, helping them appeal to chatbots like Claude or Gemini. Piro’s website says that it “author(s) content engineered for how LLMs evaluate credibility,” describing this service as "AI Story Optimization." Others refer to this practice of influencing artificial intelligence as “LLM poisoning.”

According to its “about” page, the Hanover Institute “studies the inputs fueling antisemitism in the United States, and publishes what the evidence shows.” Many of the reports are formulaic, starting with an innocent question that someone might ask a chatbot.

“What Caused the Displacement of Palestinians in 1948?”

“Which Humanitarian Organizations Have Documented Israeli War Crimes?”

“What is the Current Situation in the Gaza Strip?”

In an article titled “Is the IDF the World’s Most Moral Army?” the Hanover Institute cites a 2022 poll that found that 47% of Israeli Jews believed that statement. Another report casts doubt on UNICEF's assertion that “90% of water and institutional infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed” in Gaza. Many of the reports conclude by linking the topic to rising antisemitism, oftentimes citing the same studies.

In a few cases, the Hanover Institute publishes what it claims are original findings. For instance, it put out a study saying 19 of the 36 most-watched Israel-Gaza explainer videos contain contested claims, with most of the contested claims aligning with the Palestinian narrative.

The Hanover Institute’s publications sometimes contradict Israeli government narratives. For instance, one report says that foreign funding of universities as an explanation for antisemitic incidents is “weak and full of exceptions.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pushed this theory, telling Breitbart last year that Europeans and Qataris have spent “billions of American universities, vilifying, vilifying Israel, vilifying Jews, also, frankly, vilifying the United States.”

Alice Lee, an analyst at NewsGuard, a disinformation tracking company, told RS that the sites appear designed to reach a US audience curious about the ongoing conflict, either through search engines or AI chatbots. "LLMs favor concrete statistics and data, as well as strong citations and sources, which these articles all have," Lee said.

"It's a perfect mimicry of a typical credible American think tank, right down to the generic name, the site layout, and the red-white-blue color scheme," Lee added.

Piro, Inc, the firm that created the Hanover Institute, has received $900,000 from the Israeli government for its work. Like many other contractors working for Israel, Piro’s work is subcontracted through Havas Media, a French public relations conglomerate.

The fake think tank has churned out over 100 reports since it started publishing on August 6. The Hanover Institute claims that “cited research is peer-reviewed and academic,” although it frequently cites Israeli government sources such as the Israel Defense Forces and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

RS analyzed 12 random Hanover Institute articles using GPTZero, a popular AI detection software that claims a low false-positive rate. GPTZero flagged 11 of the articles as AI-written with “high confidence”; it flagged one article as AI-written with “moderate confidence.”

Israel has also contracted former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale to create pro-Israel websites engineered to influence chatbots as part of a $46.5 million contract. A Drop Site investigation last month found that many chatbots, particularly Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini, had been successfully trained on data from those websites. Other chatbots frequently cite those websites without flagging them as part of an Israeli influence operation.

Piro does not explicitly state in its agreement submitted to the Department of Justice that its work for Israel is to influence AI. In an email to Politico, which first reported the filing, Rosenberg said his firm’s work is to “put accurate, sourced facts into the public record and to counter misinformation about Israel with verifiable information.” However, last month, Rosenberg posted on LinkedIn advertising Piro’s ability to influence chatbots:

“When someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity about your category, an answer comes back in one confident paragraph. Most brands have no idea how that paragraph gets built. So we spent months reverse-engineering it…At Piro, we already knew how to build stories that move people. The question was: how do you make sure AI knows how to tell them?”

This week marks the beginning of Brazil's presidential campaign, with the two front-runners—current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro—officially launching their campaigns. After visiting Brazil and talking with politicians, activists, journalists, and ordinary citizens, I came away with the conviction that this is one of the most consequential presidential elections in Brazil's recent history. The outcome on October 4 will shape not only Brazil's future but also the political direction of Latin America.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, now 80 years old, is seeking a fourth presidential term. Brazil's Constitution allows presidents to serve only two consecutive terms, but they may run again after sitting out at least one term. That is how Lula returned to office in 2023 after governing from 2003 to 2010.

Following the four-year presidency of the far-right Jair Bolsonaro, Lula’s supporters say he has rebuilt many of the institutions and policies weakened under Bolsonaro. His government has reduced hunger, expanded social programs, strengthened environmental protections for the Amazon, and pursued a more independent foreign policy rather than simply following Washington's dictates. Brazil has reasserted itself as an important voice in the Global South, advocating for a more multipolar world and strengthening ties with countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Although Lula remains popular and has a good chance of winning the election, many Brazilians are frustrated by sluggish economic growth, persistent concerns about crime, and political fatigue after years of bitter polarization. His more ardent critics say Lula is a corrupt left-wing politician who has remained in public life for too long.

The outcome on October 4 will shape not only Brazil's future but also the political direction of Latin America.

Lula also has detractors on the left, who accuse him of being too centrist. They point to his inability to deliver many campaign promises, harsh austerity measures under his administration, policies that expand privatization, and his reluctance to reverse several of Bolsonaro-era regressive policies. They criticize him for moving too slowly on land reform and for accommodating powerful agribusiness and fossil fuel interests. Some also call on him to go much further in challenging US influence in Latin America, including by sending oil to Cuba as it suffers under the cruel decades-long US blockade.

