The retiring United Nations envoy for the Middle East peace process has insightfully identified a major reason the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians continues to boil and to entail widespread death and destruction.

In a recent interview with The New York Times, Norwegian diplomat Tor Wennesland criticized the international community for relying on short-term fixes such as improving quality of life in occupied territory or diversions such as seeking peace deals between Israel and other Arab states. The crescendo of bloodshed during the past year underscores the ineffectiveness of such approaches.

Needed but not employed was a concerted and sustained diplomatic effort to end the occupation and create a Palestinian state. “What we have seen,” said Wennesland, “is the failure of dealing with the real conflict, the failure of politics and diplomacy.”

It is important to understand what diplomacy in this context does and does not mean. It does not mean routinely giving lip service to a “two-state solution” while doing little or nothing to bring about such a solution.

Much of Wennesland’s criticism was directed at the international community as a whole, but his points would apply especially to the United States, the patron of the party to the conflict that controls the land in question and resists Palestinian sovereignty.

The polar opposite of the needed diplomatic effort is what has been the dominant strategy of Israel and to a large degree also of the United States: the application of ever more military force. This was true with the 1973 war between Egypt and Israel, the first full-scale Arab-Israeli war after Israel conquered in 1967 what is now the occupied territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights.

The central feature of former U.S. President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s policy was a huge airlift of military supplies to Israel. Nixon and Kissinger, viewing the conflict in Cold War terms, considered their policy a success by enabling Israel to turn the tide of battle while shutting the Soviet Union out of a meaningful regional role.

Fast forward to today, and the emphasis is still on military escalation. Israel, in its vain effort to “destroy Hamas” and strike down adversaries on its northern border, is more committed than ever to increasing death and destruction as its default approach toward any security problem. The United States has abetted this approach by gifting $18 billion in munitions to Israel since October 2023.

The collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria does nothing to discourage these tendencies and may instead encourage them. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to the events in Syria with celebration and self-congratulations, claiming that Assad’s fall was due to earlier Israeli airstrikes on Hezbollah and Iran. The change of regime was an occasion for Israel increasing rather than decreasing its offensive military activity in Syria, including seizure of a previously demilitarized buffer zone along the Golan frontier and airstrikes in and around Damascus on the very weekend that rebels were entering the capital.

During the intervening years since the 1973 war, a couple of U.S. presidents did make genuine efforts to advance an Israeli-Palestinian peace. But the necessary follow-up—largely the responsibility of subsequent administrations—did not occur.

After former President Jimmy Carter brokered the 1978 Camp David Accords, the government of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin pocketed the resulting peace treaty with Egypt while ignoring the part of the accords dealing with the Palestinians. After former President Bill Clinton in 2000 laid on the table his "parameters" for a deal, the two sides came closer than ever to a peace agreement, but an Israeli election ended the negotiations and the new Israeli government did not return to the table.

The current impending change in U.S. administrations offers little or no hope for positive change on this subject. After social media posts by President-elect Donald Trump that said nothing about diplomacy and instead talked about “all hell to pay” if Israeli hostages were not released by his inauguration on January 20, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked Trump for his “strong statement.”

Ignoring that Israel has both the power and the land and is inflicting many times more suffering on innocent civilians than anything Hamas has done, Netanyahu said that Trump’s statement “clarifies that there is one party responsible for this situation and that is Hamas.”

Echoes of a 1973-style Cold War mentality can be heard today in much discussion of U.S. policy toward the Middle East and overwhelmingly in Israeli rhetoric. The main bête noire this time is Iran, reducing the influence of which is a constantly invoked rationale for hawkish and military-heavy policies.

The Middle East is not the only region that has demonstrated the fallacy of the notion of deescalating a conflict through military escalation. As Wennesland puts it, “Politics is what ends war, and diplomacy is what ends war.”

It is important to understand what diplomacy in this context does and does not mean. It does not mean routinely giving lip service to a “two-state solution” while doing little or nothing to bring about such a solution.

Nor does it mean seeking agreements for the sake of agreements, motivated in large part by a desire to wave supposed accomplishments before a domestic constituency. This was true of the so-called "Abraham Accords," which were not peace agreements at all but instead were largely about Israel not having to make peace to enjoy formal relations with other regional states, with which Israel was not at war anyway.

It was true as well of the enormous priority that the Biden administration put on seeking a similar agreement with Saudi Arabia, which, even if it had materialized in the form the administration envisioned, would not have served either U.S. interests or the cause of Middle East peace. The administration’s effort along this line was counterproductive not only in further reducing any Israeli incentive to make peace with the Palestinians but also, as President Joe Biden himself admitted, in probably being an additional motivation for Hamas to attack Israel last October.

As for what diplomacy does mean, it includes the concerted and sustained use of diplomatic energy, policymaking bandwidth, and political capital to address directly the core issues underlying a conflict and bring about a result that makes a difference. In the Middle East context, that result needs to include Palestinian self-determination and an end to occupation.

Correct understanding of diplomacy also speaks to what a foreign policy of restraint means. It does not mean isolationism. In areas such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it can mean an increase in diplomatic involvement and in the priority that policymakers give to the goal being sought. As the restraint-minded Quincy Institute puts it in its statement of principles, the United States “should engage with the world” and pursue peace “through the vigorous practice of diplomacy.”

Much damage from the policies that Wennesland laments has been done and cannot easily be reversed. The Israeli settlement enterprise in the occupied territories, which tsk-tsks from the United States have done nothing to stop, have led many observers—though not Wennesland—to believe that a two-state solution is no longer possible.

But even if the requirement of Palestinian self-determination could be achieved only through a one-state solution that provides equal rights for all, the same principle—that peace can be achieved only through vigorous diplomacy and not military escalation—applies.

In the famous lines of Tacitus, Roman historian, “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”

In our age, it is Israel and the U.S. that make a desert and call it peace.

The story is simple. In stark violation of international law, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers claim the right to rule over seven million Palestinian Arabs. When Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands leads to militant resistance, Israel labels the resistance “terrorism” and calls on the U.S. to overthrow the Middle East governments that back the “terrorists.” The U.S., under the sway of the Israel Lobby, goes to war on Israel’s behalf.

The fall of Syria this week is the culmination of the Israel-U.S. campaign against Syria that goes back to 1996 with Netanyahu’s arrival to office as Prime Minister. The Israel-U.S. war on Syria escalated in 2011 and 2012, when Barack Obama covertly tasked the CIA with the overthrow of the Syrian Government in Operation Timber Sycamore. That effort finally came to “fruition” this week, after more than 300,000 deaths in the Syrian war since 2011.

Syria’s fall came swiftly because of more than a decade of crushing economic sanctions, the burdens of war, the U.S. seizure of Syria’s oil, Russia’s priorities regarding the conflict in Ukraine, and most immediately, Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah, which was the key military backstop to the Syrian Government. No doubt Assad often misplayed his own hand and faced severe internal discontent, but his regime was targeted for collapse for decades by the U.S. and Israel.

Since 2011, the Israel-U.S. perpetual war on Syria, including bombing, jihadists, economic sanctions, U.S. seizure of Syria’s oil fields, and more, has sunk the Syrian people into misery.

Before the U.S.-Israel campaign to overthrow Assad began in earnest in 2011, Syria was a functioning, growing middle-income country. In January 2009, the IMF Executive Board had this to say:

Executive Directors welcomed Syria’s strong macroeconomic performance in recent years, as manifested in the rapid non-oil GDP growth, comfortable level of foreign reserves, and low and declining government debt. This performance reflected both robust regional demand and the authorities’ reform efforts to shift toward a more market- based economy.

Since 2011, the Israel-U.S. perpetual war on Syria, including bombing, jihadists, economic sanctions, U.S. seizure of Syria’s oil fields, and more, has sunk the Syrian people into misery.

In the immediate two days following the collapse of the government, Israel conducted about 480 strikes across Syria, and completely destroyed the Syrian fleet in Latakia. Pursuing his expansionist agenda, Prime Minister Netanyahu illegally claimed control over the demilitarized buffer zone in the Golan Heights and declared that the Golan Heights will be a part of the State of Israel “for eternity.”

Netanyahu’s ambition to transform the region through war, which dates back almost three decades, is playing out in front of our eyes. In a press conference on December 9th, the Israeli prime minister boasted of an “absolute victory,” justifying the on-going genocide in Gaza and escalating violence throughout the region:

I ask you, just think, if we had acceded to those who told us time and again: '"The war must be stopped"– we would not have entered Rafah, we would not have seized the Philadelphia Corridor, we would not have eliminated Sinwar, we would not have surprised our enemies in Lebanon and the entire world in a daring operation-stratagem, we would not have eliminated Nasrallah, we would not have destroyed Hezbollah's underground network, and we would not have exposed Iran's weakness. The operations that we have carried out since the beginning of the war are dismantling the axis brick by brick.

The long history of Israel’s campaign to overthrow the Syrian Government is not widely understood, yet the documentary record is clear. Israel’s war on Syria began with U.S. and Israeli neoconservatives in 1996, who fashioned a “Clean Break” strategy for the Middle East for Netanyahu as he came to office. The core of the “clean break” strategy called for the Israel (and the US) to reject “land for peace,” the idea that Israel would withdraw from the occupied Palestinian lands in return for peace. Instead, Israel would retain the occupied Palestinian lands, rule over the Palestinian people in an Apartheid state, step-by-step ethnically cleanse the state, and enforce so-called “peace for peace” by overthrowing neighboring governments that resisted Israel’s land claims.

The long history of Israel’s campaign to overthrow the Syrian Government is not widely understood, yet the documentary record is clear.

The Clean Break strategy asserts, “Our claim to the land—to which we have clung for hope for 2000 years—is legitimate and noble,” and goes on to state, “Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil. An effective approach, and one with which American can sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hizballah, Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon…”

In his 1996 book Fighting Terrorism, Netanyahu set out the new strategy. Israel would not fight the terrorists; it would fight the states that support the terrorists. More accurately, it would get the US to do Israel’s fighting for it. As he elaborated in 2001:

The first and most crucial thing to understand is this: There is no international terrorism without the support of sovereign states.… Take away all this state support, and the entire scaffolding of international terrorism will collapse into dust.

Netanyahu’s strategy was integrated into U.S. foreign policy. Taking out Syria was always a key part of the plan. This was confirmed to General Wesley Clark after 9/11. He was told, during a visit at the Pentagon, that “we’re going to attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years—we’re going to start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.” Iraq would be first, then Syria, and the rest. (Netanyahu’s campaign for the Iraq War is spelled out in detail in Dennis Fritz’s new book, Deadly Betrayal. The role of the Israel Lobby is spelled out in Ilan Pappé’s new book, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic). The insurgency that hit U.S. troops in Iraq set back the five-year timeline, but did not change the basic strategy.

The U.S. has by now led or sponsored wars against Iraq (invasion in 2003), Lebanon (U.S. funding and arming Israel), Libya (NATO bombing in 2011), Syria (CIA operation during 2010’s), Sudan (supporting rebels to break Sudan apart in 2011), and Somalia (backing Ethiopia’s invasion in 2006). A prospective U.S. war with Iran, ardently sought by Israel, is still pending.

Strange as it might seem, the CIA has repeatedly backed Islamist Jihadists to fight these wars, and jihadists have just toppled the Syrian regime. The CIA, after all, helped to create al-Qaeda in the first place by training, arming, and financing the Mujahideen in Afghanistan from the late 1970s onward. Yes, Osama bin Laden later turned on the U.S., but his movement was a U.S. creation all the same. Ironically, as Seymour Hersh confirms, it was Assad’s intelligence that “tipped off the U.S. to an impending Al Qaeda bombing attack on the headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet.”

Operation Timber Sycamore was a billion-dollar CIA covert program launched by Obama to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. The CIA funded, trained, and provided intelligence to radical and extreme Islamist groups. The CIA effort also involved a “rat line” to run weapons from Libya (attacked by NATO in 2011) to the jihadists in Syria. In 2014, Seymour Hersh described the operation in his piece “The Red Line and the Rat Line”:

“A highly classified annex to the report, not made public, described a secret agreement reached in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdoğan administrations. It pertained to the rat line. By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria.”

Soon after the launch of Timber Sycamore, in March 2013, at a joint conference by President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu at the White House, Obama said: “With respect to Syria, the United States continues to work with allies and friends and the Syrian opposition to hasten the end of Assad’s rule.”

To the U.S.-Israeli Zionist mentality, a call for negotiation by an adversary is taken as a sign of weakness of the adversary. Those who call for negotiations on the other side typically end up dead—murdered by Israel or U.S. assets. We’ve seen this play out recently in Lebanon. The Lebanese Foreign Minister confirmed that Hassan Nasrallah, Former Secretary-General of Hezbollah had agreed to a ceasefire with Israel days before his assassination. Hezbollah’s willingness to accept a peace agreement according to the Arab-Islamic world’s wishes of a two-state solution is long-standing. Similarly, instead of negotiating to end the war in Gaza, Israel assassinated Hamas’ political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran.

To the U.S.-Israeli Zionist mentality, a call for negotiation by an adversary is taken as a sign of weakness of the adversary.

Similarly in Syria, instead of allowing for a political solution to emerge, the U.S. opposed the peace process multiple times. In 2012, the UN had negotiated a peace agreement in Syria that was blocked by the Americans, who demanded that Assad must go on the first day of the peace agreement. The U.S. wanted regime change, not peace. In September 2024, Netanyahu addressed the General Assembly with a map of the Middle East divided between “Blessing” and “Curse,” with Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran as part of Netanyahu’s curse. The real curse is Israel’s path of mayhem and war, which has now engulfed Lebanon and Syria, with Netayahu’s fervent hope to draw the U.S. into war with Iran as well.

The U.S. and Israel are high-fiving that they have successfully wrecked yet another adversary of Israel and defender of the Palestinian cause, with Netanyahu claiming “credit for starting the historic process.” Most likely Syria will now succumb to continued war among the many armed protagonists, as has happened in the previous U.S.-Israeli regime-change operations.

