The warehouses of human suffering are all around us. Filthy, inhumane prisons where immigrants are hidden away and brutalized. It's up to us to keep pushing to end these modern-day concentration camps. To expose them, empty them, and tear them down.

For months we New Jerseyans have mobilized to defend our brothers and sisters locked away in Delaney Hall in Newark. Many there are on a hunger and labor strike to protest the inhumane conditions inside—the rotted food, untreated illness, physical abuse and mental anguish—and the injustice of their detention in the first place. They are demanding their freedom.

Delaney Hall is just one part of a national network of immigrant abuse. It’s not about enforcing immigration laws—it’s about a paramilitary operation to attack and imprison immigrants and people of color, and keep them in inhumane conditions without the possibility of freedom until they give up their rights and accept deportation. In prisons all over the country—Adelanto, Dilley, Krome, Otay Mesa, Hutto, and others—corporate contractors like GEO Group are profiting from human isolation, sickness, and death. The Trump administration is supplying the bodies. And Congress is pumping billions of dollars more to feed this obscene, corrupt system.

Right now there is so much we can and must do to support the people suffering and protesting inside those walls. Some courageous fighters have already been released. But the struggle continues. We must work together to keep the pressure on the administration to meet their demands for human rights, due process, and for their freedom, starting first with the release of the most vulnerable, the elderly, young, pregnant, and sick.

We who are outside need to keep fighting and organizing to defend imprisoned immigrants and to support their families.

At a bare minimum, we must bear witness. The ICE Out of New Jersey collective has brought together several state and local community and grassroots organizations to be in the front lines to defend immigrants and expose and resist the administration's abuses. The groups are the New Jersey Immigrant Rights Program of the American Friends Service Committee, CATA - The Farmworkers Support Committee, Cosecha NJ, DIRE (Deportation and Immigration Response Equipo), El Pueblo Unido, Estamos Unidos NJ, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, Resistencia en Acción NJ, and Semilla Roja NJ.

Also, Eyes on ICE is building a network of watchful vigilance and mutual aid. Community members, elected officials, faith leaders, students, unions—it's going to take all of us, all across the country. To show that we could be different. We must not look away. And we must not stop.

President Donald Trump and those enforcing his white-supremacist campaign of mass imprisonment and mass deportations want us to feel afraid and powerless. The police—like the New Jersey state troopers who attacked peaceful protesters at Delaney Hall—want to intimidate us. We need to work together to shift this narrative, at all levels, from the governor and state and federal representatives to mayors and grassroots leaders.

When we say, “No justice, no peace,” we mean it. We are neither afraid nor powerless. And we are not strangers. We are human, like those just inside those walls.

Our freedom out here is linked to their freedom inside. We must fight for the liberation of all. The attack on one is an attack on all of us.

We must be witnesses when we are ordered to leave and told there's nothing to see. Even when Immigration Custom Enforcement agents and state police officers beat, trample, and pepper spray us in the name of "keeping the peace."

We must keep saying no—not now, not ever, never again. We must not allow the Trump administration and its state and local partners to keep abusing their power and using our money to commit moral atrocities in secrecy.

We the people must hold firm to our humanity and reject their barbarism.

The administration's top goal is to dehumanize immigrants. But despite all their violence, they have failed. The men and women behind the bars of immigrant prisons like Delaney Hall refuse to be dehumanized. Those who are on a hunger and labor strike are asserting their human dignity, which can never be erased.

We who are outside need to keep fighting and organizing to defend imprisoned immigrants and to support their families. We must keep up the pressure, for as long as it takes and with all the power we have.

We must not let their inhumanity dehumanize us.

For too long, philanthropy has hidden behind the twin gatekeepers of fiduciary duty and perpetuity to avoid giving more when communities need it most. Last year, the Marguerite Casey Foundation provided a one-time fivefold increase in funding to meet a deepening moment of crisis. We learned this was a lifeline to many organizations facing increasing attacks and whose funders were pulling back from supporting racial and economic justice organizing.

The damage we’re seeing—from cuts to essential government services and ICE raids to a corrupt federal government orchestrating the largest transfer of wealth from the poorest people to the richest in our nation—will have impacts for a generation. Philanthropy must provide resources at a scale and with a fervor that meaningfully responds to the reality of the world around us.

Yet, at a time when funders should be doing more, The Center for Effective Philanthropy recently documented a stunning disconnect: the vast majority of philanthropic leaders believe everything is fine, while the nonprofit sector is suffering job losses, burnout, and uncertainty. To address this gap between foundation comfort and community suffering, our sector must evolve how we move money.

A foundation more concerned with preserving its endowment than in meeting its mission must question whether it is living into its charitable purpose.

The traditional philanthropic model limits annual giving to 5% of a foundation’s total assets. A commonly cited reason for this approach is fiduciary duty. Foundation trustees and leaders invoke fiduciary duty to shut down conversations about increased payout: "We can't give more than 5% of our assets because we have to exercise fiduciary responsibility."

But after a series of deep conversations with our board, examining legal frameworks and sharpening our definitions, we arrived at a different conclusion: fiduciary duty is a duty to mission. So if our mission is to transform the government so it delivers on the promise of a good life for all people then right now is precisely when we need to make the deepest commitment we possibly can. Increasing our annual grantmaking by 50% to a minimum of $500M over the next decade is how we’re putting into practice our sharpened understanding of fiduciary duty to mission.

The second assumption we examined was the unexamined belief that foundations must exist forever by growing their endowments at any cost, even when that cost is investing in corporations that work at cross-purposes to our mission. Perpetuity, often written directly into a foundation's bylaws, is the second gateway where conversations about increased payout often go to die.

The logic sounds reasonable on its face: to last forever, a foundation must preserve and grow its endowment infinitely. But a foundation more concerned with preserving its endowment than in meeting its mission must question whether it is living into its charitable purpose. We hope that our commitment to give $500M over ten years will serve as a powerful proof point for our sector that a vastly increased payout and perpetuity can and must coexist.

If our mission is to transform the government so it delivers on the promise of a good life for all people then right now is precisely when we need to make the deepest commitment we possibly can.

Through rigorous investment stress testing, we found that most foundations can, in fact, drastically increase their payout even while adhering to a commitment to perpetuity. When we took a closer look at our own bylaws, it became clear that our perpetuity clause doesn’t define “perpetuity” as endless upward growth of the endowment. Instead, perpetuity simply means lasting forever—it says nothing about getting larger forever. Our sector has confused endless growth with existing over the long-term. At MCF, we’re untangling the two and showing how a foundation can last indefinitely while also spending down its endowment to a predetermined level. The two are not in conflict.

Instead of a grantmaking formula determined by a rigid percentage of total assets, we now operate from a sharpened approach: fiduciary duty centers mission, and perpetuity means building durable community power, not endlessly growing our own money for an unpromised tomorrow. We are not alone in this realization or practice. Many of our philanthropic partners have been giving above and beyond the 5%, realizing that "forever" has become an excuse for "not now."

The crises we’re facing are too big for business as usual. Our invitation to foundation leaders reading this: let’s evolve our practice of fiduciary duty and perpetuity so we can move the money to the community organizers, scholars, municipal leaders, and meaning-makers creating a future worthy of living.