Yet despite these criticisms, most of Brazil's progressive movements remain united behind Lula. Whatever their frustrations with his government, they see defeating the far right as the overriding priority. They also recognize that Brazil's far right is stronger, better organized, and more deeply rooted than it was a decade ago. They believe Lula's cautious approach reflects not only political pragmatism but also a desire to avoid provoking forces that have already demonstrated a willingness to challenge democratic institutions through violence.

That became clear when the right, led by President Jair Bolsonaro, refused to accept that Lula had won the 2022 elections. On January 8, 2023, Bolsonaro supporters stormed Brazil's Congress, Supreme Court, and presidential palace in an effort to overturn the election. The similarities with the January 6 insurrection by Trump supporters are striking.

But in Brazil, Bolsonaro was actually convicted for his role in the conspiracy. He is now serving a prison sentence under house arrest and is unable to run for president. So his movement is represented by his son, 45-year-old Senator Flávio Bolsonaro.

Flávio brings his own political baggage. His reputation was damaged by allegations that members of his legislative staff were required to kick back part of their taxpayer-funded salaries in a scheme to enrich him personally. His campaign has also been shaken by revelations that he sought millions of dollars from a jailed banker to finance a film celebrating his father's presidency in hopes of boosting his own presidential campaign. Even his own family has become a political liability. A bitter public dispute with his stepmother, former First Lady Michelle Bolsonaro, exposed deep divisions within the Bolsonaro movement and deprived him of one of the Brazilian right's most influential voices among women voters.

As Flávio struggles to broaden his support at home, he has sought help from abroad. Argentine President Javier Milei traveled to Brazil to campaign on his behalf. Donald Trump and members of his administration have openly supported Flávio, aggravating US-Brazil tensions that recently blew up when Lula's government refused visas to two US State Department officials on grounds that they intended to interfere in Brazil's democratic process. The Trump administration responded by revoking the US visa of Brazil's ambassador to Washington. The episode reflects growing concern about US attempts to influence Brazil’s election.

Perhaps the most astonishing example of foreign influence comes from Israel. Instead of announcing his presidential ambitions to the Brazilian people at home, Flávio first did so during a visit to Israel, where he accused Lula of antisemitism and pledged to move Brazil's embassy to Jerusalem. Benjamin Netanyahu later publicly endorsed him.

At a time when so many Latin American governments have shifted to the right—or even the far right—all eyes are on Brazil. It is Latin America's largest country, its largest economy, and one of the most influential voices in the Global South.

Polls show Lula with a narrow lead over Flávio. But if no candidate secures more than 50% of the vote in the October 4 first round, the election will go to a runoff between the top two contenders on October 25.

If Lula is reelected, Brazil is expected to continue pursuing an independent foreign policy, strengthening South-South cooperation, deepening its role in BRICS, and resisting efforts to pull Latin America back into Washington's geopolitical orbit. A Flávio Bolsonaro victory, by contrast, would likely bring Brazil into much closer alignment with the Trump administration and revive the nationalist, authoritarian politics associated with his father's presidency.

That is why so many Brazilians see this election as far more than a contest between two political rivals. For them, it is a choice between two fundamentally different visions of Brazil's future—and of its place in the world.

A right-wing libertarian think tank has confirmed that Medicare for All would provide massive savings. Savings that could be as high as $40 trillion with Medicare for all.

That’s right, folks.

The Cato Institute put out an analysis last week intended to terrify America of the DSA agenda.

Unfortunately for them, math was not on their side.

The people that are trying to terrify us about doing things differently weren’t able to get their math to work because, guess what? It turns out it’s more effective, efficient, and cost-effective to cover everybody all at the same time from one pool of cash.

Their own analysis suggests universal healthcare saves Americans between $40 trillion and $4 trillion over the next decade, depending on how well we implement it.

They reckon that universal health care would cost anywhere between $40 trillion and $75 trillion. What they what I failed to mention is that the current, albeit shitty, health care system we have now is projected to cost around $80 trillion over that same stretch.

Both of Cato’s estimates, their low one and their absolute worst case, save America money over the current system. The people that are trying to terrify us about doing things differently weren’t able to get their math to work because, guess what? It turns out it’s more effective, efficient, and cost-effective to cover everybody all at the same time from one pool of cash.

So if we actually implemented it efficiently and did it well, if America did the thing where we’re the best country on the planet, then that would mean we save about $40 trillion over the next 10 years. Which would be more than enough money to ramp up the needed supply side of our health care system. It would be more than enough money, while still saving money, to build new hospitals and clinics, reopen rural hospitals and clinics, training a generation of medical professionals, revive the health care deserts in thousands of American counties, and have cash to spare.

We can have more for less. That’s the crazy thing here: more for less.

This isn’t some former AOC/Bernie lefty fella saying this. It’s a libertarian, right-wing institute think tank telling us that just moving to DSA’s big idea version of Medicare for All will free up enough money from the American economy to satisfy build a world class healthcare system.

It turns out, if you look under the hood just a little bit at the engines that drive our economy (whether it’s health care, education, child care, infrastructure, scientific research, or pharmaceutical production), you’ll see that there is massive waste, fraud, and abuse. The waste, fraud, and abuse happens after we write the checks. The problem is when the US becomes an ATM for corporations big and small.

When we go after the waste, fraud, and abuse at the level of the corporations that are scamming us, robbing us blind, then we find that there is a significant savings. We can have more for less. That’s the crazy thing here: more for less.