In short, American interference, at the behest of Netanyahu’s Israel, has left the Middle East in ruins, with over a million dead and open wars raging in Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine, and with Iran on the brink of a nuclear arsenal, being pushed against its own inclinations to this eventuality.

All this is in the service of a profoundly unjust cause: to deny Palestinians their political rights in the service of Zionist extremism based on the 7th century BCE Book of Joshua. Remarkably, according to that text—one relied on by Israel’s own religious zealots—the Israelites were not even the original inhabitants of the land. Rather, according the text, God instructs Joshua and his warriors to commit multiple genocides to conquer the land.

Against this backdrop, the Arab-Islamic nations and indeed almost all of the world have repeatedly united in the call for a two-state solution and peace between Israel and Palestine.

Instead of the two-state solution, Israel and the U.S. have made a desert and called it peace.

If we have learned anything about U.S. President-elect Donald Trump over the past decade, it’s that even his most outlandish threats against democracy should be taken seriously. This applies not only to his promises to exact revenge and retribution on his political opponents and critics, but also to his expressed interest in serving a third term (or more) as president.

Trump has been musing about serving three terms for a long time. In a 2018 fundraiser with donors at Mar-a-Lago, he praised Chinese President XI Jinping for being elected president for life, calling Xi “great,” and suggesting, “Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.” At a campaign rally in Wisconsin in August 2020, he declared: “We are going to win four more years. And then after that, we’ll go for another four years because they spied on my campaign. We should get a redo of four years.”

There is no reason to think Trump’s MAGA base would raise any objections to keeping their dear leader in power.

His latest remarks on the subject were delivered on November 13, when he told a gathering of House Republicans, “I suspect I won’t be running again, unless you say, ‘He’s so good, we’ve got to figure out something else.’”

Although widely characterized as a joke, the third-term talk cannot be dismissed as just another zany part of Trump’s rambling standup schtick that has seen him praising Hannibal Lecter, extolling the size of Arnold Palmer’s penis, and condemning windmills for driving whales crazy. Nor can it be taken for granted, as is commonly done, that the 22nd Amendment would preclude Trump from securing a third stint behind the Resolute Desk.

The 22nd Amendment provides:

No person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice, and no person who has held the office of president, or acted as president, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected president shall be elected to the office of the president more than once.

By its terms, the amendment prohibits presidents from being elected more than twice. It is silent as to whether a president can legally assume office more than twice by other means.

The distinction is critical because the hardcore reactionaries who dominate the Supreme Court, where any 22nd Amendment challenge involving Trump would wind up, consider themselves to be strict “textualists.” This means that they profess to focus on the plain meaning of the words contained in the Constitution, regardless of the practical consequences. As Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett put it in her October 2020 Senate confirmation hearing: “I interpret the Constitution as a law and… I interpret its text as text, and I understand it to have the meaning that it had at the time people ratified it. So that meaning doesn’t change over time and it’s not up to me to update it or infuse my own policy views into it.”

The exact meaning of the 22nd Amendment, however, has been the subject of academic debate since the measure was ratified in 1951. In a 1999 law review article published well before Trump became a reality TV huckster much less a presidential hopeful, legal scholars Bruce Peabody and Scott Gant argued that a twice-elected president would not be prohibited from joining a new electoral ticket as a vice presidential candidate, and if elected, would not be precluded from ascending to the presidency if the head of the ticket subsequently died or resigned.

Given the degeneration of the Republican Party into a cult of personality, it is not at all unthinkable that if Trump is still physically fit in 2028 that he and JD Vance could switch places on the GOP ticket, with the goal of having Vance elected and then stepping down to allow Trump to return to the helm. There is nothing unconstitutional on its face about such a scheme. And there is no reason to think Trump’s MAGA base would raise any objections to keeping their dear leader in power.

A less likely route back to the Oval would be for Trump to be elected speaker of the House, assuming there is a Republican majority in the lower chamber in 2029. The speaker is second in line to the presidency under the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, and does not have to be a member of the chamber. There was considerable chatter in 2023 about Trump running for the speakership, and that talk could easily be revived to facilitate a third Trump term with the proper resignations of newly elected GOP stand-ins as president and vice president.

If both of those scenarios appear beyond reach, Trump could simply declare his candidacy for a third term and defy anyone to stop him. While such a move would be in direct conflict with the 22nd Amendment and would seemingly require the amendment to be repealed in the fashion of the 21st Amendment, which negated the 18th and ended prohibition, some pundits on the radical right are already agitating for “Trump 2028,” contending that the 22nd Amendment is inherently undemocratic and thus ripe for repeal.

But what if Trump, emboldened by a second term, decides to skip the laborious process of amending the Constitution altogether? Writing last February in the online journal LawFare, former associate White House counsel Ian Bassin asked why we should expect the Supreme Court to step in and declare Trump ineligible to run in 2028 if the court refuses to enforce a state’s decision to remove him from the ballot under the insurrectionist clause of the 14th Amendment.

The insurrectionist clause is simple and straightforward, and appears tailor-made for Trump, stipulating that “No person shall … hold any office… under the United States… who, having previously taken an oath… to support the Constitution… shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion.”

Bassin’s article was published a month before the Supreme Court answered his question with its disastrous and hypocritical ruling in Trump v. Anderson that overturned Colorado’s decision to deny Trump a place on its 2024 presidential ballot. The court held that only Congress could enforce the insurrectionist clause. And even then, the court explained, Congress would have to enact a new statute to authorize the removal of an insurrectionist.

Prior to Anderson, a broad array of constitutional law experts, including liberal Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe and retired conservative federal judge J. Michael Luttig, had argued that the insurrectionist clause was “self-executing” and required no enabling legislation, but only action by the courts for implementation. The Supreme Court slammed the door on this argument in Anderson, while potentially opening another on the self-executing nature of the 22nd Amendment in a future case.

Even if the Supreme Court were to rule against a Trump third-term bid, what would stop Trump from just ignoring the court’s commands? As Alexander Hamilton wrote long ago in Federalist Paper No. 78, “The judiciary… has no influence over either the sword or the purse… It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment.”

Both Andrew Jackson (in a case involving the seizure of Native American lands) and Abraham Lincoln (on habeas corpus) defied the Supreme Court. Trump would no doubt love to outdo them both.

Record your health insurance horror story, send the audio as an email file attachment TODAY to: TMIShowQuestion@gmail.com and we’ll play it and comment on it tomorrow on The TMI Show with Ted Rall and Manila Chan.

The post Wanted: Your Health Insurance Horror Story first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post Wanted: Your Health Insurance Horror Story appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

           The arrest of a suspect in the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a street in midtown Manhattan leaves some questions unanswered. But the gleeful reaction to the executive’s slaying leaves nothing subject to interpretation. Many Americans feel that they have been treated so shabbily by the health insurance industry that they despise it and want their leaders to die—and they’ve been willing to say so loudly and publicly.

            I’m 61. I can’t recall the demise of any public figure being greeted with as much glee and dark humor, including the killing of Osama bin Laden. Which makes psychological sense. If someone is trying to kill you, you hate them.

            Health insurance companies are trying to kill us.

While Americans were shocked and some even traumatized by the 9/11 attacks, most individuals didn’t feel personally threatened, much less harmed, by Al Qaeda. On the other hand an insurer like United, which is reported to deny a whopping 32% of in-network claims, wields the power to overrule doctor’s orders, harass sick people at their most vulnerable and, given the sky-high health costs in this country, put medical treatment—the ultimate non-discretionary expense—out of reach. Rare is the health insurance customer who can’t tell a horror story of being unfairly turned down for reimbursement for a doctor’s visit or procedure, usually after being given the runaround over pre-authorizations, procedural codes, doctors erroneously listed as in network, and other Soviet-style nonsense.

Sometimes health insurers decide that people—people like you—shouldn’t receive life-saving care. Patients die every year due to the health insurance industry’s sinister profit model, which heavily relies upon quotas for automatic and in many cases automated denials.

            Even when health insurance works as advertised, it feels like a scam. You pay a monthly premium yet, even when you have a legitimate claim, you probably won’t be able to collect a reimbursement due to high deductibles that can exceed $10,000 a year. Insurers’ online directories of in-network health providers are years out of date; most of the doctors listed no longer accept the company’s insurance (or never did), have moved their practices, or are retired or deceased. “In a 2023 analysis, researchers surveyed nearly 450,000 physicians in the Medicare provider database that appeared in online physician directories for UnitedHealth, Elevance, Cigna, Aetna, and Humana,” Jacobin reported. “They found that only 19 percent had consistent addresses and specialty information across all the directories in which they were found.” (Failing to keep these lists up-to-date is illegal under the 2022 No Surprises Act (NSA), but the federal law is not enforced.)

There ought to be more difference between the experience of being uninsured and paying for insurance.

Health insurance companies create misery that feels intensely personal. The fact that a procedure or medication ordered by your physician, whom you know and has examined you personally, can be overruled by an anonymous individual who has never laid eyes upon you in a completely opaque process can be maddening. Insurers want to make more money and are willing for you and your loved ones to suffer great pain, and perhaps even death, in order to maximize revenues.

“Our role is a critical role, and we make sure that care is safe, appropriate, and is delivered when people need it,” UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty reassured employees in an internal video following Thompson’s killing. “We guard against the pressures that exist for unsafe care or for unnecessary care to be delivered in a way which makes the whole system too complex and ultimately unsustainable.” He hasn’t learned a thing.

This, of course, is bullshit. Companies like UnitedHealthcare are leeches, a net negative to the patient experience. No one believes they are “guarding” us against any danger whatsoever. They aren’t fighting “complexity;” they are the complexity. They add an additional, unnecessary layer of bureaucracy between sick people and healthcare providers, with only one goal: profits.

The obvious solution is to abolish the medical insurance industry and join the 69% of the world’s population that has some form of universal healthcare. For the foreseeable future, however, massive donations by the health insurance lobby both to Democrats and Republicans make it highly unlikely that something like Medicare For All, popular among  voters of both parties, will be enacted anytime soon. 

Still, the staggering hatred by health insurance consumers for the current system creates a political opportunity for the politician or party willing to push through three simple reforms to protect health insurance consumers from the industry’s most predatory practices.

First, if a physician is listed as a member of a health insurance company’s network, an insured patient’s experience should be frictionless. In network, no claim for a visit, test, procedure or medication should ever be denied. Pre-authorizations should never be required.

Second, if an insurer believes that one of its network member physicians is overprescribing or otherwise abusing the system, the dispute should be resolved between the insurance company and the doctor. An insurer can sue a rogue doctor, kick them out of their network, whatever, but leave sick patients out of it.

Third, failure to update lists of in-network physicians should inconvenience the insurance company that fails to fulfill its responsibilities and comply with federal law, not those of us who are seeking medical care. We deserve truth in advertising. If an insurer lists a doctor as being in-network on their website or elsewhere, patients should be reimbursed for visiting that doctor under the doctrine.

As President-elect Trump formulates his policies for his second term, I hope that his powerful instinct when it comes to gauging public opinion has taken note of our hatred of the for-profit health insurance industry. Pushing through these three reforms would enjoy bipartisan support and begin to fulfill his pledge to fix the badly-broken American healthcare system.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

The post We Hate Health Insurance Companies. 3 Reforms Would Help. first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post We Hate Health Insurance Companies. 3 Reforms Would Help. appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

In the early 1990s, doctors in Hiroshima, Japan discovered a stress-induced syndrome they called Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or “broken heart syndrome”—a condition in which the heart’s left ventricle, responsible for pumping blood, loses its capacity in response to extreme stressors like war, natural disaster, and the loss of loved ones. Prevalent among older women, that acute condition involves heart attack-like symptoms, including chest pain and pressure, light-headedness, and dread.

More recently, Israeli doctors in Tel Aviv noted a spike in the condition after the October 7, 2023 attack by the militant group Hamas and Israel’s subsequent incursion into (and devastation of) Gaza in response. The mothers of Israeli soldiers in particular have been affected, as have many who didn’t directly experience or witness the ravages of October 7 against that country’s civilians. (Undoubtedly, something similar has been happening in Gaza, too, but given the disastrous situation of the medical profession there, we have no way of knowing.)

Examples like these remind me of one of the most valuable things I’ve learned from studying my country’s endless foreign wars as both an anthropologist and a military spouse: Armed conflict transforms the bodies and minds of people far beyond its battlefields, including in the country that launched such wars in often distant lands.

it’s hard to know which came first: our president-elect, or Americans who distrust each other as much as they do outsiders, the federal government, and factual reporting.

As Americans await the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump, I find myself thinking that it couldn’t be more important to understand the culturally transformative impact of war. My vantage point is a strange but (I think) salient one. I’m the wife of a U.S. military veteran and the mother of children who have been encouraged by those in our family and community to become fighters “like Daddy.” Yet I’m also someone who, through my involvement in Brown University’s Costs of War Project, has long critiqued this country’s warfighting efforts and the culture that sustains them.

In short, I find myself in an awkward position in this fragile democracy of ours. After all, I’m someone who has devoted unpaid labor to our military-industrial complex, yet can’t resist the impulse to critique it for its impact. How’s that for a conflict of interest?

Having risked plenty in this position, I might as well keep at it. One thing I can say is that all too many Americans, whatever their political leanings, agree on the benefits of funding our military with ever more hundreds of billions of our tax dollars that disproportionately benefit weapons contractors rather than us or our social safety network.

In fact, decades of federal budgets have favored war fighting with all too lax human-rights standards in dozens of foreign countries, hostility and violence against vulnerable people within the ranks of our own troops, antiterrorism policies that have encroached on domestic civil liberties, and the flow via police departments of military assault rifles and armored vehicles onto America’s city streets. And don’t forget the Veterans Day celebrations that propagandize military service to young children or the military recruiters in public schools. All of that is yet more evidence of what Americans value most. Yes, many of us have balked at school shootings and spiking child death rates, or at the servicemen and veterans who helped lead the rampage to overturn the 2020 election certification, but it’s clear that ever more of us, in or out of uniform, agree, in some fashion, on the sanctity of armed violence.