At least in public, Trump claims not to be concerned about the economy despite severe warning signs of rising inflation and shrinking jobs. Though he must be privately concerned, the impression he conveys to a worried public is that he doesn’t care about them. And why should he? He’s been grifting the presidency to amass extreme wealth that he only previously pretended to have.

The post My Economy Rocks appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

For more than two weeks, hundreds of detainees at Delaney Hall immigration detention center have been on hunger and labor strike. They are protesting consistent medical neglect; being fed rotten, maggot-filled food; as well as overcrowded and poorly maintained living conditions. Outside the facility, protesters have clashed with federal agents, leading to dozens of arrests.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Geo Group, the private prison company that operates Delaney Hall, have severely restricted access into the facility. On June 8, they finally granted New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill a “closely controlled and limited tour of the facility.” This is unsurprising. DHS has unlawfully prevented elected officials from entering Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities in Illinois, Minnesota, Maryland, Colorado, Mississippi, Texas, New York, and California.

Geo Group has likewise sought to restrict access to their facilities. In fact, on June 8, they filed a lawsuit against Colorado challenging a new law that requires all detention facilities in the state to undergo more regular inspections. The law further mandates that such facilities must always have medical and mental health professionals available on site. A spokesperson for Geo Group claimed that the new law has “the purpose of making it more difficult for federal immigration officers to carry out their responsibilities in Colorado and impose direct burdens and requirements on facilities used in immigration operations.”

Describing more oversight and requiring medical staff as “burdens” is a telling admission that ultimately points to the broader problem here. What is occurring at Delaney Hall is not an isolated incident. In fact, there is another hunger and labor strike currently happening at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California. From April to mid-May 2026, hundreds of detainees at North Lake Processing Center in Michigan also went on strike. Both are operated by Geo Group.

The current system of mass deportation and detention is cruel, costly, and ultimately unnecessary.

Depriving detainees of medical services, hygiene products, fresh food, and basic accommodations is part of a deliberate strategy aimed at maximizing profits for private prison companies as well as achieving the xenophobic goals of DHS.

In addition to multimillion-dollar government contracts, private prison companies profit by exploiting the labor of detainees via the “Voluntary Work Program.” Participants are typically paid $1 per day regardless of the number of hours they work.

Despite the name, this program is far from voluntary. First, because basic amenities are not provided, detainees must rely on the company’s commissary and its limited assortment of overpriced goods. In 2019, the Adelanto facility charged $3.25 for a can of tuna, $7.12 for a 2.5oz tube of denture cream, and $11.02 for a 4oz tube of toothpaste.

Second, those who refuse to work may be subject to retaliatory measures. In 2022, detainees at the Mesa Verde Detention Facility and Golden State Annex—both operated by Geo Group—went on a labor strike. Like the detainees in Delaney Hall, they too were protesting inhumane living conditions. Those who participated in the strike reported being kept in prolonged solitary confinement and denied medical treatment due to their involvement.

This is the economics of detention: intentionally underserving detainees generates demand for overpriced commissary goods. Their desperation and vulnerability are exploited to force them to work long hours for meager wages. All the while the company generates millions in profits.

Amid President Donald Trump’s mass deportation regime, Geo Group’s profits soared from $32 million in 2024 to $254 million in 2025. The company spent over $3.6 million on lobbying expenditures over the same period.

Geo Group is not alone here. About 86% of all detainees are held in facilities operated by for-profit companies, including CoreCivic, Lasalle Corrections, Ahtna Technical Services, and Management & Training Corporation (MTC).

This brutality also serves the interest of DHS. For instance, in 2025, a family from Venezuela was given permission to live and work in the US while their asylum case was pending. At their hearing, the judge immediately dismissed their case without even listening to their testimony. They were then detained by ICE and transferred to the South Texas Family Residential Center—a privately-run facility operated by CoreCivic.

After a month, they were released, but the damage had been done. The psychological stress, trauma, and fear of being detained again drove the family to self-deport. As one of the parents put it, “As soon as we got out [of detention], I told my husband, we’re leaving this country, I don’t care where we end up, but we’re not staying here.” She even called other neighbors to warn them to stay inside. “I never want anyone to go through the same experience we went through inside the detention center.”

That’s the point. Deportations are expensive. In January 2026, DHS reported that the “current cost of a single enforced deportation is $18,245.” For this reason, DHS has adopted a practice of “attrition through enforcement”—the explicit goal here is making life so incredibly difficult that immigrants will decide to leave the US rather than endure the hardship. To this end, the Trump administration has abused its authority to cut off immigrants—both documented and undocumented—from jobs, medical care, financial services, tax credits, and even childcare.

Detention centers are also part of this strategy. Kamel Maklad, a former detainee who spent more than two years at the CoreCivic-operated Eloy Detention Center, explained that guards consistently tried to find excuses to put people in solitary confinement. “They do it so that the detainee, out of desperation, will hurry up and request voluntary deportation.” He further added that one guard explicitly told him: “It’s part of my job. I have to make your life miserable so that you request your own deportation.”

All immigration detention centers—and ICE more broadly—must be abolished. They are dehumanizing institutions born out of capitalist greed, xenophobia, and the callous indifference to the suffering of others.

A better path is possible. In fact, before Trump, the US was on a (relatively) better track. In 2017, he eliminated the Family Case Management Program (FCMP). FCMP paired immigrants with pending court cases with social workers who offered legal guidance. On average, 99% of participants complied with ICE check-ins and appointments, and 100% attended their court hearings. Out of 954 people, only 23 were reported as absconders. FCMP cost about $38 per family per day in 2017. By contrast, in 2019, DHS estimated that the average daily rate for family beds at a detention center was $318.79. This is one of many cost-effective and humane alternatives to the current system of mass detention.

It is worth stressing here that only 5% of people detained by ICE have violent criminal convictions—73% have none. Detention centers are not protecting the public from dangerous “foreign invaders.” The vast majority of immigrants meaningfully contribute to our communities—they pay taxes, drive innovation, and contribute to the economy. Even if they didn’t, however, they are still human beings worthy of respect and dignity.

The current system of mass deportation and detention is cruel, costly, and ultimately unnecessary. We can and must do better.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

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

Today we discuss:

• Trump’s DOJ will denaturalize 17 U.S. citizens convicted of crimes such as health care fraud, wire fraud and other unlawful conduct. Denaturalization is extreme and rare in democracies, and at scale was most recently used by Nazi Germany during World War II to deport Jews to death camps. Also, a judge voided Trump’s $100,000 application fee for H-1B visas.

• Trump repeats his claim that a deal to end the war in Iran could be reached in “two or three days,” and that the Strait of Hormuz would reopen “immediately” after such a deal. Trump said that the two parties are in the final stages of a “very, very good deal that will not in any way allow nuclear weapons.”

• A study records the highest number of conflicts between states since World War II, and the highest number of fatalities recorded since the Rwandan genocide. There were 65 active conflicts in 2025, according to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) at Uppsala University. The number of direct conflicts between individual states doubled from the previous year to eight — the highest number of such conflicts since UCDP began collecting data in 1946. They included the wars between Russia and Ukraine and between Iran and Israel, as well as conflicts between India and Pakistan, Thailand and Cambodia, and Israel’s conflicts in Syria and Yemen. The final two are: the border conflict between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the conflict in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden between the U.S. and U.K. against Yemen’s Houthis.