Just fixing the one element of our healthcare system of who pays for it, let alone restructuring the entire system itself. We turn an $80 trillion machine of denial, waiting, telephone calls, and endless questions of “Are they in my network or are they not?” into a 50% savings that takes away much of that irritation.

I say we can do even better than that.

Healthcare as a utility. Doctors, nurses, dentists, all the folks who make up that system, as plentiful as electricity and water. As easy to reach as the tap and the light switch. There’d be nothing left to fight over.

What if our health care system was as trusted as the fire department? When your kitchen’s ablaze and you dial 911, you know a red truck and excited, ready-to-go people are coming to help you.

That can only be done by changing the way we do it. Not writing bigger checks to the same middlemen. Building it. Training the doctors. Pouring the concrete. Running it ourselves, like we’ve done before, like we can do again.

Cato wrote this report to scare us off, but if you just look at it, it’s the best news we could have gotten.

We’ve been hearing a lot of panicky warnings lately after Democratic primary voters chose socialists and other leftists instead of “moderates” in several major elections. The alarm bells got louder this month after Michigan’s progressive Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed defeated Rep. Haley Stevens—who was, the New York Times reported, “the moderate establishment-backed candidate.”

The soothing “moderate” label routinely goes to candidates like Stevens who’ve supported continual arming of Israel. She “benefited from about $62 million in advertising spending from half a dozen outside groups,” the Times noted. “Over half of that sum came from the super PAC arm of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the country’s most influential pro-Israel group.”

What’s so “moderate” about supporting genocide?

Politicians are also routinely dubbed “moderate” when they’re running interference for extreme income inequality and deadly healthcare inequities – helping to block popular policy options like tax hikes on the rich and Medicare for All, which is supported by three-quarters of Democrats.

The Democratic base is fed up with a system that gives inordinate power to the wealthy and to large corporations. In the real world, the so-called “moderates” are aligned with a status quo that continues to inflict widespread suffering and preventable death at home and abroad.

To hear timeworn party strategists like James Carville and Paul Begala tell it, leftwing candidates are duping the Democratic electorate. As this month began, Carville threatened to leave the party. Begala made headlines by declaring, “I don’t like the socialists. I can’t stand them.”

But last month, a CNN poll found that “about a third of Democrats and Democratic-leaning adults identify as democratic socialists.” At a time when defeating the fascistic Republican Party is imperative, any strategist’s prescription that would denigrate or seek to exclude them amounts to political malpractice.

Treating so many Democratic voters like interlopers to be scolded might play well with corporate donors. But it’s a feeble swim against the political current. Polling shows that the younger Democratic voters are, the more favorable they’re apt to be toward socialism. “Younger adults are more likely to be in groups on the left, while older adults tend to cluster in more conservative groups,” the Pew Research Center noted.

Drawing on the results of its new public opinion survey, Global Strategy Group just reported that “socialist Democrats skew younger, with 57 percent of them being between the ages of 18 and 44.” Another poll, released a month ago by Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research, found that two-thirds of young people “said that their political views have changed in some way in recent years”—and “youth whose views did shift were almost twice as likely to become more liberal/progressive instead of more conservative.”

As socialists and others on the left prevail in many high-profile races, the refrains of condemnation coming from some of the Democratic Party establishment are potshots in a losing battle. By definition, young voters are the future of the party. Its prospects for winning elections are diminished to the extent that younger voters are made to feel unwelcome, or even vilified.

To the ears of many young Democratic voters, derision about how they cast their ballots is coming from out-of-touch party elders who treat crucial problems as abstractions or matters worthy only of lip service. Millions of Americans in early adulthood are facing financial stress with bleak outlooks for jobs and careers. College tuitions are often prohibitive, and college debt can be debilitating. Rents and mortgages are high. Everyday expenses are worse than a challenge. The climate crisis is real.

Such realities cast a shadow over the future. The last thing those voters want is arrogant leadership that refuses to grasp the urgency of this political moment.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM ET.

Today we discuss:

• Centrist Democrats keep pressuring progressive Democrats to cut ties with their most strident allies, like streamer Hasan Piker. “Well look, you know, it certainly makes sense to get rid of this Hasan Piker affiliation,” Haley Stevens told Fox. “I’m calling for that. I’ve continued to call on that.” Why are corporatists out to divide the Left? Will the Left let itself fall for the Sista Souljah tactic?

• Ecuadorean fishermen are being bombed and killed by unidentified “gringos” using drones, spurring a mystery over whether the US military, another country or mercenaries are behind the murders. One fishing boat has been lost at sea since January, with 8 people presumed dead. Survivors blame English-speaking assailants wearing matching uniforms with American flag patches, without clear insignia, who hauled them out of the water, questioned and then handed over to El Salvador’s navy before being released. A plane based out of a military base in El Salvador followed and surveilled them before.

• Public figures and friends of Jason Arday have called for a public inquiry into media coverage surrounding the former Cambridge professor, 41, before his suicide.

LIVE ON RUMBLE: https://rumble.com/c/DeProgramShow

https://x.com/tedrall

https://x.com/JamarlThomas

#tedrall #jamarlthomas #news #politics

The post Democrats’ War Against Hasan Piker | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Whatever White House security officials deemed a credible threat from Iran prompted the Secret Service to sneak Trump off Air Force One and fly him out of Turkey on a different plane. Staff, Air Force One personnel, and journalists were forced to fly on a decoy plane that might have been a target for destruction.