In a sense, the fact that we just voted back into the presidency someone who embodies a lack of restraint might be considered the climax of America’s decades-long War on Terror that began in response to the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Twenty-odd years later, we have a president-(re)elect who doesn’t believe in the peaceful transfer of power. He’s already used the bully pulpit of his presidency and then his candidacies to demonize federal workers and journalists. He’s called his political opponents “vermin” and “the enemy within,” while conjuring up specific images of violence against them. And he’s accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood” of our country—language that, in other settings like Hitler’s Germany or early 1990s Rwanda, led to upsurges in extralegal violence even before the first official orders to kill were given.

Trump has used his public statements to direct his anger—and so that of his most ardent supporters—not toward China and Russia whose militaries threaten the sovereignty of our allies, but toward our own unarmed civilian workers who feed, educate, nourish, and pay Americans. Under such conditions, it’s hard to know which came first: our President-elect, or Americans who distrust each other as much as they do outsiders, the federal government, and factual reporting. And talking about wars of terror, if ever conditions were ripe for civilian bloodshed at home, it’s now—a time when there exists no shared sense of what it means to be an American or even any way to talk about it together.

Start ‘Em Early.

Perhaps the truest reflection of our faith in war fighting as problem-solving is the emphasis still given to telling kids that it’s a good idea to join the military. Within military communities, it remains an unspoken rule that kids ought to be raised to be like their parents in uniform. As an example, consider the Pentagon’s take-your-child-to-work-day, attended by over 8,000 children this year and replete with athletic events, refreshments, and paraphernalia for those kids to take home. My own children experience a version of that: toy battleships and fighter jets, as well as coffee-table books displaying every class of armored vehicle ever made and old uniforms and memorabilia from various military bases.

Teachers at local elementary schools ask younger grades to draw pictures of those they know who serve in the military and write essays about why they’re proud of them. A local gathering in honor of loved ones in the military, during which community leaders extol the bravery and resolve of those who serve, is among the best-attended events in my small rural town. If only that many people attended PTA meetings to discuss the curriculum and school safety, among other things!

In our kids’ local Cub Scouts troop during Veterans Day week, parents who served in the military were invited to talk to the scouts about what they did while in uniform. Adults and children peppered them with questions about the weaponry they used and who they fought. And mind you, in such settings, when was the last time you heard of doctors, election workers, teachers, or federal employees being asked to describe their work, no less what they use to do it?

A Mandate to Kill

The way we spend money, go to war, vote, and raise our children suggests that, on some level, we’ve already given our military and law enforcement our implicit trust. How else to interpret the results of the 2024 election? By a significant margin, voters decided that leadership means not standing up to autocratic leaders abroad, but promising to hurt those who would speak out against you at home.

In June 2020, as protests and riots against the police murder of George Floyd swelled in Washington, President Trump told military leaders that he wanted to augment police units already in the capitol with armed military personnel. Hundreds of soldiers from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division traveled from North Carolina to Fort Belvoir just south of Washington, theoretically to help units already posted around the capitol. Those troops were issued bayonets, though they didn’t display them.

Apparently betting on the prospect that Trump would not want to own the decision to deploy troops against unarmed civilians, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper attempted to appease him and buy time without acting on his suggestion. However we judge the minimalist guardrails those officials put in place, it’s no longer clear that anyone in Trump’s second term will be there to restrain him from moving forward with his worst intentions against civilians, including undocumented immigrants (against whom the president-to-be is already threatening to call in the military). “The next time, I’m not waiting,” Trump said of such a future possibility at a 2023 rally.

Trolling by Nomination

Next to the man himself, nothing telegraphs Trump’s willingness to use force against unarmed American civilians more vividly than his nomination of former Army National Guard officer Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense. A Fox News host with no administrative experience in the Pentagon, he sports tattoos indicating his allegiance to Christian nationalist and white supremacist causes. It’s hard to imagine a more partisan pick for a military that is supposed to be none of the above. Hegseth also (you won’t be surprised to learn) settled a sexual assault allegation in 2017 by a woman who attended one of his speaking engagements. In three separate instances as a Fox News host, he advocated on behalf of three service members being investigated by military tribunals for killing unarmed civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Subsequently, President Trump pardoned two of those convicted men and reversed the demotion of the third, who had posed with the dead body of a teenage prisoner after allegedly murdering him with a knife.

Not just Hegseth’s actions but his stated goals speak to his disdain for restraint. He’s already made explicit his intention to fire any of the military’s top brass who have participated in diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, which, among other things, involve badly needed education to prevent sexual assault and hate speech demonizing religious and racial minorities or LGBTQ+ service members.

Hegseth’s appointment dovetails with the incoming administration’s revulsion against law and order within its own ranks, effectively ensuring, in the years to come, that the military will rot from the inside. Trump’s governance blueprint, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, is direct in stating that weeding out “manufactured extremism” will be nonnegotiable this time around. The authors of that plan have urged the incoming administration to place national law enforcement agencies like Homeland Security and the federal police directly under the leadership of the secretary of defense and the president.

Disdain for Restraint

Americans have a certain reverence for those who act on impulse without considering the consequences. I doubt Donald Trump would have such a reputation for being a “strong leader” without having egged on his most ardent followers with intimations of violence. Think about his claim that white supremacist protestors in Charlottesville who, in 2017, ranted about Jews replacing them included “very fine people”; or his boast that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters”; or his urging the crew who were to become the January 6 rioters to “fight like hell”; or his suggestion that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley ought to have been executed for attempting to directly reassure a Chinese general about this country’s stability while the president was trying to remain in office after his election loss in 2020. That last example should be a reminder that instability and violence within our government present an existential safety risk not just to ordinary Americans but to the entire world, as foreign governments worry about what an unhinged Trump administration might mean for them.

For me, the greatest elephant in the room is our government’s possession of a vast supply of nuclear weaponry capable of causing exponentially more destruction than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Just the non-nuclear explosives that the Biden administration has provided to Israel to drop on Gaza have, cumulatively, had a power far greater than the Hiroshima bomb—a preview of the human destruction our elected leaders are willing to allow even without giving direct orders to do so. Since the only enemies Donald Trump now refers to live in this country, it falls within the realm of possibility that, in his hands, our arsenal of weaponry could place American cities in danger.

A New Kind of War

I like to remind myself that things have been bad in the past: police wielding fire hoses, clubs, and dogs on unarmed Black children protesting for their civil rights; troops blocking Black teenagers from attending school; and of course, border patrol agents separating children from their parents and locking them in cages. To a large extent, we rebounded from such horrors, even though hundreds of those immigrant children have yet to find their parents. Still, we can only imagine what will happen in the Trumpian immigration crackdown that awaits us.

As Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg emphasized to a group of activists and supporters the day after the election, we need to “make a lot of noise” about whatever the incoming Trump administration does, and what it means for our democracy. And independent journalism and truth-telling will make this possible, not cynical mistrust of the news or of Americans who try to call out what is likely to be Trump’s violent abuse of power. Keeping our republic will be harder than ever this time around, but Americans who care about their fellow citizens need to prepare themselves to bear witness to the human costs of what could be a new kind of war right here on our own soil. Otherwise, we’ll find all too many hearts broken, including mine.

The Democratic Party is at a crossroads. To defeat Trump and those who back him, the Democratic Party must change course and fight for working-class people. With the climate crisis bearing down, this task is incredibly urgent and important. The cost of failure is planetary catastrophe.

For the first time in years, Democrats won with voters who made over $100,000 and lost those making less than that. The Republican Party made huge gains among working-class people of color and those without a college degree. Youth turnout dropped eight points from 2020. Harris won only 54% of the youth vote and was the first Democratic nominee since 2004 not to win young voters by at least 60%.

The Democratic Party urgently needs to take the right lessons away from this election, or they risk handing elections to Trump-like candidates for years to come, and burning away any chance of stopping catastrophic climate change. In the first days after the election, I had a lot of hope this would be a turning point when the Democratic Party shifted to embrace populist, people-centered policies that took on corporate power and addressed voters’ economic pain. News coverage focused on how swing voters didn’t trust Democrats on the economy and how Senate candidates like Ruben Gallego and Sherrod Brown who ran on an anti-corporate message outperformed Harris. Mainstream politicians like Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy were echoing this argument.

The Democratic Party must loudly and vocally fight for populist, people-centered policies and take on corporate power in our democracy.

But, then the spin from corporate consultants and pundits began. They have flooded the opinion pages and podcasts with a medley of reasons why Democrats lost the election. They have argued that “woke politics” and groups like Sunrise pushed Democrats too far left on social issues. They have argued that the campaign was poorly run, or that Biden should have dropped sooner. Conveniently, this analysis often leaves out the economy and doesn’t challenge the corporate donors that bankroll many of the candidates and consultants.

This is an incredibly dangerous interpretation that misses the forest for the trees. If Democrats’ takeaway is: “be less woke,” they will continue to fracture their coalition and set the GOP on the path to electoral majorities for years to come.

For the sake of our democracy and our planet, Democrats must tackle the underlying reasons they are losing working-class voters, young voters, and voters of color. They need to proudly take on corporate interests and fight for an economy and politics that works for all of us.

That starts with listening to what voters are saying. This year, Sunrise made over four million voter contacts. Again and again, we heard young people saying they were struggling to afford groceries and rent, anxious about job prospects, and grappling with the economic uncertainty that has made the American Dream feel out of reach.

In 2024, simply being "Not Trump" wasn't enough to win, especially among young voters. If you turned 18 this year, you were just 9 years old when Trump first descended the golden escalator to launch his campaign. Trump in politics is all they know. So, Harris’ closing message of “I’m not Trump” didn’t hold up against Trump’s message about remaking the economy and upending business as usual.

Seeing this, we dug in with people, talking about the Inflation Reduction Act and capping of insulin prices. We pointed out Trump’s allegiance to his fellow billionaires. But, those conversations often only got so far — people didn’t trust that Democrats actually understood their struggles. They had seen Biden and Harris on TV for years celebrating how the economy was good, but that wasn’t how it felt to them in the day-to-day. If people don’t feel understood and respected by a political party, it’s hard to get them to believe that party will actually do something to help them.

For the sake of our democracy and our planet, Democrats must tackle the underlying reasons they are losing working-class voters, young voters, and voters of color. They need to proudly take on corporate interests and fight for an economy and politics that works for all of us.

Trump, on the other hand, hardly went a minute without talking about how prices were rising and the economy wasn’t fair. He managed to convince people he understood their pain and would act on it — despite being a billionaire championing regressive economic policies.

This isn’t to say that social issues were irrelevant in this election. However, Harris’ inability to gain the trust of voters on the economy made these attacks from the right more potent. When people can't afford rent or food, they look for people to blame. Trump and far-right politicians have told people to blame immigrants or trans people or people of color. That was a core part of Trump's closing message: “Kamala Harris is for they/them. Trump is for you.” Pundits are spending a lot of time talking about the first half and missing the 2nd half. If Democrats can’t convince working-class voters and young voters that they will fight for them, it’s going to continue to be hard to fight back against these attacks.

The Democratic Party must loudly and vocally fight for populist, people-centered policies and take on corporate power in our democracy. It’s the way to win back the trust of young voters, working-class voters, and disillusioned voters. And it’s the best defense against the divide-and-conquer strategy of the populist right. That means backing policies like Medicare for All, creating green union jobs, and raising the minimum wage. And, it means challenging Trump for the populist mantle by pledging to shake up the status quo and make it work better for everyday people.

America is at a critical crossroads, and the time for both preparation and action is here. The Democratic Party and American patriots must engage in a serious and urgent conversation about the alarming pending state of our nation and the capture and corruption of the GOP by the morbidly rich.

Remember the historical fears of foreign influence in American politics? From the “malign French influence” XYZ Affair during John Adams’ presidency to Sen. Joe McCarthy's (R-Wisc.) witch hunts against communists in the 1950s, those worries are trivial compared to what we face today.

For the first time in our history, we’re on the brink of having a convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, and “friend” of a foreign foe in the White House. But that’s not even the most terrifying aspect of our new reality. What should truly keep us awake at night is the unprecedented power wielded by a single billionaire who has direct access to the president and, alarmingly, to the Kremlin.

This is a call to action. We must organize populist movements—and reform the Democratic Party—in a way that awakens voters from their slumber before it’s too late.

The richest man in the world, who controls our largest social media platform and crucial satellite technology, is not only a close adviser to President-elect Donald Trump but is also, according to The Wall Street Journal, regularly communicating with Russian President Vladimir Putin. This is oligarchy at its most dangerous.

Let’s not forget Elon Musk’s previous calls for a deliberate economic crash; billionaires thrive on recessions because they use them as buying opportunities to quickly and radically expand their empires. He has openly advocated stripping our federal government of talent and funding. What was once dismissed as eccentricity is morphing into actual policy proposals under Trump’s leadership.

And, of course, it’s not just Musk. Trump’s nominated a rogue’s gallery of billionaires—along with accused sexual abusers, grifters, and friends-of-Putin—to the highest positions in the government of the United States, and claims to have Big Plans for our future. As Nina Burleigh asked over at The New Republic:

Whose side will the military take, Trump’s or the people’s? Will America come to resemble Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s, the “enemy within” rounded up and held without charges? Will women be stopped at state borders and hormone tested for pregnancies? Will Americans watch behind closed curtains as men in military garb, maybe without identification, hustle their neighbors away? Will we hear of—but never see—the concentration camps, deep in the barren Western deserts, surrounded by razor wire?

These are serious questions, all are within the realm of things Trump and people around him have proposed. The stakes are higher than ever.

Idaho just confirmed they are going after women and girls who leave the state for abortions. The governor of Texas just unveiled land to build the first concentration camps for “the enemy within.” The guy Trump wants to run the FBI has published an actual enemies list of Americans.

Recent revelations from The Wall Street Journal confirm that Musk has had back-channel interactions with Moscow, apparently engaging in regular conversations with Russian officials, including Putin himself. This is not just political evolution; it could become a direct threat to democracy worldwide.