MERCH STORE: https://www.deprogram.live

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The post Trump’s Newest Nazi Knock-Off | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Years ago, when I was pregnant with my first child, I called my mother in a panic: I had been trying to find a childcare spot for when I planned to go back to work. But every childcare center I called had a waiting list of at least a year. I was distraught. Then my mom suddenly cut me off and asked, “Are you going to have strangers raising your baby?”

Her question stopped me short. And yet, it was also nonsensical. I was a couple of years out of law school, and had just started a career that I loved. My husband and I had mountains of student loan debt. There was no way we could afford for one of us not to work. And we lived 3,000 miles away from my parents. The only choice for us, really, was to put our daughter in childcare.

I was reminded of that moment recently when, during a news conference, Alex Adams, who leads the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) at the US Department of Health and Human Services, bemoaned that childcare policies in the US limit parental choices and undervalue “mothers staying home with their children during their earliest years.” This follows reporting that Adams wants a “bonfire of regulations” around childcare, and recent actions by ACF that will increase childcare costs for families and financial challenges for childcare providers. As I listened, I realized that Adams is proposing the wrong answer, just as my mother was asking me the wrong question 23 years ago. What we should be asking is what would actually help families raise their children in the ways that work best for them.

The truth is that our country is not set up to give families real choices, then or now. Families can’t survive on one salary because wages have stagnated, with the federal minimum wage frozen at a measly $7.25 for over two decades. The costs of living are skyrocketing out of reach for an increasing number of families. We are one of only a handful of countries that do not offer paid family and medical leave. Our childcare system has been chronically underfunded to the point of crisis, with families unable to access or afford care, providers operating on razor-thin profit margins, and early educators earning poverty-level wages.

The policy failures that have limited families’ choices can only be fixed by making robust public investments—not by pitting families against each other.

It bears underscoring, moreover, that families’ needs vary wildly, and they want a range of options to care for their children, including having access to high quality, affordable childcare in a variety of settings. The policy failures that have limited families’ choices can only be fixed by making robust public investments—not by pitting families against each other. Cutting care supports and slashing programs that help families afford food and healthcare, as this administration has relentlessly done since last January, is only going to limit families’ choices even further.

My mother’s question still rings in my ears all these years later, even though that baby has since graduated from college. To be clear, I was startled by the question but not surprised. My mother comes from Southeast Asia. There was little care infrastructure in her country when she was young, by which I mean there was literally no alternative for caring for children, elders, and family members who are ill or have disabilities, other than family. Her grandmother took care of her when her mother was at work. That was the model in her mind.

When my parents got married and came to the United States, my dad was the breadwinner, and my mom stayed home to care for my two sisters and me (and at one point, for my grandmother while she was undergoing cancer treatment). For her, families take care of each other; there’s no other way.

Even though this administration likes to invoke a simpler, glorified past, the reality back then was more complicated, however: Part of the reason my mom stayed home with the three of us was that my parents didn’t have great options either. My mother, the first in her family to go to college, was a teacher who supported her extended family financially in her home country.

When she came to the US, her degree and teacher’s license weren’t recognized—she couldn’t have worked in her chosen profession without going back to school. For her to work outside the home, we would have needed a second car (which my parents couldn’t afford). There were even fewer childcare options then, and we didn’t live close to my dad’s family for much of my childhood—even if we had, my grandparents had their own health issues.

My mother is also quick to point out that, even though she and my dad raised three children on one salary, it was not easy. She cut our hair and made our clothes. She pretty much cooked everything from scratch, and it didn’t look anything like Ballerina Farm. She periodically watched kids in our neighborhood after school, and did some sewing to earn extra income. She traveled to visit her family only twice in 16 years, and the second time was to help care for her dying mother.

The truth of the matter is that raising young children is hard, especially in a nation that stubbornly refuses to invest in care. I am grateful that my husband and I had help, not only from exquisitely skilled and caring “strangers,” but also my parents who visited as much as they could, my in-laws who lived nearby, and friends and neighbors. To be sure, my family has had more options and flexibility and resources than many. But all families deserve choices that enable them to care for their children according to their values and needs. In order to give families real options, we must invest real dollars in care systems, communities, and in wages and benefits that allow all families to thrive.

The Republican revolt against President Donald Trump began over an issue that was never supposed to become a crisis: another war in the Middle East.

In recent weeks, a group of Republican members of Congress has openly challenged the White House—not over taxes, immigration, or even the budget, but over the most fundamental power of any president: the authority to lead the country into war. When several Republicans chose to stand alongside Democrats and support efforts to limit the president’s war powers, something greater than a routine legislative vote took place. This was not merely a legal disagreement over the interpretation of the Constitution; it was a sign of a deeper fracture emerging at the core of a movement that was once united around Trump’s leadership.

In Washington, politicians have often voted against presidents from opposing parties. But when members of a party are willing to confront their own president on the most sensitive issue imaginable—war and peace—we are no longer dealing with a tactical disagreement. This is the moment when intellectual and ideological divisions begin to reveal themselves through political behavior.

The central question is not why a handful of Republicans have found themselves at odds with Trump. The more important question is why this disagreement has emerged precisely over an issue that was once one of the foundational pillars of Trump’s political project.

Iran today is more than just a foreign-policy issue; it is a test of Trumpism’s political credibility.

To understand the significance of this development, one must return to 2016.

Trump’s success was not simply the product of economic frustration or public dissatisfaction with political elites. He was able to build a new coalition because he was willing to challenge one of the most sacred assumptions of Washington’s foreign-policy establishment. While many Republicans continued to defend the legacy of two decades of American military interventions, Trump called the Iraq War a disaster. He argued that the United States had spent trillions of dollars in the Middle East, lost thousands of its soldiers, and still failed to achieve the security and stability it had been promised.

For millions of voters, these remarks were not merely a critique of a single war. They represented the declaration of the end of an era.

Trump promised them that America would no longer become entangled in endless wars. He pledged to separate foreign policy from idealistic nation-building projects and open-ended missions, and to refocus it on tangible American interests. It was precisely from this promise that the slogan “America First” drew much of its power.

A significant portion of Trump’s political base was neither isolationist nor anti-power. They believed America should remain strong, but that strength should not require perpetual involvement in distant conflicts. They supported a president who claimed to have learned the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan.

That is why Iran today is more than just a foreign-policy issue; it is a test of Trumpism’s political credibility.

For many Republicans, the primary concern is not Iran itself, but the memory of Iraq. Once again, they see familiar warning signs: escalating tensions, gradually expanding objectives, requests for broader executive authority, and arguments that tie American security to the complex dynamics of the Middle East. These similarities are enough to prompt some conservatives to warn against repeating the mistakes of the past.

This is why the votes cast by some Republicans in favor of restricting presidential war powers have acquired symbolic significance. These votes were not merely attempts to restrain a specific policy decision; they were efforts to prevent a return to a pattern that Trump himself once claimed to oppose.

In reality, a segment of the Republican Party now faces a paradox that few would have imagined in 2016. They find themselves in the position of having to oppose certain decisions by Trump in order to defend the very principles that originally drew them toward him.