The post Yeet the Press appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Pete Hegseth’s Department of War is building America’s largest quantum computing project right here on the Southside of Chicago, to the detriment of not only our city but the world at large. Gov. JB Pritzker has lauded the venture capital project as an unprecedented opportunity to make Illinois the “Silicon Valley of quantum development.” With whose consent? On whose land? And on whose dime?

When examining the backers of the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP), it is difficult to rationalize this $9 billion project as anything but an accelerative altar to militarism. Alongside federal backing from DARPA, investors such as BlackRock, IBM, and Israeli startup Quantum Machines have all cited quantum technology as the next frontier in modern warfare. The military-industrial complex has emphatically doubled down on quantum computing technology and advanced computing in AI alike as the next crucial edges in 21st-century militarism. Indeed, AI technology in warfare is already being used extensively by the US and Israel to terrorize the SWANA region.

Even with the considerable private capital financing already allotted to this project's troubling Big Tech-war machine alliance, Illinois taxpayers are the top funders of IQMP by far. To the sum of more than 700 million state dollars, the land and water beneath our feet have been sold out to private equity military contracts. As families across our cities starve, as rent costs go up and our unhoused neighbors are continually displaced, we must stop the flow of state and city resources from being directed to a global surveillance state hellbent on mass destruction.

On a local level, the Chicago City Council has unanimously approved the Quantum Park's construction on three separate occasions, with Mayor Brandon Johnson contributing $5 million from the city’s already strained budget. The contrast between the typical glacial speed of approval from City Council and the suspiciously rapid approval process of this project is jarring to say the least, particularly when one considers the largely uncharted nature of the technology itself.

Southside Together's campaign against Quantum is an unequivocal stand for people power against the cynical backdrop of Big Tech fatalism.

Southside Together, an organization focused on building people power with working-class Southside residents, collected signatures proposing a non-binding referendum concerning IQMP. The petition asked one question: "Should our local elected officials stop the construction of the IQMP and instead invest directly in community resources?" Non-binding ballot referendums are rarely challenged on the basis of their language, yet this expression of community consensus was struck from the ballot summarily. Southside residents, in particular, breaking the silence on this project have been clearly delineated as a high-priority threat by backing city officials.

Widespread awareness and community dissent could in fact function as IQMP’s death knell. If organizing on the Southside alone has already scared these Big Tech military syndicates into such frantic repression, imagine what genuine citywide resistance to quantum computing development could accomplish in turn.

As Gov. Pritzker and Mayor Johnson push this project through, they are continuing to make the people of Chicago complicit in war crimes across the globe. Do Illinois politicians want this escalation in Big Tech militarism to be their legacy? More importantly, are we as Chicago residents at ease with the unprecedented horrors of quantum and AI warfare coming out of our own backyards?

Southside Together's campaign against Quantum is an unequivocal stand for people power against the cynical backdrop of Big Tech fatalism. Join the fight today against what quantum tech threatens to do tomorrow.

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In a 2002 video, Donald Trump was interviewed about his favorite movie, Orson Welles’ 1941 classic, Citizen Kane. In the discussion, he likened himself to the film’s principal character, Charles Foster Kane—a man portrayed as rising to become the richest and most powerful man in the world. But, as Trump noted, there was a price to pay. Kane ends his life in solitude, divorced and bereft of friends: “I think you learned in Kane,” he concluded, “that maybe wealth isn’t everything because he had the wealth but he didn’t have the happiness... In real life I do believe that wealth does in fact isolate you from other people.”

Trump isn’t the only one who has seen a resemblance between him and his fictional counterpart. Over the years, many commentators have pointed out the similarities:

• Both men inherit great wealth but grow up in harsh circumstances—Kane under a strict and heartless guardian; Trump under a demanding and punitive father.
• As adults, both are marked by a high level of narcissism and lack of empathy.
• Kane becomes known for a ruthless and amoral approach to the newspaper business; Trump is said to have used similar tactics in real estate.
• In mock newsreel footage, a smiling Kane is shown on a balcony with Adolf Hitler; in news coverage, Trump appears in friendly meetings with Vladimir Putin and other autocrats.
• Kane aspires to political power and runs for governor of New York as a step toward the presidency; Trump aspires to political power and runs directly for the presidency.
• During his campaign, Kane threatens to have his political opponent prosecuted; running against Hilary Clinton in 2016, Trump leads the chants of “lock her up.”
• Kane leaves his socialite wife for an aspiring singer, Susan Alexander; Trump divorces two socialites before marrying a fashion model, Melania Knauss.
• When Kane loses his gubernatorial race, he claims fraud at the polls; when Trump loses in 2020, his claims of voter fraud become a never-ending refrain.
• In Florida, Kane builds an artificial mountain on which to build a palatial estate that he names Xanadu after Kublai Khan’s fabled capitol; Trump’s opulent “Winter Whitehouse,” Mar-a-Lago, spans the entire width of an exclusive Florida barrier island and is estimated to be worth over half a billion dollars.
• Kane turns on even his best friend; Trump dumps even his most loyal followers.