Witness how this influence plays out in real-time: Musk’s alignment with Russian talking points apparently led him to block Ukrainian military operations over Crimea using his Starlink satellites. This isn’t merely business; it’s foreign policy dictated by a billionaire ostensibly taking suggestions from Moscow.

We are witnessing the collapse of democratic norms right before our eyes, starting with Musk—a federal contractor—spending a quarter-billion in unaccountable money to put Trump into the White House when federal law arguably forbids federal contractors like Musk from inserting themselves into federal elections to avoid conflicts-of-interest.

The Republican-captured federal election commission (FEC), which is responsible for enforcing such election laws, has been rendered impotent for over a decade by the Republicans in its leadership.

A new power structure is emerging where unelected billionaires like Musk act as conduits between foreign autocrats and the White House, and billionaires like Musk, Bezos, and Soon-Shiong (owner of the LA Times) control what millions of people read and believe.

The lines between corporate power, billionaire interests, government authority, public “knowledge,” and foreign influence have not just blurred—they’re vanishing.

And it doesn’t stop with Russia. The Kremlin, we just learned, has also apparently pressured Musk to restrict satellite coverage over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping. A private citizen with no government oversight making decisions that impact international security based on conversations with foreign leaders.

We have never seen anything like this before. Although both Russia and Hungary have: It’s how oligarchs helped strongmen end democracy in both nations.

Yes, foreign governments have tried to sway American policy in the past, and wealthy individuals have wielded outsized political power, but never have we seen such a toxic combination: A former president returning to power (himself a convicted criminal and a billionaire), another billionaire controlling key technology, multiple billionaires (including Musk) controlling media consumed by as many as 40% of Americans, and several of them sharing direct lines of communication with foreign adversaries.

This is not just politics as usual; this is an emergency. When has any small group of private citizens held such sway over both domestic and foreign policy? When have we seen a president so willing to allow a billionaire with clear foreign entanglements to dictate our nation’s direction?

The America we once knew—where elected officials were accountable to voters rather than billionaires—is slipping away. This erosion of democracy is largely due to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court ruling that political bribery equals “free speech,” allowing billionaires to flood our 2024 election with money.

Unless we act to restore democratic oversight and accountability, to stand up to this incoming regime, we may not recognize what remains of our democracy by the end of Trump’s next term.

The oligarchs are no longer just at the gates—they're moving into the White House. So far, a dozen billionaires and two multimillionaires have infiltrated Trump’s cabinet picks. And almost across the board, they are talking about gutting the institutions of America, something that would delight Vladimir Putin.

Do we, the American people, still possess the power and will to challenge this oligarchic takeover? Can the Democratic Party unite around a working-class consensus that rejects billionaires running our country for their own gain and at the behest of foreign dictators?

Democrats in the House and Senate must gird themselves to do what Republicans did to U.S. President Barack Obama when he was elected: absolutely oppose everything he tries, no matter how slickly packaged it is, and resist to the last man and woman.

Not only will that energize Democratic voters and bring electoral victories over the next four years, it may well save what’s left of our republic.

This is a call to action. We must organize populist movements—and reform the Democratic Party—in a way that awakens voters from their slumber before it’s too late.

Reversing 43 years of the Reagan Revolution in tax and regulatory policy while re-embracing the New Deal won’t come overnight, but if we don’t show up and lay their foundations, they won’t come at all. Which will almost certainly mean the doom of American democracy.

The future of our republic hangs in the balance; both the Democratic Party and those of us who care about the future of our country must prepare for a long, hard slog and get about the work today. (I’ll be writing about this with more specifics shortly.)

That includes showing up at your local Democratic Party meetings, joining activist groups you feel aligned with, participating in social media, and relentlessly calling out the abuses and crimes of the morbidly rich and their corporations.

It’ll be difficult, but if we can return our country to her core values of respect, compassion, and egalitarianism as laid out in our founding documents, it’ll be well worth it.

Ties between Syria and Russia go back not only through the Soviet Union but even to Czarist Russia. Now, presumably because Russia is so focused on Ukraine, it was unable to save its ally, President Bashar al-Assad, from being deposed by Islamist insurgents. Assad is safely in Moscow but Damascus is a different matter.

Americas who remember the optimistic coverage of the fall of Baghdad in 2003 know better than to take similar images and coverage seriously now. International security analyst and Russia expert Mark Sleboda joins Ted Rall and guest co-host Robby West (filling in for Manila Chan) on “The TMI Show” to talk about the broad international implications of the collapse of the Syrian state, rising instability, and where Russia and Iran go now when it comes to influence in the Middle East.

The post TMI Show Ep 35: “Assad Falls; What Now for Russia in the Middle East?” first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 35: “Assad Falls; What Now for Russia in the Middle East?” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is just weeks away from returning to the White House, and when he gets there, it is all but assured that he will attack press freedom (FAIR.org, 11/14/24; NBC, 12/4/24).

But the will and desire to clamp down on free speech and expression isn’t just a Trumpian phenomenon. A U.S. District Court of Appeals panel, with two Republican-appointed judges and one picked by a Democrat, has upheld a law forcing the sale of TikTok because of its alleged Chinese government control (AP, 12/6/24).

An act of Congress signed by the president—in this instance, outgoing Democratic President Joe Biden—that could ban a media product used by two-fifths of the nation seems inconceivable. And yet here we are.

All corners of government, joined by members of both major parties, concur that national security concerns should allow the government to scrap First Amendment principles. This means that Trump’s aggressiveness against free speech isn’t an anomaly of his Make America Great Again movement, but a general feature of American state power. The enormity of this decision, if upheld by the notoriously conservative Supreme Court, is a dire sign of what is to come.

Censorship for Freedom

Writing for the court, Ronald Reagan appointee Douglas Ginsburg said that despite the importance of the First Amendment, the government “acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States” (Reuters, 12/6/24).

In a concurring opinion, the court’s chief judge, Sri Srinivasan, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, said that “concerns about the prospect of foreign control over mass communications channels in the United States are of age-old vintage,” and thus the “decision to condition TikTok’s continued operation in the United States on severing Chinese control is not a historical outlier.”

Srinivasan cited the Communications Act of 1934 and other Federal Communications Commission regulations:

The FCC’s revocation of China Telecom’s authorization was “grounded [in] its conclusion that China Telecom poses an unacceptable security risk” because “the Chinese government is able to exert significant influence over [it].”… In rejecting China Telecom’s claim that the asserted national-security risk was unduly speculative, we noted that Chinese law obligates Chinese companies “to cooperate with state-directed cybersecurity supervision and inspection,” and we cited “compelling evidence that the Chinese government may use Chinese information technology firms as vectors of espionage and sabotage.”

He went on to say that “China Telecom is a present-day application of the kinds of restrictions on foreign control that have existed in the communications arena since the dawn of radio.”

Two-Fifths of the Nation

But there’s a key difference. For many reading this, this might be the first time you have ever heard of the FCC’s case against China Telecom (Reuters, 10/26/21). When I last wrote about the potential ban on TikTok (FAIR.org, 9/27/24), I debunked many of the national security concerns about data mining and espionage, and I also noted that the ban is incredibly unpopular, in part because “TikTok (3/21/23) claims 150 million users in the United States; its users are disproportionately young, female, Black, and Latine (Pew, 1/31/24).”

An act of Congress signed by the president—in this instance, outgoing Democratic President Joe Biden—that could ban a media product used by two-fifths of the nation seems inconceivable. And yet here we are.

This year, the House of Representatives “passed legislation that would allow the government to revoke the tax-exempt status of nonprofit groups it accuses of supporting terrorist entities” (New York Times, 11/21/24). While most Democrats voted against the bill in the end, it enjoyed the support of “blue dog” Democratic congressmembers like Henry Cuellar of Texas and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington State (Intercept, 11/21/24).

With Trump coming back into the presidency and the Senate falling into GOP control, that bill has a good chance of becoming law. Just think of what an unfettered Trump—who has vowed to make “the Fake News Media… pay a big price for what they have done to our once great Country” (AP, 12/5/23)—could do with a law giving virtually free rein to pull the plug on any nonprofit.

For example, The New York Times (8/5/23) last year raised alarms about a left-wing tech mogul named Neville Roy Singham, who the paper painted as a Chinese government puppeteer (FAIR.org, 8/17/23). “He and his allies are on the front line of what Communist Party officials call a ‘smokeless war,’” the Times wrote.

In order to advance Beijing’s “goal… to disguise propaganda as independent content,” the account continued, his groups “have produced YouTube videos that, together, racked up millions of views.” This depiction of journalistic advocacy as a kind of foreign invasion could be used to justify fodder to go after groups the government could connect to Singham, like the antiwar group Code Pink.

But any nonprofit would be under existential threat under the bill, if the Trump administration decides to label it a ““terrorist-supporting organization.” This includes major nongovernmental organizations like the ACLU and Amnesty International, as well as major news outlets organized as nonprofits, including NPR, ProPublica, and The Intercept.

Flimsy Security Concerns

Some see a ray of hope in Trump’s mercurial behavior, hoping he turns course on TikTok despite the fact that he started the whole campaign (NPR, 8/6/20; Vox, 12/6/24)—there’s some self-interest for the president-elect at play as “Trump joined TikTok during the 2024 election and used it to reach younger audiences” and he “boasts more than 14 million followers on the app” (Wall Street Journal, 12/6/24). But, given how far this case has gone, it would be a mistake to think Trump might simply give up the China-bashing as the core of his economic nationalism.

And Washington is already heading in a repressive direction. The Biden administration’s sanctions have forced Russian radio broadcaster Sputnik off U.S. airwaves (FAIR.org, 10/22/24), and privately owned Chinese newspapers like Sing Tao have had to register as foreign agents (South China Morning Post, 8/26/21); FAIR.org, 2/28/22).

It is also important to note how flimsy the “national security” concerns are in the TikTok case. As many journalists, including myself, have pointed out, the accusation that TikTok, a social media product, might engage in data collection is like saying water is wet—this is the nature of social media platforms.

The AP report (12/6/24) on the appeals court decision said that during the case, TikTok

accurately pointed out that the U.S. hasn’t provided evidence to show that the company handed over user data to the Chinese government, or manipulated content for Beijing’s benefit in the U.S.

To “assuage concerns about the company’s owners,” AP noted, “TikTok says it has invested more than $2 billion to bolster protections around U.S. user data.”

But the court ruling shows that the mere invocation of “national security” can pull government branches together to support measures that smother media freedom. A federal law eliminating a product enjoyed by nearly 150 million Americans might seem anathema to the free market rhetoric of the GOP, but this is completely in line with the authoritarian mindset that has been growing in the United States and many European countries for years.

I have for decades been assuring both colleagues and comrades that the climate negotiations are not a sick joke, that “COP” is not short for “Conference of Polluters,” that the negotiations matter. The argument has become easier to make as more people have come to see the implacable necessity of an international way forward. As imperfect as the COP process is, a world without multilateral climate negotiations would be far worse.

Still, there comes a time, amid the floods and the firestorms, when even the practiced realism of seasoned observers must break down. This time didn’t quite come at COP29, though it came close. As Martin Wolf put it in the Financial Times, “the assessment has to lie between failure and disaster—failure, because progress is still possible, or disaster, because a good agreement will now be too late.”

The climate problem demands an earnest and cooperative international response, but Baku instead saw the Global North present the Global South with a “grim ultimatum”—agree to an inadequate offer of support or risk the collapse of the only international process where it has significant voice and influence. By its end, the Global South had been forced to accede. With the clap of the president’s gavel, and despite a broad push to assert that “no deal is better than a bad deal,” it got a very bad deal indeed.

COP29 really did have a silver lining. It focused the climate finance debate and pushed it to center stage.

There was also action on the emissions trading front, where the rules were finally nailed down. But the rules are pretty bad and the deal is more likely to generate a flood of illusory offsets than a flood of quality investment. Also, and importantly, neither carbon trading in particular nor private finance in general can honestly be expected to entirely finance a successful climate transition.

On the public finance side, the pressure to relitigate the Baku deal, already high, can only increase. The last-minute adoption of the “Baku to Belém Roadmap to $1.3 trillion”—a critical commitment to find a real path forward—is likely to define the COP30 agenda. The problem is that, barring an unanticipated political shift of the first order, the Belém COP, too, will fail to rise to the occasion.

The next year is going to be a big one.

Clarity at Last

Hope, as always, remains. The future is unwritten; we have the technology to save ourselves, and we may yet decide to do so. Also, there’s plenty of money, though like the future it is not evenly distributed. Further, COP29 really did have a silver lining. It focused the climate finance debate and pushed it to center stage. There is now, finally, a deep and widespread understanding of the nature and scale of the international climate finance challenge. Talk today about planetary-scale climate ambition and you’re talking in terms of trillions of dollars a year, and everyone knows it.

Unfortunately, this also means the climate negotiations are now in crisis, because those necessary trillions are not on the table. The Baku agreement is simply not going to give the world’s developing countries the confidence—read “the support”—they need to table a strong new round of climate action pledges in 2025. And, as 1.5°C slips through our fingers, it is becoming ever more difficult to believe that even the weak end of the Paris temperature goal (“well below 2°C”) is slated to be preserved.

Part of the problem at Baku was of course the pall cast by Donald Trump’s reelection. Even negotiators who bitterly resent the traditional U.S. tactics knew that something worse was in the future. Just as importantly, it was no longer possible to imagine that the United States, with its massive share of the world’s capacity, would soon produce any significant fraction of its fair share of the cost of rapid international climate mobilization. The Europeans, certainly, could easily argue that, without the United States on board, no adequately ambitious public finance goal could possibly be met, and that, therefore, they could not possibly acquiesce to one.

But Trump’s importance can be overstated. The Europeans have long hidden behind American intransigence, which was a problem long before the age of Trump. The United States has for years worked to eradicate the United Nations climate framework convention’s foundational commitment to equitable burden-sharing based on “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities,” and the Europeans have never roused themselves to object in any effective way.