This is the point at which political disagreements evolve into an identity crisis.

At the same time, the issue extends beyond war itself. In the United States, wars have never been purely military phenomena. They shape the economy, influence domestic politics, affect public spending, and alter the balance of power within government. Major wars often lead to the expansion of executive authority, the growing influence of security institutions, and shifts in national political priorities.

From this perspective, Republican resistance to expanding presidential war powers is not driven solely by geopolitical concerns. Many are also worried about the domestic consequences of such a trajectory. Some conservatives believe that the deeper America becomes involved in foreign crises, the greater the concentration of power in Washington—a result that stands in direct contradiction to the original promises of the America First movement.

Here, the great contradiction of the Trump era becomes visible.

Trump rose to power by presenting himself as an opponent of two trends: endless wars and the increasing concentration of power in the nation’s capital. Yet today, some Republicans feel that both trends are reemerging. From their perspective, the issue is not simply that America may be entering another Middle Eastern crisis; it is that such a crisis could revive the very political and security structures that Trumpism was supposed to rebel against.

For this reason, recent disagreements should not be interpreted merely as a temporary dispute between the White House and Congress. What is unfolding today is a clash between two competing interpretations of “America First.”

In the first interpretation, presidential authority and greater freedom of action in foreign policy are considered necessary for safeguarding national security. In the second, fidelity to the movement’s founding principles requires avoiding a slide into new wars and subjecting presidential war powers to stricter oversight.

This divide is likely to deepen in the months ahead because Iran is not merely a regional crisis. It has become a mirror in which Republicans see their own past—the promises they made, the wars they criticized, and the movement that claimed it would redefine American foreign policy.

Perhaps the most important point is this: Today’s Republican rebellion against Trump does not necessarily stem from opposition to Trumpism itself. In many cases, it arises precisely because some Republicans believe Trumpism is drifting away from its own founding principles.

Ultimately, the current crisis is less about Iran than about identity.

It is about whether the America First movement remains the same movement that once promised to end endless wars, or whether it is gradually becoming a new version of the very foreign-policy establishment it once rose up against.

And perhaps that is why the most dangerous challenge facing Trump is not emerging in Tehran, but within the Republican Party itself—where some of his former allies are no longer certain that loyalty to Trump still means loyalty to the original ideals of Trumpism.

One of the (many) curses of the Trump era is that he keeps us fixated, hour by hour, on his latest stupidity or fraud, a constant swirling game of three-card monte that ends only when he robs some more of our attention and money. So I will try valiantly for a moment to escape his asteroid belt of provocation (it’s not easy—did you know that America decided this week to sink a few billion into promoting… coal?) and try to think a little more broadly.

This step back is occasioned by Thomas Piketty and his team at the World Inequality Lab in Paris, who last week released the Global Justice Report, subtitled A Plan for Equality & Prosperity Within Planetary Boundaries. Piketty, you will recall, is the London-born economist who in 2013 released his book Capital, in many ways launching the ongoing critique of global inequality and the generalized scorn for the billionaire class. (At one point, remember, America and the world generally admired these people).

Now he and his team has enlarged their analysis to include the 21st century’s novel dilemma—that we are steadily and rapidly overheating the planet—and the result is this report, which I read in certain ways as the data-rich companion to Naomi Klein’s 2014 classic This Changes Everything, an investigation of whether it is possible to imagine prosperity without ruinous growth. Much has changed in the years since those volumes—most importantly, the plummeting price of solar and wind energy and of batteries to store that power has opened up a much larger escape hatch. And it’s from that premise that Piketty’s new work really proceeds.

There’s an ever-better case for taxing the hell out of billionaires even if all you do is bury the resulting money in a hole in the ground.

The Global Justice Project says that rapid decarbonization is a must, and that it needs to be paid for by the rich, and that that payment should come in the form of a global wealth tax and a global income tax, which funnel fairly large sums of money from the north to the south. They aim for a “sufficiency” world, in which all have enough and where the share of wealth owned by the richest 1% drops dramatically—a kind of globalized Sweden, I’d say, in which people work half the hours we do at present, and consume more education and healthcare and less stuff. They view it as an alternative to “degrowth” scenarios, and also to our current unrestrained growth model, and say that it leaves the world with lower temperatures than either of those schemes.:

To avoid climate catastrophes, we show that sufficiency is required: a structural transformation of the economy involving shorter working hours, a lower material footprint, a shift from material-intensive sectors toward relatively immaterial sectors such as education and health, and major changes in food systems and land use. Rapid decarbonization of energy systems is also necessary, as is the sharp compression of income and wealth inequality. This compression is both a social justice objective and a condition for financing necessary climate investment and human capital expenditure and for sustaining political support from bottom- and middle-income classes in both the North and the South.

Here’s a little diagram they provide of the basic outline.

I have a certain sympathy for the argument—expressed most pithily by David Roberts on Bluesky—that this kind of sky-castle architecture doesn’t amount to much; I too am more fascinated by the daily drumbeat of technological innovation. And I think that the accumulation of that innovation may undermine part of Piketty’s argument; I have a feeling that the investment required for decarbonization is going to be easier to come by, as the price for good stuff just keeps falling, and the economic logic of paying for fossil fuel becomes ever smaller.

But I also think that the climate crisis is not the only ecological threat we face, nor indeed the only threat period. I think it’s pretty clear that democracy can’t survive inequality; there’s an ever-better case for taxing the hell out of billionaires even if all you do is bury the resulting money in a hole in the ground. One possibility is that the mega rich will succeed in their current project of deliberalizing the planet, and we’ll all get to live in our own nasty little sovereignties; another is that the Bernie Sanderses resident in most parts of the world will figure out how to combine their efforts and that over time we’ll get something that looks a bit like what Piketty (or for that matter Kim Stanley Robinson in Ministry for the Future) imagines. One tell for me that this team is not entirely politically detached came in this paragraph about what would happen if America (or China) predictably refused to join in such a scheme:

If necessary, the Global Justice Platform can be implemented with an incomplete coalition of countries, including the absence of the US and/or China. According to our projections, the climate damages imposed by the US on other countries would be about 3% of world GDP per year, on average, over the 2026-2100 period if the US does not participate in the GJP. Under simplifying assumptions, other countries should impose a corrective tax of approximately 80% on all US exports to collect tax revenues approximately equivalent to the damage. Given the projected decline of the US share in world GDP—from 30% in 1945 to 15% in 2025 and 5-10% by 2100—it is likely that such tariffs would induce the US to join the GJP. The same conclusion applies to the case of China, but with a higher tariff (180% or more).

The report concludes that

A habitable, equal 21st century is materially possible. What stands in the way is not technical impossibility but political choice and the hard but crucial work of building a coalition behind it.

I think that’s a worthy goal to keep in the back of our minds as we proceed with the daily work of building the infrastructure for this new world; every election is a chance to get us a little closer, by electing the kind of people who understand the need for this kind of compression of wealth.

But the infrastructure is the part we can do something about right now, and on that score there’s some equal mix of encouraging maddening news, all of it again on a large scale.