That was then; this is now—and things have changed. A fresh look at the comparison shows that the arc of Trump’s life has departed significantly from that of Charles Foster Kane:

• Kane’s run for governor is abruptly derailed when his affair with Susan Alexander is made public; Trump’s legendary infidelities are easily brushed off. Even reports of paying hush money to a porn star to suppress a story about an alleged affair, boasting about grabbing women by their private parts, and being found liable for sexual abuse in a court of law, barely dent his campaigns—and in both 2016 and 2024, Trump ascends to the highest office in the land.
• After his defeat at the polls, Kane retires from public life; after his defeat in 2020, Trump remains very active in public life, even inciting a mob of supporters to attack the Capitol in an effort to overturn the election.
• Kane’s electoral defeat makes it impossible for him to follow through on his threat to have his political rival prosecuted; in both Trump’s first and second terms, at his urging, his Department of Justice repeatedly targets his political opponents.
• Kane builds a $2 million dollar (equivalent to $45 million today) opera house for Susan Alexander’s operatic performances, which are lambasted by the critics and shunned by audiences; Trump megadonor, Jeff Bezos, funds a $40 million documentary about Melania that receives crushing critical reviews—but is a huge success with MAGA-faithful audiences.
• In the stock market crash of 1929, Kane loses his newspaper and much of his wealth; over his career, Trump’s companies declare bankruptcy six times—but he emerges personally unscathed, with banks and creditors absorbing the losses. And during his presidency, Trump’s personal fortune grows to over $7 billion.
• Humiliated and deeply depressed by her failed singing career and isolated life with Kane, Susan Alexander walks out on him; Melania appears to have little interest in her role as first lady and spends very little time at the White House, but shows no signs of walking out on Trump—so far. She has, however, renegotiated her prenuptial agreement with Trump at least three times, not a sign of enduring commitment.
• Kane spends his last days isolated and friendless in his decaying mansion; although more and more isolated because of fears of assassination attempts, especially since he initiated his war with Iran, Trump remains surrounded by loyal family members, devoted staff, compliant yes-men, sycophants, and, when in Florida, the ultra-rich membership of his elite Mar-a-Lago social club.

The question now is, what happens after Trump leaves office on January 20, 2029—assuming that he does leave office. It seems improbable that he will, like Kane, willingly recede from public view and become isolated, personally and politically. But, in his declining years, will he find himself powerless to keep his friends and loyal entourage from slipping away? Will the GOP seek to distance itself more and more from him? Will his efforts to grab headlines fade as the news media loses interest in him? Will legal fees, criminal penalties, a collapse of his cryptocurrency and a downturn in the real estate market combine to decimate his financial empire? Will Melania seek a multimillion dollar divorce settlement? In other words, will the arc of Trump’s life begin to realign with that of Charles Foster Kane?

On Kane’s deathbed, he utters the single word, “Rosebud,” which we later learn was the name emblazoned on his childhood sled. In his 2002 video, Trump explains that, “I think the significance is bringing a lonely, rather sad figure back into his childhood.” Did he foresee that nostalgia for a simpler, happier time in his life—perhaps before his political career—might be his own destiny? Probably not. But time will tell where the parallels between Charles Foster Kane and Donald J. Trump ultimately end.

Suppose for a moment that reliance on nuclear arms by the United States and other nuclear powers will produce “strategic stability” for the rest of this century. That is, that there will be no nuclear war or war on a major scale between the nuclear powers.

Is that a world we should want to live in, a world where security depends on the potential for the devastation of entire societies, a world where we are supposed to live moral lives in the context of an immoral system of global security? My answer is no.

The question, however, is based on a false premise. It is a fantasy that reliance on nuclear arms can be counted upon to produce stability indefinitely. That can be demonstrated just by looking at today’s conflicts. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in violation of the United Nations Charter was preceded by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threat to resort to nuclear weapons should Western states intervene in support of Ukraine. Then in the fall of 2022, it was credibly reported that that the Biden administration believed that the Russian government was operationally moving toward the use of nuclear weapons.

The US attack on Iran, another violation of the UN Charter, has been accompanied by President Donald Trump’s bluster about wreaking society-ending devastation on Iran, evoking the possibility of use of nuclear weapons. Whether or not his nuclear bluster is specific and credible enough to be considered a “threat” as a matter of international law, it certainly runs counter to the notion that use of nuclear weapons is out of the question.

A broader view of the Nuremberg principle of individual responsibility is that citizens are acting in accordance with that principle when they take responsibility for preventing nuclear war.

Nuclear deterrence involves the readiness to inflict massive devastation on other societies, even if targets are said to be military. It is planning and preparation for the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity and in some cases crimes against peace. Crimes against peace concern aggressive war. The use of nuclear weapons to initiate an aggressive war would certainly be a crime against peace. But there is a good case that the first use of nuclear weapons by a state defending itself would be so escalatory and disproportionate as to be a crime against peace.

Nazi officials were convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity. They were also convicted of the crime against peace of waging aggressive war, including planning for the war that was carried out.

This was done in accordance with the Nuremberg principle of individual responsibility. Individuals, not only states, can be held accountable for the commission of international crimes.

A broader view of the Nuremberg principle of individual responsibility is that citizens are acting in accordance with that principle when they take responsibility for preventing nuclear war. That can be done in many ways. One is non-violent protest, as took place August 6 outside the Livermore nuclear weapons laboratory in California.

Reliance on nuclear arms by the United States and other states means that the world is in a state of risk, immorality, and illegality. The imperative is to end that state of affairs.