And, as always, there is the problem of the fossil fuel industry, which cannot be reduced to the problem of the United States, or even the problem of the Global North. The Saudis in particular, with the aid of the Azeri hosts, reportedly did everything in their power to prevent any Baku statement from reiterating COP28’s call for “transitioning away” from fossil fuels. Further, it became clear in Baku that, as Laurie can der Berg of Oil Change International astutely commented, many rich countries are actively planning for fossil fuel phaseout failure.

That planning began long before Trump’s reelection.

There are many issues entwined within the climate negotiations, and across the board their resolution has been blocked by the lack of adequate climate finance. Inevitably, given that Baku was the long anticipated “finance COP,” it was fated to play a very special role. Given the widespread anger occasioned by Baku’s weak outcome, it’s safe to say that it didn’t deliver.

Still, the climate negotiations are not doomed. It is better to say they are now visibly in a crisis they’ve been in for years. But the distinction makes a difference, and the timing could not be more critical. Unless substantial progress is made by the end of COP30, by November 21, 2025, in Belém, Brazil, we’re going to be in extremely serious trouble.

What Did the Global South Demand and What Did It Get?

By the opening of COP29, the Global South’s negotiators had settled on a demand for $1.3 trillion a year in climate finance, much of it to be provided by the developed countries as non-debt-producing grant-based public finance and the rest of it mobilized via facilitated investments. The size of former amount—the “public finance core” that would be provided—was not universally agreed upon, but agreement was close. The G77 + China negotiating bloc cohered around the figure of $500 billion a year, though a number of negotiators and activists, the Climate Action Network in particular, supported a much larger figure. As for the $1.3 trillion, this would be built upon the core, by layering on investments that were mobilized in one way or another.

Baku saw the agreement of a “new collective quantified goal on climate finance,” which replaces 2009’s old finance goal of $100 billion a year, with a new goal that is nominally $300 billion a year. This sounds like a tripling, but it’s not. As for the $1.3 trillion, look to the future negotiation of the “Baku to Belém Roadmap to $1.3 trillion” and prepare for a fight.

Start with the $300 billion, and its comparison to the old goal of $100 billion. The first thing to note here is that the old goal took years to reach, if it was reached at all. The $100 billion line was finally crossed via a finance package that was 70% loans, many of them non-concessional (market rate) loans that significantly swelled recipient countries’ debt loads. The second is that the Baku promise doesn’t have to be delivered until 2035—which, given the climate emergency, is an eternity—and that during that eternity inflation will have eaten deeply into its value.

Stabilizing the climate quickly enough to prevent global catastrophe is going to be expensive, but that we nonetheless have the money to do so. Or, more precisely, the global rich have the money.

Also, and even more crucially, this nominal $300 billion is absolutely not a “public finance core” that will be met exclusively via grant-based financing. It will rather come “from a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources,” which is to say that the $300 billion (or whatever is left after inflation) will include not only funding provided by the developed nations, but also any private investment this public funding manages to “crowd in,” and loans both market rate and concessional, and even carbon-offset revenues.

To say this outcome is disappointing is to put the matter diplomatically. As Action Aid’s Brandon Wu explains, “There’s no clarity about how much if any of [the $300 billion] will be public, grant and grant-equivalent finance; it could be loans; it could all be private investment; it could all be MDB [Multilateral Development Bank] finance, it could all amount to basically nothing, in fact.” No wonder that during the final plenary, immediately after the decision text was suddenly gaveled through (the delay was 1.04 seconds, according to the Financial Times), Indian delegate Chandni Raina called the finance target “too little, too distant,” and said her country could not support it. “This document is nothing more than an optical illusion,” she said to cheers and applause.

What Does the Global South Actually Need?

What does the Global South need to rapidly decarbonize, while at the same time pursuing a low-carbon development path? There will never be a single correct answer to this supremely difficult question, for no possible answer is free of political and ethical claims, including claims about development and about the even more fundamental and elusive notion of need.

Needs assessments are possible, but assessing the needs associated with planetary climate stabilization—from mitigation needs to loss and damage needs to just transition needs—is extremely difficult, and costing such needs with any real precision is flat-out impossible. However meticulous a needs assessment process is, it can only be provisional, because the “real” bottom line will depend on how quickly and brutally the impacts of climate change unfold, and how decisively humanity mobilizes to contain them, and how much obstruction the fossil fuel industry erects against this mobilization, and how forgiving the overall climate system turns out to be. None of this is knowable in advance, though the total need is certainly larger than $1.3 trillion.

We do, however, have some useful preliminary estimates.

Most prominently, the “High Level Experts Group,” which has been supporting the U.N. climate finance debate since COP26, does not simply defend the $1.3 trillion figure. It also tells us this is not the end of the story, that total ”projected investment requirement for climate action” would be about $6.3-6.7 trillion per year by 2030, an amount that should be roughly divided between “advanced economies,” China, and other nations. Of this, about $2.3-2.5 trillion would be for emerging and developing countries other than China, and this figure would increase to $3.1-3.5 trillion by 2035.

Also notable is the updated Needs Determination Report recently released by the UNFCCC’s Standing Committee on Finance. It pegs “the costed needs” from the latest pledges at $5-7 trillion cumulatively out to 2030, a figure which it annualizes (over the 2020 to 2030 period) as $455 billion to $585 billion a year. This, however, is a very partial calculation, and larger estimates can be found within the same report.

In all this complexity, one text is particularly useful, the “submission” that the Climate Action Network’s Finance Working Group made to the pre-COP29 negotiations. This submission advocates a “public finance core” of $1 trillion a year, and then situates that core within a much “wider mobilization goal” that reflects “historic legacies and ongoing practices of unfair atmospheric carbon budget appropriation,” among other inconvenient realities. Also, the text anchors its $1 trillion headline ask in three key subgoals, and reviews the (still primitive) needs assessment literature to conclude that “developing countries’ international climate finance needs could be at least $400bn for loss and damage, at least $300bn for adaptation, and at least $300bn for mitigation, measured in grant-equivalent terms.”

Annually, of course.

We Have the Money

Let’s take this $1 trillion annual figure, stipulate again that it refers to a public finance core that must come as grants or grant-equivalents, add that this finance is needed immediately, not 2035, and note that—unlike the miserable sums gaveled through in Baku—its provision would be a game changer. Not that $1 trillion a year in core public finance would be enough, not as the equatorial regions of the planet dry and people begin to migrate in real numbers, but it would suffice to establish, or at least allow, robust levels of international trust and cooperation. It would really get things moving.

Where would this kind of money come from? A group of us took up this question in the 2024 Civil Society Equity Review, which was entitled Fair Shares, Finance, Transformation: Fair Shares Assessment, Equitable Fossil Fuel Phaseout, and Public Finance for Just Global Climate Stabilization. Unlike this brief essay, it is long enough to treat the finance challenge in meaningful detail. Its key message is that stabilizing the climate quickly enough to prevent global catastrophe is going to be expensive, but that we nonetheless have the money to do so. Or, more precisely, the global rich have the money, and—one way or another—they’re going to have to pay, as per Foreign Policy’s rather inelegant formulation, to “help fix the planet.”

The Equity Review group is not alone in making this case. But Fair Shares, Finance, Transformation is notable for the deliberate manner in which it lays out the path forward, the way it names and quantifies the barriers to decarbonization, and its careful, explicit distinction between finance sources that are immediately available—or would be, given political and economic reforms—and more fundamental transformations that will require deeper system change.

Strategically, the key issue is the finance sources that are immediately available, so here’s a very quick summary. (See Fair Shares, Finance, Transformation for details and footnotes, and for a discussion of the larger context, which includes the need for deeper and more fundamental changes.)

The place to begin is fossil fuel subsidies. These represent a public finance flow that could be quickly redirected to support the climate transition. This flow can be expressed as either direct public support or “total” subsidies. The former, according to Energy Policy Tracker, reached a record high of $1.7 trillion in 2022, a figure that represents “public financial support for fossil fuels, in the form of subsidies, investments by state-owned enterprises, and lending from public financial institutions.” The latter, according to the International Monetary Fund (no hotbed of green socialism), takes a more expansive view of subsidies that includes “undercharging for global warming and local air pollution” and estimates total fossil fuel subsidies at $7 trillion a year.

There are also targeted financial mechanisms already at hand. For example, a reinvention of the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights, which after decades of discussion is only now getting real attention, could very rapidly yield $500 billion in concessional loans, while financial transaction taxes, even at low tax rates, would yield considerable revenues. One proposal calls for a levy of 0.05% to be applied to various domestic and international financial transactions involving stocks, bonds, and currency. In 2011, the estimated revenues for such a tax was $600 to $700 billion; at today’s volume of financial transactions, it could easily raise more than $1 trillion.

Whatever happens, pollution taxes are fundamental. First up are frequent flier taxes, which could yield $150 billion a year, and maritime levies, which could bring in $100 billion more. And when we’re ready to tax pollution directly, all sorts of doors would open. Special attention should go to the proposal for a Climate Damages Tax, which could raise $900 billion by 2030 by taxing fossil fuel extraction in the OECD countries. Eighty percent of this, $720 billion, would go to the Loss and Damage Fund, while the rest would be reserved to support the action in the countries where the tax is imposed. The alternative to such an extraction levy is to more heavily tax fossil fuel companies’ profits. The five oil supermajors alone (ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, TotalEnergies, and BP) made over $120 billion of profits in 2023.

Wealth taxes are increasingly central to the finance debate. Exhibit A is the Blueprint for a Coordinated Taxation Standard for Ultra-high-net-worth Individuals commissioned by the Brazilian G20 presidency and prepared by economist Gabriel Zucman. This proposal is notable for its links to Brazil, the COP30 host, and for the precise way it aims to remedy problems with tax systems that rely on income taxes that fail to effectively tax the super-rich. “Let’s agree that billionaires should pay income taxes equivalent to a small portion—say, 2%—of their wealth each year… In total, the proposal would allow countries to collect an estimated $250 billion in additional tax revenue per year.”

Another approach is to cast a wider net, and go straight to a system of globally harmonized national wealth taxes. This approach is exemplified by a recent proposal from the Tax Justice Network for an “international version of Spain’s ‘featherlight’ progressive wealth tax.” Spain’s tax applies a tax of 1.7- 3.5% to the richest 0.5% of the country’s households, a group of about 26.5 million people. If adopted by nations around the world, it would raise about $2.1 trillion a year. The decisive move here is to erase the unfair distinction between “earned wealth” like salaries and “unearned wealth” like dividends, capital gains, and rents, which is obtained by simply owning things and is typically taxed at far lower rates than earned wealth. This erasure would yield so much revenue because the richest 0.5% own a quarter (25.7%) of all wealth.

Finally, there is military spending, the gold standard of wasted economic potential. Military spending diverts massive streams of resources that could be used to stabilize the climate and build the infrastructure of a sustainable world. The wealthiest nations, those in the UNFCCC’s Annex II, are, according to research by the Transnational Institute, “spending 30 times as much on their armed forces as they spend on providing climate finance for the world’s most vulnerable countries.” The United States is responsible for a huge chunk of that military spending, with an official 2025 military budget of $852 billion, but other countries are by no means innocent. China holds second place, with a military budget now estimated at $296 billion a year. Throughout the world, even very poor countries burn significant fractions of their public moneys on the military sector, to the obvious detriment of climate transformation and the well-being of their populations. When added together, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, global military expenditure surged in 2023 to $2.4 trillion, the highest level ever recorded.

There are two takeaways from all this. The first is that there is plenty of money to stabilize the climate system, and to do so well and fairly. The second is that there are plenty of ideas for how to redirect money to the climate transition. The above list is anything but exhaustive, and the best way forward is probably to combine multiple ideas into one flexible, expansive program. Action Aid, in Finding the Finance, put this well, arguing that the way forward is “taking coordinated action globally to introduce a range of new taxes that could raise trillions of U.S. dollars—such as through windfall taxes, wealth taxes, higher tax rates on the income of the top 1%, financial transaction taxes, a range of carbon and climate damage taxes, and taxes on aviation and shipping.”

Who Pays

This may sound defeatist, but it’s time to seriously consider the possibility that there will be no finance breakthrough, that neither the $300 billion that was promised in Baku nor the far larger sum that would allow us to plan an inclusive and civilized transition to a post-carbon world will ever arrive.

This would not be a surprise. Nor would the consequent anger and outrage and bitterness be in any way unexpected, or even unwelcome. But, having said this, is it permissible to wonder if they would suffice? The question is necessary after Baku, which followed Dubai’s call to “transition away” from fossil fuels. Baku should by all rights have marked a deepening of that effort, but instead the fossil fuel industry, led by the Saudis, was able to leverage the more-than-justified frustration and bitterness of the Global South to ensure that the Dubai call was not even reiterated.

What’s the lesson here? The best answer may simply be that, even as we fight for finance, we have to remember that finance isn’t everything, and that it’s dangerous to believe it is. It is not even exactly the case that finance is a precondition of rapid decarbonization. The truth is rather that economic and developmental justice is a precondition of rapid decarbonization, and that we are being forced by our strange times and dire circumstances to take international finance as a proxy for justice. In some cases—the fossil phaseout comes to mind—we would be better off insisting on the real thing.

Baku cast a bright and unforgiving light on the political vise within which we are trapped. On the one hand we’re out of time, and mitigation—decarbonization—must be our top priority. On the other hand, rapid decarbonization is simply not going to be possible without a great deal of economic justice. Think of the Global South’s overwhelming international debt, which can never be repaid. Think of the massively unbalanced and unsustainable international trading system. Think of the planetary divide between the rich and the poor, and how the rich exploit it at every turn.

Even if, as many believe, decarbonization is the essential core of the climate challenge, it is difficult, amidst today’s crumbling political order, to believe that any sufficiently rapid climate stabilization is possible in a world where adaptation, loss and damage, and just transition challenges—all of them pillars of the solidarity agenda—are left almost entirely unfunded. Yet that is exactly where we are today.