On the one hand, our farcical war in the Gulf continues to serve as the recruiting sergeant for the renewable revolution. As a Bloomberg team reports in a long and important essay, the Gulf War has been “Asia’s Ukraine”:

About two hours from Manila there’s a solar power plant capable of powering 60,000 homes. Surrounded by fields growing okra and eggplant, it had been sitting idle since August, waiting for a connection to the grid—stuck in a queue just like many other renewable energy facilities around the world as power networks struggle to catch up with rising electricity demand.

Then the Iran war cut off the Philippines’ supply of imported liquefied natural gas. Immediately, the government cut fuel taxes and offered free bus rides to the public. Then a few weeks later, as the Strait of Hormuz remained blocked, officials began deploying policies toward a deeper, more structural plan to reduce the country’s dependence on fossil fuels.

One strategy was to fast track more than 30 renewable plants by the end of April. One of those was that 125-megawatt solar plant, built by Citicore Renewable Energy Corp, which is now supplying clean energy to the grid. It is “good timing,” said Joselito Ernst Cañete, operations manager at Citicore, just as electricity demand increases to power air conditioners during the peak summer months.

What happened in the Philppines isn’t an isolated example. With their energy supplies threatened, countries across Asia and Europe have chosen to speed up deployment of renewables and electrification.

Meanwhile, the cheerful solar guru Danny Kennedy chimed in from a conference in Singapore where he found the Western politicians and analysts way behind the Asian curve. I will quote from his account at some length because it’s important:

Philippines. After declaring a national energy emergency in March, the government activated a whole-of-government mandate for energy security. Regulatory bottlenecks for renewables are being dismantled. Rooftop solar inquiries are up 500% since the crisis began. This is not a green ambition. This is a survival response.

Vietnam. The country has revised its power development plan, targeting a minimum of 47% renewable electricity generation by 2030. Vietnam is already the region’s largest EV market, and its government has expanded EV tax incentives in direct response to the Iran War’s impact on fuel prices. HSBC recently extended $4 billion in clean-tech financing to Chinese firms, much of it flowing into EV and solar exports to Vietnam and ASEAN.

Indonesia. Beyond the factory I visited in Batam, the government is engineering a broad fiscal shift—expanding EV incentives with a target of 2 million electric cars and 12 million electric two-wheelers on the road by 2030. With the world’s largest nickel reserves, Indonesia is positioning itself to replace diesel imports with a domestic battery ecosystem. The logic is national sovereignty as much as climate policy. We’ve also talked about their 100GW solar archipelago plans.

Thailand. Advanced its net zero target by 15 full years, to 2050. Solar generation surged 72% in 2025. The country is adding 50 GW of renewables and 14 GW of energy storage by 2037. A major 1 GW module supply deal between China’s GCL-SI and Thailand’s Getz Energy was just signed to support that buildout.

Singapore itself. Already scaled solar to 1.7 GW and is executing multi-gigawatt cross-border subsea clean electricity cables from Indonesia, Cambodia, and Vietnam—with a requirement that developers bundle storage at origin for 24/7 firm power delivery. Singapore, to its credit, is acting. The conference, perhaps, just needed a bigger window.

We already know China and India—the two largest energy consumers in Asia—reached a historic tipping point together in 2025. For the first time, fossil fuel generation fell in both countries simultaneously: China down 0.9%, India down 3.3%. These are not small numbers. These are inflection points.

And yet even as this good news is happening, the Chinese are also beginning to shutter many of the solar panel factories that are at the heart of this revolution, because they’re not making enough money. This is, on the hand, understandable, and on the other entirely maddening—these factories are the single most important industrial asset on Earth—they are factories for lowering the temperature of the Earth. As readers are doubtless painfully aware, I’ve been beating this drum for a good long while, but I’m glad to see others joining in. Adam Tooze, the interesting bricoleur in charge of the Chartbook newsletter, wrote in the FT this week, it would be understandable if we were talking about some mundane commodity like cement:

But solar panels? Since when were solar panels just another commodity? They are a technological miracle. They make us into farmers of the sun. For the past half century, research labs around the world, starting in the 1970s with NASA spin-offs and the big US energy research push under Jimmy Carter, have been straining to reach this point. Together with batteries, which are also rapidly approaching the point of excess supply, they are the key to a sustainable future.

As Tooze points out, it cost China very little in subsidies ($18 billion) to build this behemoth (though one should probably add in the subsidies that, say, Germany provided to its citizens to buy the early models, underwriting the startup of China’s engineering miracle).

I’ve long argued that on a rational world, trying everything it could to head off the worst of global warming, we would “globalize” these factories, running them 24/7 and then piling up the panels on every railroad siding and wharf on the planet so that people could come take them away. This would be, I think, a backdoor way of achieving a fair amount of what Piketty has in mind, far messier than his global scheme but somewhat more plausible. By some calculations, 10 years production from those plants would produce enough panels to provide all the power the world currently uses.

If my sense that the coming El Niño will revive the world’s focus on the climate crisis—well, this is the easiest possible route forward. And it comes not just with more power, but with different power. Elon Musk may be rushing his IPO for data centers in space or whatever the heck he’s currently selling, but some of us will hole up here on Earth, quite sufficient with the solar panels in our yards.

As those active in the field will often say, politics is a tough business – it ain’t for everyone. Saikat Chakrabarti, would-be successor to retiring San Francisco Representative and past Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, is a recent case in point: a candidate who seemed a perfect fit for the city’s political scene, yet failed to win one of the two slots in the November final. What is unusual about the Chakrabarti story is while we’re all too familiar with political figures who have mastered the art of winning and holding office at the expense of developing a clear vision of why they’re doing it, his problem has largely been the reverse.

Chakrabarti brought two major assets to the race: ideas and money. Some of his past ideas had been quite impactful. After significant involvement in Bernie Sanders’ seminal 2016 presidential campaign, he co-founded Brand New Congress to recruit new congressional candidates, one of whom was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. While Brand New Congress proved ephemeral, Justice Democrats, a subsequent organization he also co-founded, has proven to have staying power, continuing to promote Sanders-stripe candidates – with notable successes. Chakrabarti’s money derives from his role as a founding engineer of the then-start-up Stripe, a payments processing company. He is known to be a centimillionaire.

The connection with Ocasio-Cortez went on to became substantial, as he served as her campaign manager, chief of staff following her 2018 upset election to Congress, and a principal in the formulation of the Green New Deal legislation that she introduced in the House. Unfortunately, Chakrabarti himself did not fare so well within the walls of the House as he had without. He soon drew fire within the Democratic Caucus for sending out tweets criticizing other House members by name. Although he had previously shown great facility in dealing with both “big picture” political questions as well as the mechanics of campaigning, the curriculum doesn’t stop there. What he had apparently failed to understand was that while members of Congress may choose to criticize their colleagues by name, their staff are not expected to do so without the approval of the elected representative. Before her first year in office was out, he and Ocasio-Cortez would part ways. He went on to work on Green New Deal-type issues in an outside organization. Neither would subsequently speak in great detail about the parting. She did not endorse his congressional run.