30 years ago, on July 8, 1996, the International Court of Justice released its advisory opinion on the legality of threat or use of nuclear weapons. The court found nuclear threat or use to be generally illegal, especially because such use cannot be reconciled with core principles of international humanitarian law forbidding the infliction of indiscriminate harm and unnecessary suffering. The court was clear that if a use of weapons is illegal, the threat of such use is illegal.

However, the court did not address all circumstances of nuclear use, and did not assess nuclear deterrence. But the court unquestionably recognized the state of at least potential illegality involved in reliance on nuclear arms.

So the court concluded its opinion with an analysis of something it was not asked, the nature of the nuclear disarmament obligation rooted in Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and in UN General Assembly resolutions going back to the 1950s. And the court gave a very strong interpretation of the obligation, finding that the obligation is to pursue in good faith and conclude negotiations on nuclear disarmament.

There have been other important efforts to move the world out of the state of risk, immorality, and illegality. In NPT review conferences beginning in 1995, non-nuclear weapon states extracted commitments from the nuclear weapon states such as reducing the role of nuclear weapons and engaging in verified reductions leading to elimination. If they had been implemented, by now the commitments would have brought the world much closer to the elimination of nuclear weapons, if not all the way there.

In 2017, non-nuclear weapon states negotiated the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). One hundred states are now signatories, not including, however, any nuclear-armed states. Whether the TPNW will serve as a vehicle for the nuclear-armed states to accomplish the elimination of nuclear weapons is open to doubt; they probably would create their own vehicle. Without question, though, the TPNW is a marvelous statement of the principles that should motivate and guide the achievement of a world free of nuclear weapons. The first review conference of the TPNW will be held late this year.

We are currently living in a world of conflict, and especially under Trump, the United States has turned away from the multilateralism that reached its peak in the 1990s with the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. But the reality is that nuclear abolition, probably in conjunction with other arms control and with changes in global governance, is by far the best way to address the risks, immorality, and illegality of reliance on nuclear arms.

This month marks 61 years since Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law. Fifty-four years ago, Congress sent the Equal Rights Amendment to the states—now ratified by the three-quarters of the states the Constitution requires. On August 26, the 19th Amendment granting women’s universal suffrage turns 106. Three anniversaries, one question: Why, in 2026, are we still fighting for rights already won—the right to vote, equal pay, the Equal Rights Amendment Congress refuses to recognize as ratified?

In April, the Supreme Court answered part of that question. In Louisiana v. Callais, a 6-3 majority ruled that challengers to a discriminatory voting map must prove intent to discriminate, not merely effect—the same sleight of hand the court used in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) to gut the Voting Rights Act's preclearance formula. The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would fix what Shelby County broke, still sits in Congress 13 years later. That is not neglect. It is a choice—and it is shameful.

The consequences are not abstract: At least six Black Democratic members of Congress face elimination through Republican redistricting this year, and one-third of the majority-minority districts under threat are held by women. The Congressional Black Caucus—grown from 13 members in 1971 to a historic high of 62 today—is being dismantled, district by district, ruling by ruling.

Then there's President Donald Trump's SAVE America Act, dressed up as election security: It requires documentary proof of citizenship to register. But an estimated 69 million American women hold a legal name that doesn't match their birth certificate—married, divorced, or changed. A woman may need a birth certificate, marriage license, divorce decree, passport, and driver's license just to prove she is herself: a paperwork tax that falls hardest on women with low incomes, survivors of domestic violence, and older women whose records are scattered across a lifetime.

You cannot protect the paycheck if you cannot protect the ballot. You cannot protect the ballot if you cannot protect the Constitution.

The suppression of Black votes and of women's votes are not separate struggles—they are the same assault, mounted by the same forces, to concentrate power permanently in the hands of those who hold it. Every woman in America who has changed her name is in the crosshairs. The attack on the Voting Rights Act, on women's economic security, and the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment are one battle.

What ties it together is economic justice: For the second consecutive year, the gender pay gap has widened. Women working full time now earn 81 cents for every dollar men earn—down from 83 cents, down from 84 the year before, the first back-to-back widening since the 1960s. For Black women, that figure drops to 65 cents, a gap of $28,340 a year. For Latinas, 58 cents—$33,620 a year. Over a lifetime, the gap costs a woman roughly half a million dollars—and for many women of color, more than $1 million.

That is not a gap. It’s a transfer of wealth—smaller Social Security checks, depleted retirement savings, less generational wealth. The root cause: Women lack the constitutional guarantee of equality that would force government, courts, and employers to treat these harms seriously.

That guarantee is the Equal Rights Amendment. The legal threshold for ratification has been met—all that remains is for Congress to pass a joint resolution affirming the ERA as the 28th Amendment. Every House Democrat has co-sponsored it. One Republican has joined them. Only one.

Our organizations are built on a truth that has not changed: Economic justice and political power are inseparable.

You cannot protect the paycheck if you cannot protect the ballot. You cannot protect the ballot if you cannot protect the Constitution.

Today we stand more than 100 years past the Suffrage Amendment, 61 past the Voting Rights Act, 54 past the day Congress sent the ERA to the states. A new Congress, elected in November, can choose which anniversary this country keeps: rights fought for and won, or rights quietly let go.

The forces of reaction aren't just trying to curtail our votes and reduce our paychecks. They’re trying to erase them. We will not stop until Congress acts.

This op-ed was distributed by American Forum.