Again, there is plenty of money. The question is how to convert some of it—say, a trillion dollars a year—into grant-based public finance, so that it can be used to provision not only an accelerated mitigation effort, but also the equity agenda—the solidarity agenda and the fair-share agenda—that will have to accompany it. It’s a more than challenging prospect, particularly given that the finance battle must be fought, and won, among the rich, most of whom reside in the Global North, which is currently beset by an exterminist strain of right-wing nationalist populism.

The Washington Post frankly reported that Baku was “blasted” by the negotiators and activists of the Global South. Then it found space for this:

Taxpayers in wealthy countries will ultimately foot much of the bill for the finance deal. Negotiators from rich nations had to consider the possibility of voters’ resistance to a high amount, especially in the European Union, where farmers have held recent protests against climate regulations, and the United States, where Trump could refuse to send more climate aid overseas.

In an email, Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas), who led a delegation of House lawmakers to COP29, called the final agreement a “horrible deal.”

“China, the world’s largest polluter, self-identifies as a ‘developing country,’” Pfluger said. “The last thing we need is to be shackled by another harmful, America-last climate pipe dream.”

There’s the problem, and the misery, right there.

Baku can be read—and is being read, within the climate left—as a final repudiation, by the rich countries, of the obligation to do their fair share they took on when they signed the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. I can see the logic here, but I don’t think it’s quite right. The equity battle is anything but over, and it cannot be plausibly repudiated. But the equity battle will also not be won in strict North/South terms.

Looking back over financing options sketched above, I see a way forward, one in which we open the strategic lens, not by talking less about the injustice of the North/South world, but by talking more about the injustices of the rich/poor world. Think, if you will, of the “Baku to Belém Roadmap to $1.3 trillion,” and the challenge to contrive an effective campaign strategy around it. Think, in particular, about the spectrum defined by pollution and extraction taxes on one side, and wealth taxes on the other, which the Climate Tax Justice groups have taken to calling “solidarity levies.” Think about the fact that both pollution taxes and wealth tax are essential, and that they can be imposed nationally and harmonized globally.

The Global South needs real climate finance, and plenty of it. But what if, instead of continuing to insist that this finance will eventually come from the Global North, we admit that there’s only one place to get it: from the global rich. While most of them live in the Global North, some of them don’t. There are now 1,050 billionaires in the United States and 304 in China. We want a solidarity levy on the former group, absolutely, but are we really going to get one without taxing the latter as well?

There were many pre-COP29 finance debates. Last year, during one of them, it became all but impossible to avoid references to a paper by Andrew Fanning and Jason Hickel that argued that the United States—even if it pursues an ambitious emissions reduction trajectory—will by 2050 owe the countries of the Global South something like $200 trillion, as compensation for its historic over-appropriation of the atmospheric commons. It’s a stunning number, and even if it’s only somewhat true, it makes a stunning point.

The “Why Trump Won” debate in the United States is also throwing up some stunning numbers. In this illuminating comment by American historian Heather Cox Richardson, she cites research showing that, had the comparably equitable income structure of post-World War II America to 1974 held steady through 2020, the annual income of American workers below the 90th percentile would by 2018 have been $2.5 trillion higher than it actually turned out to be.

This means that between 1975 to 2018, “the difference between the aggregate taxable income for those below the 90th percentile and the equitable growth counterfactual totals $47 trillion.” Extend the trend ($2.5 trillion a year in shifted income) to 2024 and you arrive at the present: Since 1975, the richest 10% of Americans and especially the richest 1% have taken $60 trillion from the poorest 90%.

Sixty trillion dollars is not $200 trillion, but it’s not peanuts either. We would be fools to ignore it, in favor of a vision of global economic justice that identifies the Global North as the only significant barrier to honest hope. It is, certainly, a keystone barrier, but so too are the global rich, and they well deserve their fair share of the vilification.

The who pays question is one of the oldest on the climate equity agenda. It’s time to answer it properly.

The toppling of Bashar al-Assad in Syria was cheered by U.S. President Joe Biden and other major Western leaders, like French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, as it ended the reign of a brutal regime more than 13 years after Assad’s crackdown on anti-government protests ignited Syria’s civil war.

Indeed, Biden described Assad’s fall as a “historic opportunity” for the Syrian people, echoing Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the leader of the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group (HTS) that took over Syria, who said, “This victory, my brothers, is historic for the region.”

But wait. Isn’t HTS on the list of banned terrorist groups and Jolani a jihadist militant whose journey began in Iraq with links to al Qaeda and later to the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI)? So why is the West cheering for al Qaeda and its allies?

When all is said and done, forcing regime change rarely succeeds.

The European Union Agency for Asylum describes HTS as a coalition of Islamist Sunni armed groups that “frequently commit serious human rights abuses, including harassment, assassinations, kidnapping, and torture, as well as unlawful detention of civilians.” It goes on to say that “civilians have also been extorted and kidnapped for ransom” and that “the group has conducted formal military campaigns, assassinations, hostage takings, and ‘lone wolf’ operations, including suicide bombings,” while “members of religious minorities have been forced to convert to Islam and adopt Sunni customs.”

So, what is going on here? How can the fall of the admittedly brutal Assad regime create a “historic opportunity” for the Syrian people when the country is now under the control of jihadists? But we’ve been witness to this comedy drama before. From 1979 to 1989, the United States (along with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan) armed and financed the Afghan Islamist fighters known as the mujahideen who were fighting the Soviet Union. The plan from the beginning was to keep the Islamist insurgency going for as long as possible, thus sucking the Soviets into a Vietnam-style quagmire.

The Islamist fight in Afghanistan against the Soviets was “the good jihad,” according to Washington. The mujahideen were fighting for peace against an enemy of the Western world and deserved U.S. support. Of course, we know how that turned out.

The Bush administration embarked on a campaign against terrorism following the 9/11 attacks, with the first phase of the campaign focusing on “capturing or killing bin Laden, destroying his al Qaeda network in Afghanistan, and deposing the Taliban-regime.”

Undoubtedly, bombing into oblivion the Islamists in Syria if the new government, headed by Mohammed al-Bashir who has been appointed as interim prime minister, fails to lead a new path is a contingency plan that Washington has probably already considered. The job, in fact, could be given to Israel, for whom bombing is second nature. Since the fall of Assad, Israel has already carried out hundreds of airstrikes across Syria, targeting airports, naval bases, and military infrastructure. And the U.S. Central Command announced that it has struck more than 75 targets, including ISIS leaders, operatives, and camps.

Hypocrisy and duplicity, followed in the end by astonishing moral and political somersaults, are trademarks of the way Washington and its Western allies approach world affairs and conduct diplomacy. And these elements have been in full display since the start of Syria’s civil war. The Obama administration provided support to the anti-Assad forces, primarily to the Free Syrian Army forces and its affiliates, but the CIA began to support other groups as early as 2013 even though they had jihadi orientations. CIA’s covert operation against the Syrian regime, known as Timber Sycamore, was a joint effort with Saudi Arabia that had long ties with radical Islamist groups. But regime change is what Washington was after in Syria, so everything else was of secondary concern.

The fall of the Assad regime has staggering implications for security in the region, but the speed with which it collapsed suggests that, in the end, it may have been mainly internal rather than external pressures that made the difference. Syria was under imperialist attack for the past 13 years. The U.S. (along with Turkey) backed and funded mercenaries and terrorist forces against Assad’s regime, imposed economic isolation of the country through sanctions, and denied plans that would have contributed to reconstruction even though aid was desperately needed for civilians. In April 2017, the U.S. even ordered direct military action against Syria in retaliation for the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime. The Trump administration claimed to have been moved by the deaths of some 80 civilians; yet then-President Donald Trump refused to lift his ban on accepting Syrian refugees into the U.S.

But the Assad regime had created a hellish place, with 90% of Syrians living in poverty and widespread malnutrition. The country was in a vicious downward spiral. The economy had plummeted by 85% due to nearly 14 years of civil war. The inflation rate had risen to over 120% in 2024 while electricity production had dropped by 80%, with power outrages having become a common phenomenon. And the only thing that the Assad’s regime had to offer was more repression.

Still, the collapse of the regime, now celebrated throughout the Western world, raises more questions than answers. There are too many actors, both inside and outside Syria, with diverse interests and conflicting goals and aims. Assad’s regime used secularism as a tool to repress opponents, but there should be no expectations for the emergence of stable secular nationalism in Syria anytime soon. The fear that Syria will face the same fate as Afghanistan is also unfounded. The country has too many hostile factions for a dominant group like the Taliban to take complete control of the country. If anything, it is probably destined to become a failed state like Libya following the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi in 2011 with the help of NATO, an event that was also widely celebrated by the Western leaders of the time.

Indeed, when all is said and done, forcing regime change rarely succeeds. In fact, U.S. foreign policy has been an unmitigated disaster in the post-Cold War period, creating more problems that it tried to solve. Think of the Balkans, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Middle East.

Syria will be no different. It was a hellish place under Assad but will more likely than not end up next as another “black hole” in the lost list of U.S. "achievements" in forcing regime change.

Progressive Democrats and Corporate Democrats are blaming themselves for their party’s latest defeat. But the corporate Democrats run the party, it was their candidates including Biden and Harris who fell flat and they didn’t allow progressives to have anything to do with the campaign or their strategy.

The post Move Right, No Matter What first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post Move Right, No Matter What appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The DMZ America Podcast’s Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) discuss a pair of stories that reflect a disturbing trend: as the government turns more lawless and fails to enforce the law, Americans are taking the law into their own hands—and voters seem to approve.

A Manhattan jury acquitted Daniel Penny, the subway rider who strangled a mentally-ill homeless man, Jordan Neely, using a choke hold that the NYPD is banned from using in the line of duty. And Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old man accused of shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson to death in New York has become a folk hero to patients angry at the way they’re treated by health insurance companies.

If the system fails, is it acceptable to roll “Death Wish” style? Ted and Scott debate the social and political ramifications.

The post DMZ America Podcast Ep 184: It’s Vigilante Time! first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post DMZ America Podcast Ep 184: It’s Vigilante Time! appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

World's richest man Elon Musk has revealed the truth about what he plans to do with his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE): Gut Social Security and Medicare.

Musk retweeted a series of posts by Utah’s Republican Senator Mike Lee, who dubbed Social Security “deceptive” and called for its dismantling. “Interesting thread,” Musk added.

— (@)

On Thursday, Musk and his “DOGE” co-chair, Vivek Ramaswamy, went to Capitol Hill to discuss their plans. Republican lawmakers immediately announced that “everything is on the table,” including cutting Social Security and Medicare.

During the campaign, Musk said his goal was to cut $2 trillion — or about 30 percent — of the entire federal budget.

There’s no way to do this without cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Social Security alone accounts for almost a quarter of the total federal budget.

Ramaswamy has been even more explicit about their plan, saying in a CNBC interview that “there are hundreds of billions of dollars of savings to extract” from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Elon Musk spent $277 million of his fortune to elect Trump. He bought the power to gut Social Security and give himself more tax cuts and tens of billions in government contracts.

Just to remind you: Neither Musk nor Ramaswamy was elected to his position. Which means they’re utterly unaccountable. (Musk and Ramaswamy will work in concert with budget-cutters in the Trump White House, with the support of a congressional DOGE caucus that’s now forming.)

They’re both multi-billionaires who couldn’t care less about Social Security. Meanwhile, you’ve probably been paying into Social Security your entire working life.

Republicans have been out to kill Social Security since its founding in 1935 because it’s one of the most popular and successful government programs ever created. It doesn’t only help retirees. It also keeps 26 million people out of poverty.

Republicans have used public concern about Social Security’s future solvency as a cynical excuse to demand cuts in benefits.

True, the trustees of Social Security — of which yours truly was once a member — say the program will be able to pay full benefits only until 2033. After that, Social Security will be able to dole out only about 77 percent of benefits.

But Social Security could easily pay everything it will owe to everyone for the next 75 years if the cap on income subject to Social Security taxes were eliminated.

That cap is set at $168,600 this year (it rises with inflation). That means that anyone who earns more than $168,600 this year pays nothing in Social Security taxes on the excess.

Elon Musk finished paying his 2024 Social Security taxes 14 seconds past midnight on January 1 of 2024.

Even a run-of-the-mill CEO earning $20 million per year pays Social Security taxes on less than 1 percent of their income.

Meanwhile, a typical American worker pays Social Security taxes on 100 percent of their income.

The Social Security trustees anticipated the current boom in boomer retirements. This is why Social Security was amended in 1983, to gradually increase the age for collecting full retirement benefits from 65 to 67. That change is helping finance the boomers’ retirement.

But the trustees failed to anticipate that most Americans’ wages would remain stagnant and how much of America’s total income would be going to the top.

Most of the American working population today is earning less than the Social Security trustees anticipated years ago — reducing revenue flowing into the program.

Had the pay of American workers kept up with the trend decades ago — as well as their growing productivity — their Social Security payments would have helped keep the program flush.

At the same time, a much larger chunk of the nation’s total income is now going to the top compared to decades ago.

But income subject to the Social Security payroll tax is capped. So as the rich have become far richer, more and more of the nation’s total income has escaped the Social Security payroll tax.

The rise in the amount of income above the cap due to inequality has cost the Social Security Trust Fund reserve an estimated $1.4 trillion since 1983.

The solution is obvious: Scrap the cap and make the rich pay more in Social Security taxes.

Bernie Sanders has come up with a plan that would eliminate the cap on earnings over $250,000 and also subject investment income to Social Security taxes. This would extend the solvency of Social Security for the next 75 years without raising taxes on 93 percent of American households.

But Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and the other billionaires who’ll be running the administration starting January 20 don’t want to pay their fair share to keep Social Security going. They’d rather kill Social Security.

Buckle your seatbelts. This is likely to be one of the biggest fights of the first year of the Trump administration. It’s also a glaring illustration of the difference between the American people and Trump’s rich and powerful lackeys.

If we want to ensure Social Security’s long-term future, and that working people can retire with dignity, we must make the wealthy — including the richest person in the world — pay their fair share.

The fall of the Baath state in Syria is a serious defeat for Russia (and a disaster for Iran). It would however be a grave mistake to assume that this by necessity makes it a success for the United States.