In October 2025, Chakrabarti formally announced his candidacy for the San Francisco congressional seat. It was widely expected that the Speaker Emerita would not be running for re-election, but then she had surprised many by running for the term she was now serving after losing the speakership to the Republicans and stepping down from party leadership – and had made no statement regarding her 2026 intentions. Chakrabarti’s move forced the hand of State Senator Scott Wiener whose desire to succeed Pelosi was well known. (It had also previously been widely assumed that when Wiener did run he would ultimately get the nod of the Pelosi-Willie Brown establishment wing of the party, something that did not happen, presumably in part due to his announcing for the seat before Pelosi indicated her intention to leave it.)

To one unfamiliar with the details of San Francisco politics the Chakrabarti candidacy would likely have seemed a welcome development for the a left that has long been frustrated by city’s domination by what they considered the corporate-oriented wing of the Democratic Party – here was a big picture candidate with the capacity to run a high budget campaign. (Chakrabarti put in something like $10 million of his own money over the course of the campaign.) And he even seemed to recognize the fundamental truth that the wealthy will generally deny to their dying days – that all value comes from labor, telling supporters at his kick-off rally, “I ended up making a lot of money, and that was a profoundly weird and radicalizing experience,” but “I did not work harder than my teacher or a nurse or the people cleaning our offices ...I just won the startup lottery.”

But the campaign did not turn out as hoped. At the time of this writing the latest tally shows him at 17 percent, trailing Weiner at 41 percent and Supervisor Connie Chan at 29 percent. Chan, who much of the city’s left ultimately rallied around, might never have run if Chakrabarti had actually proved to be that hoped-for candidate. So what went wrong? Well, for one thing it wasn’t that his potential base refused to vote for a wealthy candidate who appeared to be trying to buy the office. Billionaire gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer, who spent over $200 million on his race, carried San Francisco by a 38-25 percent margin over statewide frontrunner Xavier Becerra, the voters apparently deciding that he been putting his ill-gotten gains to good use.

A San Francisco Chronicle post mortem maintained that Chakrabarti’s problem was that he didn’t meet the right people. An article painting the city’s politics as special – which they are, just like every other city’s politics are special – described “San Francisco’s bare-knuckled political scene that is famously described as a ‘knife-fight in a phone booth’” to which “San Francisco Democratic Party Chair Nancy Tung added a telling detail ... ‘It’s a knife fight in a phone booth where you know everybody in the phone booth.’” The article goes on to say that, “Chakrabarti didn’t reach out to Tung,” and “More surprisingly, he didn’t reach out to [former Supervisor Aaron] Peskin, who is deeply wired into the city’s left.” Here the Chronicle ever so slightly touches on the real story, one that was covered by the city’s online publications, particularly 48 Hills and Mission Local.

Unmentioned in the Chronicle article is the fact that Peskin had been the candidate of the left in the city’s 2024 mayoral election and not only did Chakrabarti fail to meet Peskin, but he supported his opponent, the winner and current mayor Daniel Lurie (who has just successfully led the opposition to a ballot question proposing an increase to the rate and scope of the city’s Overpaid Executive Tax that is levied on companies with executives making more than 100 times the median employee compensation.) Perhaps even more importantly though, Chakrabarti also supported the candidate who supplanted Dean Preston on the city’s Board of Supervisors. Preston, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, had been the city’s elected official most prominently championing the type of politics that Chakrabarti proclaimed that he was all about. And not just did he support Bilal Mahmood against Preston in 2024, but he donated to his campaign funds – plural because while contributions to supervisorial races are limited to $500, candidates can and often do simultaneously run campaigns for the Democratic County Central Committee, a race run without that contribution limit – the money spent on one race obviously redounding to the benefit of both. Chakrabarti contributed not only the maximum $500 to Mahmood’s supervisorial campaign, but also an additional $10,000 to his successful DCCC campaign in which he ran on what 48 Hills called “the right-wing corporate slate that took over the local Democratic Party” – ironically the same one that Party Chair Nancy Tung ran on.

It’s an unfortunate story really. The tangle of policy, principle, friendship, relationships, and future prospects that may go into endorsement decisions can be a thorny matter for anyone involved in politics, but in this case the opposition to Preston was really not a close question. For many it was simply disqualifying – after all, if he was off on this, what else might he be off on? Absent such egregious errors Chakrabarti might have been the candidate the San Francisco left was hoping for; he was talking a more radical talk than Chan does. Hopefully he’ll go on to make further useful policy contributions. Who knows maybe he’ll even try the electoral route again some time. But if he does, maybe he will have learned by then that there’s more to it than just knowing which way you’d vote on the big bills. Politics is a tough business – it ain’t for everyone.

On Thursday evening last week, I attended the Colorado Democratic gubernatorial debate at the invitation of Colorado’s attorney general, Phil Weiser. Weiser and US Sen. Michael Bennet are facing off in the upcoming June 30th primary.

Colorado’s next governor needs to be aware that not having enough money to retire comfortably is not a moral failing and that we deserve the same protections as those who are more financially set in life. We support AG Weiser to be our next governor in large part due to his fight back, intelligence, and decency. Yet what solidified that support following the debate was knowing what wasn’t said and why it wasn’t said—and knowing Weiser didn’t play those games with those partaking in the debate.

We do not like being played for fools, and Weiser never seems to do that—though he is aware we are not wealthy donors or wealthy at all. Listening closely to what was said and not said is a skill I’ve honed after raising six children and after working in and around political folks in Washington, DC and closer to home. Even as a child, being able to read a room or figure out if I’m in danger has been a necessary survival skill. As a senior struggling with my share of health issues and as primary caregiver for my husband when he needs care, I know that aging in Colorado in Trump’s America requires me to be more vigilant than ever—and we are in danger, friends.

While Weiser and Bennet are not miles apart in their positions on some key policies, and voters might argue the fine points of policy differences, two sections of the debate spoke volumes to me about credibility and being seen as a voter smart enough to see through a ruse.

Phil Weiser seems to want people like me to be part of his political work—his public service—and he believes I am intelligent enough to know when the BS factor is out of control.

Michael Bennet is a fine orator. His years in the Senate have allowed him great practice for that skill. I’ve never found that his diatribes on the Senate floor in DC (as covered by his campaign and sometimes local media outlets) helped me or even slowed down the relentless American-dream-crushing march of the current federal government’s behavior. I’m afraid to lose my Medicare or my Social Security mostly because I don’t want to burden my children or grandchildren. Those programs are federal, not state.

Bennet chastised Weiser for not fighting the first Trump administration enough from his state position even though Bennet has supported many Trump nominees and even some policies. He said he did so because of the existential threats Colorado faces in areas those Trump nominees control and areas in which we need federal funds. Really? So, as Bennet proclaimed, the easiest vote in America is one against Trump, I thought to myself—what the hell exactly does that mean? It tells me that I cannot trust Bennet to do his job right now as the people of this state depend on him to do, and if I cannot trust he will protect this democracy or my earned benefits of Social Security and Medicare—and that he will do everything in his power to oppose blackmailing bullies—I cannot trust him to be Colorado’s governor.

In contrast, Weiser said he would never bow to that sort of Trump-style political gamesmanship with someone threatening our rights and our economic safety as a state. Perhaps that is Weiser’s personal history as the son of Holocaust survivors, and yet, it must also be the stance of those of us who believe in the Constitution of this nation and this state. Cooperating with an administration that devalues my life and lives of anyone in our human family is unacceptable, and it is not leadership. Appeasing a despot who finds joy and power in his cruelty has never worked and never will. Trump must be opposed at every turn.