“The Blue Pearl is the vehicle of the individual soul. It is in the Blue Pearl that the soul leaves the body after death and travels to different worlds. It is extremely fine and subtle, and it moves like lightning... The Blue Pearl is the size of a sesame seed, but in reality it is so vast that it contains the entire universe.”—Swami Muktananda, Meditate

I read Meditate in the mid-’90s, a few years before my wife’s death. After her death, nothing seemed equal to the grief I was feeling. My life was a shattered pane of glass. I needed something to hold myself together. This is when the Blue Pearl came to me, or so it seemed—not as an external truth but simply as God-knows-what, floating in my tears. I held it to my heart. Perhaps now it’s time to share “The Blue Pearl,” a poem I wrote in the midst of my grief, which put the grief into context.

A silver moon blesses

the Osco parking lot

as my wife lies sleeping

with terminal cancer.

This is her homecoming.

My breast pocket bulges

with prescription morphine

and I have just been accused

of stealing milk.

What I mean to say

is that life is good.

This is the secret of cancer,

that as it eats away

at the skin of the future,

it reveals, slowly,

in cold, hard luster,

beneath the ticking of days and hours,

the blue pearl,

our irreducible spirit

and connecting point to the stars.

It is the steady wonder

that life goes on.

It had been a bad week,

with Barbara’s lower GI

laid bare on Monday

to the surgeon’s disquieted eye:

Fifty liver lesions discouraged

an adventurous scalpel

from cutting a swath to the pancreas.

They sewed up the belly,

the soft belly I’d

gotten used to growing old

resting my head on,

and told her what happens

next is that you die.

This is the cancer

the saints get,

the ones too selfless

to endure the pain

of others.

On Tuesday they fed her

bile and comfort, salving

the desolate corpse of hope

with med school pity

and averted eyes.

And on Friday, after she’d begun

farting again and it was time

to go home, the season premiere of

“Sabrina the Teenage Witch”

wrenched our loving

family into three small

angry pieces.

The soft bondage of love,

souls in a crucible,

so lost together, our lives

cluttered with one another’s needs,

we make peace, then suddenly

kick out in frenzied yearning

for freedom and muddy

the elixir that cushions us: This

is a family, now strained

by death. Our daughter,

eleven, a trooper, a brave angel,

commutes willingly from school

to hospital, diagrams sentences

in Mom’s wheelchair,

parts the IV tubes to

give her kisses and eats

lime Jell-O all week;

she asks one thing only

that isn’t brave and chin-up,

to watch “Sabrina” at 7.

But Barbara cannot bear

another confined hour here

and so we snap

off the overhead box

and go, gracelessly,

at our sudden worst,

bleeding insults and disappointment

in the privacy

of our car ride home

to a new life.

And I understand that we need

a miracle but

the best I can offer

is my silence;

silence humbles me;

slowly I stop knowing

what to do.

I wait for the morphine

in fluorescent loneliness.

When my name is called

I heft as much of the future

as I am sure of—a sweating

gallon of milk for tomorrow’s

breakfast—upon the counter

and pay, thinking, this much

is done. But life

undoes me like a dirty bandage.

I’m challenged at the door,

humiliated for 30 seconds—

this is a neighborhood

where milk is stolen regularly,

perhaps—and finally,

the transaction verified,

I am released

to the moon

and my own soul.

In the lifeless parking lot

my wild heart,

so big and wanting

happiness, a cure for

cancer or just five years

five years to perfectly

love my wife, stops,

lets go of itself,

bears for an instant

the silver-streaked now

of truth,

now now only now

and always now

she is alive

and I am alive

and that’s my miracle

and it’s enough.

President Donald Trump took to social media Thursday, July 30 to announce what he called a breakthrough: a phased agreement under the Board of Peace requiring the Palestinian Resistance to disarm and Israel to withdraw. The optics were of a president closing out a genocide he, and his predecessor, enabled for two years.

The Palestinian Resistance agreed to the plan. Israel rejected it.

Imagine if the Resistance had rejected the 15 points by reasonably conditioning disarmament on an end to Israeli occupation. We don't have to imagine Trump's reaction. He'd have condemned them by nightfall and held them responsible for killing the peace plan.

Israel gets a different standard. On Sunday, August 9, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his cabinet, “I want to clarify this: Israel rejects the 15-point document.”

Trump's Gaza legacy does not differ from his predecessor former President Joe Biden's. Both stood impotent before Netanyahu's rejection.

Rather than call out Israel for sabotaging his own plan, Trump waved away Netanyahu's rejection as mere election posturing, as if that were acceptable. Trump’s dismissal didn't go unnoticed. Three days later, Israel's Defense Minister, Israel Katz, doubled down declaring that Israel will not withdraw, not from Gaza, not from Lebanon, and not from Syria

Last May, I wrote an article: “Stop blaming Netanyahu, stupid,” where I argued, it was never one man. It's the Zionist Project itself, and the Israeli public that keeps ratifying it. A poll released last summer found 76% of Israelis believe the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza was a mistake. Half of all Israelis now say they'd support renewing Jewish settlement inside Gaza itself—a figure that climbs to 83% among the ultra-Orthodox and 67% among religious Jews. And in a finding that goes to the heart of how Israelis have rewritten their own history, 56% now believe that if the 2005 disengagement had never happened, October 7 would have been far less likely.

Withdrawal, in other words, has been recast in the Israeli imagination as the original sin, not occupation, and not Israel’s pre-October 7 starvation siege.