Moscow and Washington may indeed now face similar challenges in Syria.

Three issues led Russia to intervene in the Syrian civil war to save the Assad regime. First was a general desire to preserve a partner state — one of the very few remaining to Russia after the U.S. overthrow of the regimes in Iraq and Libya, which helped to prop up Moscow’s international influence. Second was a desire to retain Russia’s only naval and air bases in the Mediterranean.

Third was a deep Russian fear that an Islamist victory would lead to Syria becoming a base for terrorism against Russia and its partners in Central Asia. That anxiety was increased by the presence of numerous fighters from Chechnya and other Muslim regions of Russia in the ranks of the Islamist forces in Syria and Iraq.

Moscow’s hope of preserving a partner state has now irredeemably collapsed. As to the terrorist threat, we will have to see. Given the huge challenges it will face in rebuilding the Syrian state, it would seem insane for the new regime led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) to sponsor international terrorism; and, as part of his general strategy of disowning his Al Qaeda past, its leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, has promised not to do this.

There will, however, be a question mark over HTS’s ability to control its allies, and some of its own followers. In Afghanistan, the Taliban promised not to back international terrorism when they returned to power, and have apparently kept their word. The Afghanistan-based Islamic State of Khorasan (ISK), however, continues to do so; and from some mixture of weak control over parts of Afghanistan and unwillingness to engage in new conflict, the Taliban have not been able fully to prevent this.

This leaves the issue of the Russian naval base at Tartus and air base near Latakia. The Russian squadron based at Tartus has reportedly left the port. This could be either a definitive evacuation or a precautionary move to keep them out to sea until relations with the new regime are clarified. The Russian air base is said to be surrounded by HTS forces, but has not been attacked. It is reported that there has been a deal between Moscow and HTS to guarantee the security of the bases, but, if so, this arrangement may be purely temporary.

Given the extremely complicated and uncertain nature of its relations with all Syria’s neighbors, it might make good sense for the new regime in Damascus to allow the bases to remain (perhaps in return for Russian supplies of oil and food) in order to balance its diplomatic and economic options.

This issue however is intimately tied up with that of the new regime’s policy towards Syria’s ethno-religious minorities, which generally supported the Baath regime out of fear of Sunni Islamist oppression (a fear amply justified by the savage fate of their communities in Syria and Iraq which fell to ISIS).

Where Russia’s bases are situated along the Mediterranean coast lies the heartland of Syria’s Christian and Alawite minorities. The Assad dynasty came from the Alawites, a Shia sect, and, for the past 50 years, the Baath state in Syria has been to a great extent an Alawite one. Alawite militias played a crucial role on the government side in the civil war, and inflicted numerous atrocities on their opponents.

Al-Jolani has promised that there must be no revenge for this, that minority rights will be respected, and that there will be no imposition of severe Sunni Islamist law. Even if he is sincere about these pledges, however, his followers may feel differently.

An HTS-led regime in Damascus that wishes to reassure the Alawites and Christians might see an interest in allowing the Russian bases to remain. A regime fearful of minority revolt (and outside backing for such revolt), however, would likely see the Russian bases as potential support for such rebellion.

For Russia to retain its bases against the will of the new Syrian government, and with the support of local Alawite and Christian forces, would not only require the intervention of Russian ships and aircraft but also the deployment of significant numbers of ground forces. Given the war in Ukraine, it is highly unlikely that Russia has such forces to spare.

Moreover — as with the equally rapid collapse of the U.S. proxy Afghan state — the way in which Syrian state forces melted away in the face of the HTS-led insurgent forces will hardly encourage Russia to continue the fight in Syria.

In a different form, these issues also face U.S. policy in Syria. Will Washington attempt to keep its own bases in Syria (from which it has attacked both ISIS and Baath regime targets)? Will the new regime turn a blind eye to them, or attempt to force them out?

The greatest issue of all for the U.S. to consider is the fate of the Syrian Kurds. During the Syrian civil war, with massive help from the U.S. and the semi-independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq, Syrian Kurdish forces (the Democratic Union Party or PYD) occupied a huge swath of northeastern Syria, considerably beyond their core ethnic territory. The U.S. has several bases and logistics operations in the region.

The one outside the country which appears to have been critical to HTS’s victory, and to have profited unquestionably from it, is Turkey and the Turkish government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The HTS offensive emerged from the Turkish-controlled area of northern Syria and could hardly have occurred without Turkish support. HTS’s successful use of drones strongly hints at Turkish aid.

Turkey has two core interests in Syria. The first is to establish a situation in which the three million Syrian refugees in Turkey who fled their homeland during the civil war can return home. That may now be achievable, if the new government in Damascus can establish basic peace and order and receive some international aid. Hundreds of refugees are reportedly already queuing up to cross back into Syria from Turkey.

The second Turkish interest is to reduce the power and territory of the Syrian Kurds, whom it has accused of being allied to PKK Kurdish rebels in Turkey. Simultaneously with the HTS offensive against the Baath regime, the Turkish-backed “Syrian National Army” rebels supported by Turkish airpower launched an offensive against the Kurdish PYD (officially designated by Turkey as “terrorists”), capturing the town of Manbij. This creates a situation in which proxies backed by a NATO member (though an increasingly estranged one) are attacking a U.S. proxy, without the U.S. seemingly being able to do much about it.

If Turkey pushes the new regime in Damascus to join in the attack on the Kurdish-controlled territories in northeastern Syria, this will create dilemmas for Washington akin to those facing Russia in the west. Would the Trump administration abandon its Kurdish allies, in accordance with Trump’s statement that “This is not our fight. Let it play out. Do not get involved?” Or would the demands of “credibility” compel Washington to come to their aid, even at the potential cost of triggering a deep crisis with Turkey?

The Middle East resembles a billiard table, in which the movement of one ball is liable to send the others flying off in different directions and in turns bouncing off each other. The difference is that, unlike in billiards, even the most insightful expert cannot predict in which direction the balls will move; and no outside player has been able to control them.

On the whole, the wisest approach by far would seem to be that of the Chinese, who import much of their energy from the region while determinedly avoiding intervention and taking sides in its conflicts.

For, as a Chinese diplomat said to me many years ago, “Why would we want to get involved in that mess?”

On the campaign trail, President-elect Donald Trump promised a very different foreign policy from business as usual in Washington.

He said he would prioritize peace over “victory” in the escalating war in Ukraine, pull the United States back from foreign entanglements to focus on domestic problems, and generally oversee a period of prolonged peace, instead of the cycle of endless Great Power conflict we seem trapped in.

Yet if personnel is policy, as the saying goes, then Trump’s presidency will be far more in line with his Democratic predecessor’s foreign policy than with the vision he laid out over the past year. So far, his National Security Council picks have been a series of hawks with a history of opposing diplomacy and the end of U.S. wars, as well as favoring a more aggressive posture toward China, including intervening in a possible war over Taiwan.

At best, Trump’s picks will seek to simply replace one dangerous, nuclear-tinged Great Power conflict with another.

Take Trump’s pick for national security adviser, Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.). Since his selection, Waltz certainly talks in line with the more restraint-oriented vision Trump campaigned on, fretting about the Biden administration’s recent escalation in Ukraine and calling for a “responsible end” to the war there.

But until relatively recently, the Florida congressman viewed the war in very similar terms to those of his hawkish colleagues on the other side of the aisle, reacting to the Russian invasion by warning it “violates the very fabric of international norms” and threatens “our Western values,” lamenting that President Joe Biden had not been more confrontational with Russia beforehand, and calling for the United States to “support Ukrainian resistance efforts” and turn the country “into a bloody quagmire” for Russia.

Over the months that followed, Waltz backed escalating the war (“Send the damn MiGs,” he tweeted in March 2022), complained that U.S. policy on the war was a “fiddle fart” that provided just enough arms “instead of going for the kill, instead of going for the win right now,” and charged that Biden was “letting fear of escalation be the primary driver of our policy in Ukraine.”

Waltz has shifted since, but largely because he sees a U.S.-China confrontation as a bigger priority. Waltz views China as “the most threatening adversary America has ever faced,” believes that Washington is already locked in a “Cold War” with Beijing and must “curb” its power, step up military aid to Taiwan, and end the policy of “strategic ambiguity” over the island nation, which has been at the core of decades of successful U.S. policy balancing deterrence without tipping into disastrous war.

He has also disparaged diplomacy with the Chinese government, and thinks U.S. forces should have stayed in Afghanistan to hang on to Bagram Airfield for possible use as a “second front” in a future U.S.-China war.

The rest of Trump’s national security team holds similar views. Sebastian Gorka, nominated for deputy assistant to the president, sees the Ukraine war in literally indistinguishable terms from hawks in the outgoing Biden administration: It is “unprovoked Russian aggression” that is not about NATO expansion but rather enlarging Russian territory; negotiations, peace, or an off-ramp are as futile as Neville Chamberlain’s deal with Hitler was; and the United States must continue military aid “to make the Russians bleed,” or Russian President Vladimir Putin will “take Poland and the Baltic states.”

Gorka is also a hawk on China, which he calls “the greatest threat to America.”

“We know the regime there wishes to have every nation in the world a defeated, vanquished nation, or a satrapy, a tributary nation,” Gorka said this past October, while giving a fawning interview to Gordon Chang, a discredited “China expert” who has repeatedly predicted the imminent collapse of the Chinese state.

In his 2018 book, Gorka called China’s undoubted goal of becoming a world power, and partly doing so through economic investment in the Global South, a form of “irregular warfare” (even as he admits it is little different from the actions “of the West a couple of centuries ago”). He has repeatedly suggested that China was about to invade Taiwan, including after its wayward spy balloon; gave former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy “kudos” for taking the inflammatory step of traveling to the island; and implied that U.S. lives should be expended to defend it.

Alex Wong, Trump’s pick for deputy national security adviser, agrees. Wong believes that Americans “have to be prepared for a level of tension, regional destabilization, and—yes—possible conflict [with China] that we have not seen since the end of World War II.” Wong noted he deliberately used that destructive, hot conflict as a reference point and not the Cold War.

A former foreign policy adviser for the super-hawkish Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and the merely hawkish 2012 Mitt Romney presidential campaign, Wong served most recently as vice chair of a congressional commission that recommended training Taiwanese troops on U.S. soil—a highly provocative move to China’s leadership.

Because China is, unlike the former Soviet Union, highly integrated into the “system of the free world,” Wong has said, the U.S.-China conflict requires not just “out-competing them but extruding”—meaning, pushing out—“China from certain systems, whether economically, technologically, politically.” What that means for Wong is not just continuing the Biden administration’s economic warfare with the country, but also “an increased U.S. military presence” in the Indo-Pacific and to “seriously look at new investments in strategic nuclear forces, intermediate-range missiles, our naval fleet, and certain capabilities tuned to turning back an invasion of Taiwan,” as well as “expand[ing] the aperture of our military alliances” in the region, specifically with Japan and under AUKUS.

Wong does seem to favor extricating the United States from Ukraine, but, like Waltz, it’s because he views “Ukraine as an unfortunate diversion of U.S. attention from the Indo-Pacific” and wants to “responsibly shift U.S. military resources eastward”—in a way that, to take his words literally, will ramp up conflict with China and see the U.S. go directly to war in the case of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

None of these appointments bode well for advocates of U.S. foreign policy restraint, let alone for those who voted for Trump hoping he would prioritize domestic problems over endless foreign wars. At best, Trump’s picks will seek to simply replace one dangerous, nuclear-tinged Great Power conflict with another. At worst, they will not do the former, and embroil the United States into two of the latter.

So what is the progressive working-class policy when it comes to immigration?

I don’t know the answer and neither does anyone else, because there isn’t one. Why is that?

To date there has been no serious effort to bring together the leaders of labor unions and immigrant workers centers to discuss common approaches to immigration that speak to the needs of all working people.

Further, and perhaps even more importantly, there has been no sustained educational dialogue at the local level that brings together immigrant and non-immigrant workers to discuss their hopes, fears, and desires.

To be sure there are widely shared negative positions: Opposition to separating immigrant families; opposition to creating mass detention centers; and opposition to forcibly expelling undocumented workers who are working hard and obeying the law. But there is no broad-based discussion, let alone agreement, on what a progressive working-class policy should include.

This is a disaster for progressive politics. For without addressing what is perceived widely as an immigration crisis, the field is left open to demagogues who want to divide and exploit workers for political gain.

Elements of a Progressive Working-Class Policy

There are several proactive and positive avenues to developing new progressive immigration policies. The first is the need to rebuild Latin American economies so that residents of those countries can find secure and sustainable employment near home. As one labor leader told me last week, we need an immediate multibillion-dollar Marshall Plan for these countries so that their people do not need to risk life and limb to come to the U.S. for incredibly low-wage jobs.

Unless a working-class approach to immigration is developed, progressive politics will become increasingly alienated from working people, and the right will make greater and greater inroads into the working class by promoting a politics of fear and resentment.

Making these changes is a tall order, but the root cause of the migrant crisis needs to be identified and discussed again and again. People are fleeing violence, dictatorships, and collapsing economies that U.S. financial assistance can help to rectify, and one could argue, that Wall Street’s wealth extraction and U.S. foreign policy maneuvers helped to create.

There is also reason to believe that non-immigrant workers increasingly support a path to citizenship for undocumented workers. In researching my book, Wall Street’s War on Workers, we uncovered a remarkable change in the attitudes of white members of the working class.

The Cooperative Elections Study, which has over one-half million respondents, asked the following highly charged question on immigration in 2010 and again in 2020:

“Do you favor or oppose granting legal status to all illegal immigrants who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least three years, and not been convicted of any felony crimes?”

In 2010, only 32.1 percent supported granting such legal status. By 2020, those who favored a pathway to legal status jumped to a remarkable 61.8 percent.

These working-class respondents, however, also want more enforcement on the border. In 2020, 72.6 percent were in favor of “increasing the number of border patrols on the U.S.- Mexican border.” This is a 5 percent increase compared to those who supported this statement in 2010.