No, Sen. Bennet, it isn’t so hard. Do all you can from where you are now—fight in your current position for which you are paid by us. If young people are angry about the Dems, it’s because they do not see the fight back or even the direct challenges to almost everything we fought to secure on the federal level. Stopping the forward march of Project 2025 comes before building new ways to confront our shared futures. Where were you, Sen. Bennet? Yelling and smooth orating doesn’t save anything or prove your worthiness to lead on the state level. Our erudite rants make for great sound bites, though.

My second point of recognizing deception was in Michael Bennet’s assertion that he hasn’t even thought about who he’s going to appoint (if he is elected our next governor) to fill the rest of his Senate term. It’s silly to expect anyone to believe that. While he said it would be someone under 50 years old, he wants you and me to believe he really hasn’t thought about it at all. Come on. He went on to say he hasn’t had any conversations at all here in Colorado about his favored appointee. Did you read that carefully? I’m sure the conversations he has had haven’t actually been in Colorado. He hasn’t spent that much time here, I don’t think. Access to him is very tightly controlled, and letters from Coloradans are answered with form responses. His life centers on DC, and his “conversations” about his Senate replacement likely were there with US House reps from Colorado or in New York with Michael Bloomberg (one of his most generous donors).

So, bottom line for me is that Phil Weiser seems to want people like me to be part of his political work—his public service—and he believes I am intelligent enough to know when the BS factor is out of control. I don’t want my governor to appease Trump or anyone else who harms us all in the manner of a mob boss or dictator, and I want to know who Bennet favors appointing to his Senate seat, if it’s vacated. Those things matter as we face the future together.

Phil Weiser stood firm on his answers and invited more collaboration. I believe he will make a fine governor for Colorado—for all of us. And a vote for Phil Weiser doesn’t have any mystery attached. Strong and unwilling to honey up to bullies, clear about policy, and ready to fight back and move forward—that’s our AG Phil Weiser. This time in our history demands that and more from us all, not just the people we elect. When politicians play us for fools, we can all rise to this moment and make sure history records our courage, our decency, and our sacred honor shown to one another.

Even if you haven’t geeked out over the “boy problem,” you’re probably aware of the well-documented evidence that boys and men are struggling.

Boys lag behind girls in school and graduate at lower rates. Women now comprise the overwhelming majority of college students and graduates. Boys are far more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD, get into administrative and legal trouble, and drop out. Three to five times as many men as women commit suicide. Men and boys abuse drugs more and OD more.

And no wonder: dudes don’t have much to look forward to. Traditionally male jobs in manufacturing, construction, and physical labor are disappearing. Male workforce participation is plunging. Real wages for many guys have been falling since the late 1970s.

Proponents of equity deny reality: jobs, money, and social status are zero-sum games. Every gig, prize, and pay raise that goes to a woman—fixing the systemic injustice of sexism—is one for which a guy has been passed over—creating a new problem, downwardly-mobile males.

It ought not to be necessary, but clearly bears repeating: we’re one human race and one nation. We’re all in it together. Every male is a woman’s son, brother, father, partner, or friend; every male who fails affects everyone around him.

But that isn’t the vibe.

When the topic comes up in polite liberal company, women laugh. You men have had centuries, millennia. Now it’s our turn to be in charge.

Boo hoo… men’s wittle feelings are hurt? Let me get the world’s tiniest violin.

One could retort—and I have—that today’s 20-year-old man doesn’t have much to show for the male privilege of the “Mad Men” era. Or that revenge isn’t justice. Or that our current male-bashing culture is feeding into the resentments that could fuel a future Handmaid’s Tale backlash among men who otherwise would have bought into third-wave feminism.

Some women have been worried. “Equity feminist” Christina Hoff Sommers’ 2000 book The War Against Boys argued that educators ignoring boys in favor of girls pathologized masculinity, feminized schools, and overlooked boys’ decline in test scores and college enrollment.

But the attitude of Emily Oster, the economist and parenting expert, is much more common: “Oh, men are struggling? It’s harder for some of us to get our heads around it… Because, at the top, it’s just a bunch of penises,” she responded in 2024. “Men are trash” became an Internet meme. A New Statesman poll finds that only 35% of British women under 25 have a positive opinion of men, and that women under 30 are three times more likely to hold negative views than those over 30. (Rates are similar in the US.)

Guys are in trouble—and women don’t much care.

Women and liberals don’t even want to hear about it. “In the current political climate, highlighting the problems of boys and men is seen as a perilous undertaking,” Richard V. Reeves, author of Of Boys and Men and a leading voice in this space who is also a left-leaning feminist,” confessed. “One friend, a newspaper columnist, said, ‘I never go near these issues if I can avoid it. There’s nothing but pain there.’”

At high risk of being accused of being self-serving, I’d like to remind women that when they needed a helping hand, a lot of men reached out. Now that we’re lost and broke and depressed and literally killing ourselves, is it too much to ask for you ladies to return the favor?

While female leaders drove the suffragette movement, for example, male allies provided funding, public credibility, organizational help, and votes—since only men could vote at the time.

Men like Frederick Douglass attended the 1848 Seneca Falls convention that launched the Votes for Women movement. The Men’s League for Woman Suffrage, founded in 1909 by powerful men like the publisher Oswald Garrison Villard, Max Eastman, John Dewey, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and George Foster Peabody, grew to thousands of members across dozens of states. Progressives, socialists, prohibitionists, and other reformers thought suffrage was essential to democracy. The 19th Amendment, ratified in 1920, passed with millions of male votes, not one from a woman.

What if we’d been a matriarchy instead, and men were denied the vote? I’m not at all convinced that men would have found many female allies in a universal suffrage movement.

Psychological research studies find that women are generally more empathetic than men. Women, if they focus on the issue, probably see that men are in trouble. They can feel their pain, especially since they’ve been discriminated against and, in some contexts, still are. But while women tend to be more nurturing, what the men in their lives needs now is something that men themselves tend to be better at: chivalry. Men desperately need material assistance: raises, jobs, promotions, breaks, awards.

For men, right now, help is decidedly not on the way. It’s not hard to see why: Women, viciously oppressed for millennia, are enjoying their change of fortune, even though—perhaps because—it comes at the expense of half the human race. “But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or ‘sub-oppressors.’ … Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors,” Paulo Freire noted in his influential 1968 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Israeli Jews are Exhibit A in that saddest of all narratives, victim turns oppressor. Too many American women are succumbing to the same temptation—if not to subject men to the rape culture and direct subjugation to which they were long subjected (not that it is by any means all in the past)—to ignore and even mock the plight of the men and boys with whom they are destined to share the world.

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

 

The post Hey, Women: A Little Help, Please? appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

In a famous fable a group of mice discuss the catastrophic death toll from the local cat. One mouse has an epiphany—“We simply have to put a collar with a bell on the cat, and we’ll be warned every time she draws near.” The mice erupt in celebration. But suddenly one doleful rodent interrupts the celebrants with a shy question: "Who’s going to bell the cat?"