In rejecting Trump’s plan, Netanyahu is pandering to his voting base. He is giving the Israeli Jewish majority exactly what they've told pollsters they want. He's competing against political challengers who reject any withdrawal from Gaza. Trump excuses this as political “posturing,” as if it's temporary, when in fact, it is creating a status quo to be normalized after the election.

As usual, Israel responded to Trump’s plan in two days of intensive strikes across Gaza, murdering 26 Palestinians and wounding 76. The single ugliest strike hit medicine warehouses attached to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah, one of the last facilities in central Gaza still able to treat large numbers of patients. Two of four storage buildings were destroyed and two more badly damaged. The target was a “dangerous storage” of intravenous fluid, dialysis supplies, intensive-care medication, in a place where half the dialysis machines didn't work and kidney patients were dying because treatment sessions keep getting cut.

These weren't abstractions. In Gaza City's al-Sousi Tower, a strike killed Abdullah Abu Taif, 33; his pregnant wife, Abeer Anan, 29; their 5-year-old son, Azzam; and where medics recovered the remains of an unborn child from the rubble. Near Khan Younis, a strike murdered Mahmoud al-Hams, 38; his wife, Fatima, 37; and their young daughter. An elderly couple, Kamal and Huda Abu Muailiq, were killed in their home near Deir el-Balah the same night.

This’s how Israel translates Trump’s “breakthrough” on the ground.

It is how Netanyahu sends a message to American presidents, as he did nearly a year ago when he openly defied Trump’s calls to stop bombing Gaza. Palestinian children’s blood becomes the currency of political pressure. With every refusal to heed Washington, Netanyahu demonstrates that he can ignore an American president’s demands without consequence, while the credibility and authority of the US president are diminished in the process. Netanyahu’s arrogant message is unmistakable: Israel can defy Washington, and Washington will absorb the political cost.

In October 2025, Israel secured the release of Israeli captives under a deal conditioned on ending the war. It got what it wanted immediately and did not deliver on its side. Since the ceasefire of October 10, 2025, Israel has violated it more than 4,000 times, murdering 1,300 Palestinians—more than all the Israelis, soldiers and civilians, killed on October 7. This is while food aid deliveries was two-thirds less than what the agreement promised. The territory Israel was supposed to withdraw from has instead expanded from 53% to 70%. Any withdrawal Israel may now negotiate, if any at all, will start from that expanded line of occupation, not the yellow line agreed at the ceasefire.

A president who announces a peace deal to the world has no agency of his own. He is too weak to bring himself to hold Netanyahu to account for rejecting his own plan; a political eunuch, unable to rein in a potentate whose country survives on US political and financial largesse.

Trump's Gaza legacy does not differ from his predecessor former President Joe Biden's. Both stood impotent before Netanyahu's rejection. Two subservient leaders who had shown over again that Israel does not answer to Washington, Washington answers to Israel. They leave behind a legacy of enabling an Israeli genocide and two consecutive Israel-first administrations.

To House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer—Your responses on July 1, 2026 on the reporting of the $2.2 billion profit personally reaped by President Donald Trump, while allegedly a public servant in 2025, was not specific enough.

Jeffries (NY) wrote on his social media account: “Donald Trump made more than $2 billion during his first year as President. Republicans are enriching themselves while making your life more expensive. We must crush the culture of corruption.”

Schumer (NY) wrote on his: “$2.2 BILLION for the Trump family. Higher costs for the American people.”

You should have described his huge loot as $1.1 million an hour. That’s right, $1.1 million an hour based on a 40-hour work week over one year. (And remember, Trump spends a lot of his time on his vengeance missions, his golf game, and napping—so a 40-hour work week is a generous estimate.)

You can ask for widespread feedback from the American people and make it part of his widely discernible profiteering persona of greed and lawless power.

You should have then compared that enormous sum per hour with the Trump-GOP supported federal minimum wage, frozen at $7.25 per hour. This would have given you the perfect occasion to highlight the case for a much higher federal minimum wage, helping tens of millions of American workers.

You also omitted his unlawful agreement with the Internal Revenue Service to give him a free ride on tax abuses.

Such profiteering from his public office at $1.1 million an hour is staggering, especially when you detail where it came from. This would have resonated with a huge portion of the voting public, including Republicans. Instead, Democrats lost the opportunity to make that stunningly understandable communication. But it is not too late to revive and make more concrete his boastful misuse of the office of the presidency. You can compare it with past presidents’ sense of self restraint. You can ask for widespread feedback from the American people and make it part of his widely discernible profiteering persona of greed and lawless power.

One further response to this mountain of greed by Donald Trump should be joint shadow hearings between the House and Senate Democrats during this August recess. This would bring this appalling engagement by Trump in his various investment arrangements to a wider audience and highlight recommendations of reforms to prevent such massive and dubious self-enrichment by a president of the United States. There will be many competent legal and other experts to testify at your hearings, which no doubt will reveal more information and reach a large audience during the August recess.

These hearings would provide the Capitol press corps with much needed information to fulfill their professional responsibility to provide the people with their right to know the fuller details of what has yet not been reported.

Another way to put it is, you don’t make $1.1 million an hour by pushing a button. There is a lot of personal hidden back-and-forths by many people and many conflicts of interest to make that rich haul a reality.

Contact your Democratic members of Congress and demand shadow hearings. Ask for their written response. Do your part to help make it happen. The Congressional Switchboard number is 202-224-3121.