Working people who are citizens want to see a fair and just path forward for the millions of law-abiding undocumented immigrants who are already here. But they don’t want open borders or mass unauthorized immigration.

This is not just a white worker phenomenon. Hispanic voters also seem to support a firmly policed border. That can be deduced from the enormous change in voting patterns in South Texas. Among 14 mostly Hispanic counties, Trump won 12. In 2016 he won only five. And Trump, to be sure, in the last campaign increased his focus on stopping the flow of immigrants even while threatening to deport all undocumented workers.

An Educational Model

In the 1990s, the Labor Institute—which I direct—conducted dozens of workshops that brought together environmentalists and oil and chemical workers to discuss climate change and the regulatory elimination of toxic substances. The workshops created an educational base in both groups for the idea of Just Transition, a set of policies to help workers and communities deal with the job dislocation that was likely to result from efforts to reduce toxic chemical production and the use of fossil fuels. It also led to new organizations that brought together workers and community members, such as the Just Transition Alliance and the BlueGreen Alliance.

A similar model should be created today bringing together immigrant and non-immigrant workers in joint workshops to share with each other their concerns and hopes, and to discuss joint policies on immigrant reform.

If ever there was a time to start an on-going dialogue, this is it.

There’s no guarantee that such an educational model will, on its own, produce progressive working-class immigration policies. But it is highly doubtful that a new common direction can be built without listening to rank-and-file immigrant and non-immigrant workers. Workshops can provide a safe and productive space to frankly consider and evaluate alternatives.

One thing is certain. Unless a working-class approach to immigration is developed, progressive politics will become increasingly alienated from working people, and the right will make greater and greater inroads into the working class by promoting a politics of fear and resentment.

If ever there was a time to start an on-going dialogue, this is it. Not doing so would be just another sign that progressives are writing off the working class.

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele had a huge (though controversial) electoral victory in February 2024. But a small, stubborn legal movement is challenging his popular, indiscriminate war against gangs.

Even as the reduction of gang violence brings relief to many Salvadorans, many low-income people see their law-abiding neighbors being swept up arbitrarily in Bukele’s war. Understandably, they fear the so-called security forces.

During a November 2024 tour in the United States, attorneys Ingrid Escobar and Óscar Rosales of Socorro Jurídico Humanitario (SJH or Humanitarian Legal Aid ) were clear: They do not oppose the legal arrest and incarceration of gang members. But they’re resisting a suspension of constitutional rights that’s proven to be capricious in practice, cruel, dangerous, and deadly.

Institutionalizing Brutality

MS-13 killed 87 people during the last weekend of March 2022. At Bukele’s direction, the Legislative Assembly implemented Article 29, resulting in an extraordinary emergency measure called a “state of exception.” With it, “the rights to freedom of association and assembly, and privacy in communications, as well as some due process protections” were temporarily suspended. “Temporarily” has become long-term.

Of the 83,000 who have been detained during Bukele’s war against gangs, SJH estimates that only 40% are actually gang members, another 30% have collaborated with gangs (often unwillingly and sometimes under threat of death), and the remaining 30% (most of them also charged with collaboration) are actually innocent of any gang affiliation at all.

The denial of the presumption of innocence and a lack of access to legal representation and family are harrowing for detainees, as well as their loved ones.

So, easily 25,000 (and likely many more) innocent people have been arrested and held under inhumane conditions, including extreme overcrowding. Some released prisoners report 150 detainees sharing a single toilet, multiple people sharing a single bed, and those who can’t access a bed sleeping on floors with excrement.

In mid-November, Bukele stated that 8,000 state-of-exception prisoners had been released. But, according to Escobar, hundreds of release orders have been ignored. Former detainee Melvin Ortiz had received 24 such orders but was only released after his case was taken to the United Nations.

SJH claims there were at least 330 deaths in detention between April 27, 2022 and the end of October 2024. About half were due to violence, 40% to medical neglect, and 10% to terminal illness. Notably, 94% of those 330 decedents did not belong to gangs.

Considering the cumulative institutional brutality, these deaths aren’t surprising. Some released prisoners report “welcome beatings” by prison guards upon incarceration, extreme malnutrition, dehydration (prisoners receive four ounces of water to drink daily), torture, and a lack of medications or medical care.

There is psychological trauma, too. The denial of the presumption of innocence and a lack of access to legal representation and family are harrowing for detainees, as well as their loved ones.

Arbitrary and Political Arrests

One government official told Leslie Schuld, director of Centro de Intercambio y Solidaridad: “We are throwing out nets to capture gang members and then we will release the innocent people caught in the nets.” But statistics from the past 32 months show that, once imprisoned, it’s easier to become entangled in those metaphorical nets than be released.

In practice, anyone—but it’s usually people in low-income neighborhoods—can be arrested under the state of exception. SJH reports that police and military personnel arrest arbitrarily to fulfill quotas. Allegations against persons can be made anonymously—which has proven handy for unscrupulous people with grudges, unwelcome competitors, or even romantic rivals. People are arrested for their tattoos (one young man was detained for having a rose tattoo honoring his mother, Rosa), for haircuts or clothing deemed suspicious, for having an old criminal record, or for having been deported from the United States.

“The fear we have is that we’ll be the next ones he arrests despite never having broken the law.”

Sandra Leticia Hernández fits several of these categories. After serving a sentence in Ilopango prison, she returned to Isla El Espíritu Santo where she lived with her lesbian life partner. Business competitors resented her thriving motorcycle-taxi service as well as her sexual orientation. Sandra was arrested first—and then her partner, Eidi Roxana Claros de Zaldaña, was detained when she made inquiries about her. Sandra was released eventually, while Eidi remains incarcerated.

Young Salvadorans are deeply affected by state-of-exception injustices. Human Rights Watch has observed that many children in low-income barrios are doubly traumatized: once preyed upon by gangs, they are now targeted by the police and state security forces. Over 3,000 children have been arrested; detainees as young as 12 years old can receive prison sentences of up to 10 years.

Additionally, both SJH and Columbia University’s Center for Mexico and Central America claim that, in El Salvador, “an estimated 100,000 children and adolescents had been effectively orphaned” after their parents disappeared into detention. SJH reports that many of these children lack basic necessities and some of them experience one or more of the following: depression, weight loss, eating disorders, nightmares, hyperactivity, aggressiveness, and fear and anger toward the military and police.

Finally, troublesome critics of corporations and the government—such as union members denouncing corruption, social activists, and human-rights defenders—are targeted. That includes the SJH. At a press conference, Escobar talked about the scrutiny they’re under: “These [investigatory] actions include surveillance and monitoring of our homes, workplaces, and the facilities of the Humanitarian Legal Aid. We have confirmed [this] through license plates on vehicles that are used solely for police purposes.”

Thirsting for Justice

But SJH isn’t deterred. In addition to providing full legal accompaniment to 100 innocent clients, SJH is rendering habeas corpus services to another 2,600. And because many of its clients were sole breadwinners, SJH provides material support to their families. So far, SJH has secured the release of 50 innocents, after taking some of their cases to international courts.

Escobar declares on her X page: “Tengo sed, sed de #Justicia.” She is thirsty for justice—but it’s risky. Elsewhere she’s acknowledged, “The fear we have is that we’ll be the next ones he arrests despite never having broken the law.”

SJH has a loud collective voice that carries far. It regularly denounces the Bukele administration’s violations of human rights in national and international settings. Surely these defenders of El Salvador’s hard-won but vulnerable democratic rights deserve our moral, political, and monetary support.

Please call senators and representatives through the U.S. Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121. Ask that U.S. aid for the Salvadoran armed forces be withheld until all innocents have been released and the prisons investigated independently.

You grab the duct tape and sprint to the windows in an attempt to seal them from the wind that blows in heavy dust and dirt. But your attempts at prevention are ineffective, yet again. You smother Vaseline inside your nostrils, hoping the moisture will catch the dust particles before they irritate your lungs. As you shelter from the dust storm, you feel the ache in your stomach from the lack of food. Crops have been failing due to the ferocity of the wind, and the sky is dark black from the dust clouds that hang overhead. Not a single ray of sunshine has broken through the complete obscurity in weeks.

This description is not a dystopian imagining of a far-off future. It’s a real firsthand account from a farmer who lived in Oklahoma during the years of the 1930s Dust Bowl, one the most devastating natural disasters in U.S. history.

The Dust Bowl wasn’t just the result of drought; it was driven by unsustainable land use practices, including the removal of native grasses and over-plowing for agriculture. What followed was environmental devastation, economic collapse, and the displacement of millions. This period remains a dark reminder of what happens when land is mismanaged, and its lessons are more relevant than ever as the world faces the growing crisis of desertification.

With the incoming Trump administration looking set to block and reverse climate measures that would otherwise prevent another Dust Bowl event, America’s land, and communities, hang in the balance.

Desertification is the degradation of dry lands that receive limited rainfall (known as arid and semi-arid lands). Degradation occurs when unsustainable land use practices, such as overgrazing, deforestation, drainage of wetlands, and intensive farming, strip the land of its natural vegetation, leaving the soil exposed and vulnerable to erosion.

The world’s largest forum for addressing desertification, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD COP16), is taking place right now in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. And while you may not have heard of it—given the competition with recent headlines—it comes at a pivotal time for the United States. With the incoming Trump administration looking set to block and reverse climate measures that would otherwise prevent another Dust Bowl event, America’s land, and communities, hang in the balance.

Desertification in Your Backyard

While the UNCCD COP16 is focusing on tackling the issue of desertification on a global scale, for the U.S., the problem hits much closer to home than many might realize.

Desertification impacts more than 30% of land in the U.S. States such as California, Arizona, and Nevada are already grappling with land degradation caused by drought and unsustainable agricultural practices. As the impacts of climate change intensify, the risks to these regions will only grow, creating the exact ingredients for another Dust Bowl to take place.

But we don’t need to merely speculate about the future consequences of land degradation—this past year, natural disasters have shown how degraded landscapes amplify the devastating effects of extreme weather in the here and now. When land degrades, it loses the ability to retain water and nutrients. This exacerbates drought conditions and increases the risk of wildfires, like those that ravage the Pacific Northwest so often that a period of the year is termed “wildfire season.” Degraded soils also worsen flooding due to their inability to retain water, leading to destructive floods like those witnessed in Florida and North Carolina in October.

On a global scale, land degradation impacts as much as 40% of the world’s land area, affecting more than 3.2 billion people. While desertification in distant regions like Spain or sub-Saharan Africa may seem unrelated to American lives, the reality is that the effects are far from remote.

Moreover, the ripple effects of global land degradation directly impact food security, economic stability, and supply chains. As disruptions to food production in one part of the world drive up prices and destabilize agricultural markets, the effects are felt across U.S. grocery stores and rural economies.

The Trump Presidency: a Forecasted Disaster

As the world struggles to address desertification, U.S. policies under President-elect Donald Trump are set to exacerbate the crisis. Trump’s environmental agenda prioritizes fossil fuel development over renewable energy, a strategy that will accelerate land degradation both in the U.S. and abroad.

Trump’s nominee for Interior Secretary, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, has deep ties to fossil fuel companies and supports expanding oil and gas drilling on federally owned lands. With the federal government controlling nearly one-third of U.S. land, opening these areas to fossil fuel extraction will devastate fragile ecosystems, disrupt local water cycles, and intensify pollution.

By prioritizing sustainable land management, investing in restoration, and fostering international cooperation, the impacts of desertification can be mitigated to prevent future natural disasters.

Indigenous communities, proven to be the best stewards of land and water, have long called for expanded roles in managing natural resources. Yet, Trump’s policies sideline these voices, favoring short-term profits over sustainable practices.

His withdrawal from international climate agreements, such as the Paris climate accord, weakened global efforts to address environmental crises, reducing momentum for collaborative action. This retreat disrupted progress on tackling interconnected issues like desertification, which is exacerbated by rising temperatures and extreme weather. A repeat of such actions would further undermine international cooperation and stall critical progress in combating land degradation.

Restoration Is Still Possible (and Economical?)

Despite these huge barriers to action, the fight against desertification would offer immense opportunities to the U.S.. Restoring degraded land provides economic, environmental, and societal benefits that far outweigh the costs of implementation.

Economically, restoring an area a little bigger than India could contribute up to $9 trillion in ecosystem services, providing economic gains nine times the initial investment. For every dollar invested in restoration, there is a return of up to $30, making it one of the most cost-effective strategies for combating climate change and land degradation. Restoration efforts could also create up to 395 million jobs globally by 2030.

Restoring degraded landscapes plays a critical role in mitigating climate change, with the potential to reduce global emissions by 26 gigatons by 2030. In the U.S., where recent disasters have caused billions of dollars in damages, restoration can also enhance disaster resilience. Every dollar spent on restoration yields tenfold benefits in terms of food security, disaster risk reduction, and economic growth.

Integrated landscape restoration projects demonstrate how collaboration between communities, governments, and businesses can create sustainable and scalable solutions. They unlock the possibility to reverse land degradation and build a foundation for long-term environmental and economic stability.

Preventing a Future Dust Bowl Requires Action

The Dust Bowl taught us a harrowing lesson: When we fail to protect and manage our land responsibly, the consequences can be catastrophic. Today, the stakes are even higher as climate change and unsustainable practices converge to create a global crisis of land degradation. Desertification is no longer a distant issue; it’s an urgent threat that directly impacts food security, economic stability, and the resilience of communities in the U.S. and beyond.

The ongoing UNCCD COP16 in Riyadh offers a crucial opportunity for nations to unite against desertification, but it is clear that the U.S. must step up as a leader in this fight. By prioritizing sustainable land management, investing in restoration, and fostering international cooperation, the impacts of desertification can be mitigated to prevent future natural disasters.

History has shown that inaction is far more costly than action. Restoration offers a path to resilience, providing economic benefits, creating jobs, and protecting ecosystems. The question is no longer whether we can afford to act—it’s whether we can afford not to.

The introduction to this article pieces together quotes and paraphrases sections of Caroline A. Henderson’s letters, which were originally published in The Atlantic.