As an avid reader of lefty alternative media essays, I would venture that “bell the cat” polemics have become a prominent strategy employed by far too many writers. We bell cats in our daydreams, and then write about it with a triumphant brushing of the hands. How many pieces have we all read that call for removing President Donald Trump via the 25th Amendment?

I, personally, am easily convinced that Donald J Trump is... uh... unfit. His twitchy little evil finger on the so-called nuclear button defines a new plateau of dystopian absurdity that no past writer of dark fiction could have ever imagined. Do we need to clarify just how close to the stroke of doomsday this vapid monster brings us daily? His genocidal intent; his criminal impulses; his senseless drivel; his delusional narcissism; his racism; his sexism; and his urge to brag, attack, and threaten ought to make him a prime candidate for a golden sunset behind bars.

Most of the calls for the 25th Amendment rather coalesce around the aesthetics of Trump’s alleged mental decline—his malapropisms; his stumbling gait; his ridiculous boasting about “acing” a dementia screening exam; his late-night posting binges of misspelled, all-caps incoherent rage; his nodding off to sleep in meetings; and the sheer sight of his grotesque, sneering, confused, melting jowls seem to be enough of an argument.

In the Numbed States of America we have gravely limited capacity to respond to extinction threats. Some atavistic fantasy of reprieve keeps people mutely indoors.

Some calls for the 25th Amendment solution merely focus on Trump’s dwindling physical health—his mysterious hospital visits; his bruises; his enormously swollen ankles; his tiny eye slits peering in a senile, comatose manner from the drooping folds of a face that precariously hovers somewhere between a living visage and a death mask.

It seems odd, however, to argue that Trump ought to be seen as a broken shell of a man, eaten from the inside by diseases associated with aging. Do we really want him removed from office because of illness, or because he has spearheaded an assault against the environment, a new age of unregulated capitalist plunder, a total commitment to eviscerate human rights, and the intent to wage war as a matter of reflexive masculinist expression? Where have US bombs fallen, and where will they imminently rain down on hapless civilians?

Are Mogadishu and Copenhagen on the list? Havana? Have we blown Cuba up yet, or is that just a coming attraction scheduled for August or November? Donald J Trump’s trembling, tiny phallic finger nuzzling the button of eternal extinction seems like a surefire image to summon massive levels of public panic, to send hysterical crowds into the streets as if the Chicxulub Meteor had been scheduled for an encore. But in the Numbed States of America we have gravely limited capacity to respond to extinction threats. Some atavistic fantasy of reprieve keeps people mutely indoors. We have guardrails, constitutional guarantees—like the oft mentioned 25th Amendment. Why go crazy in an existential panic, when the Constitution has our back?

The 25th Amendment is not some hoary remnant of our overly esteemed Founding Fathers. No such Revolutionary War icons stared wisely into the crystal ball of future contingencies, and asked the question, “What do we do when a batshit lunatic captures the presidency?” No, the Founding Fathers had not imagined a president as being anything other than a generic advocate for the interests of the wealthy—a role that carried an implicit assumption of sanity in their constitutional eyes. The 25th Amendment was passed by congress in 1965, and ratified in 1967, perhaps inspired by the unraveling, warmongering man of the moment, Lyndon Baines Johnson. But more likely, the amendment shuffled itself into the Constitution as a matter of legislative busywork, a footnote barely acknowledged at the time. The 25th gives some clarity as to when the vice president steps into a presidential role, usually for a day or two when a presidential colonoscopy creates a window of momentary confusion. Congress voted on the amendment only two years after JFK’s assassination—fearful politicians had, one imagines, a lurking sense of unpredictable events.

The 25th Amendment, however, also creates a new protocol for the permanent removal of an unfit president—the vice-president along with the members of the Cabinet must vote to toss the leader out of office with a simple majority. From there, the decision to remove an unfit president passes to both houses of Congress where a two-thirds majority of each chamber must vote to remove the spiraling executive. In other words (at least in Trump’s case), a collection of morally deformed misfits must pool their distaste for the unravelling psychopath who appointed them. And then a collection of party sycophants must rise up against the leader who fills their trembling hearts with utter terror.

Maybe you believe that Trump should be removed because he is: 1) corrupt, 2) demented, 3) insane, 4) stupid, and 5) evil. Obviously, while all of these allegations rest on mountains of evidence; none of it resonates with a single cabinet member. The 25th Amendment is not a public plebiscite. You and I might easily agree that tearing up the White House to build a ballroom-bomb-shelter for a nuclear fetishizing war criminal might be an awful idea. But so what? The 25th Amendment is a private matter, a means of protection for the ruling class. If a president goes cuckoo for coco-puffs, the oligarchs can set things right. One might aptly assume that none of Trump’s shenanigans trouble the billionaire class.

So you and I do not get a vote according to 25th Amendment protocol. Here is an abbreviated list of those authorized to vote: 1) RFK Jr., 2) Linda McMahon, 3) Howard Lutnick, 4) Doug Burgum, 5) Chris Wright, 6) Pete Hegseth, 7) Marco Rubio... and so forth. If you believe that any of these names might vote to remove Trump, I suggest that you hurry (if you still have medical insurance) to take The Montreal Cognitive Assessment.

Trump is not in office despite being out of his fucking mind—he occupies the seat of supreme power precisely because he is off the charts berserk. The only people who matter in the Crumbling States of America make bank on Trump’s presidency. The oil executives, nuclear weapons manufacturers, planet destroying Big Tech moguls, insurance profiteers, and chemical poisoners are carving up the Earth like famished vultures alighting on a putrid carcass. If these predators don’t care about Trump’s decaying brain, it really doesn’t matter what you and I believe.

There is a means of removal—a real one, not a self-indulgent fantasy. It is called The 3.5% Rule, a theory that argues that regime change requires massive resistance involving 3.5% of the population taking to the streets until a resolution has been reached. It involves daily mobilization, not a two hour street festival every two months. In the US that means at least 11 million angry, undeterred resistors willing to endure a measure of personal inconvenience. It involves blocking traffic, getting arrested, boycotts, strikes, and international connections. We should be calling for foreign nationals to boycott and divest from US corporations. Or we can day dream about the 25th Amendment until Trump dies and hands over the throne to JD Vance.

As a general theme, we US citizens have far too much faith in alleged democratic process, and far too little passion for collective agency.

The US empire is in decline. Compare it today to where it was only 30 years ago, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was a “hyperpower,” then, almost inconceivably dominant with no challengers on Earth.

Since then, China has surpassed the US economically. Russia is rated No.1 militarily. The US has to borrow close to $2+ trillion per year (the annual federal budget deficit) just to keep the lights on. Its government based on checks and balances is under assault by a sleazy felon who wants to be king. It is wracked by social divisions that presage civil war.

President Donald Trump’s proposed solution to these problems is to shoot our way out. He wants a 50% increase over last year’s Pentagon budget, to $1.5 trillion. It is stupid in the measure to which it is excessive. It is suicidal to the extent it will degrade our security and our chances of improving national prosperity.

A wiser policy would be to rethink how the US is to co-exist with other nations in what is emerging as a multipolar world. That’s a big rethink. There’s another rethink coming as well: how we run the economy and what it is that actually accounts for national well-being.

The era when the US could dominate, intimidate, and expropriate the rest of the world is over. If it continues to push military power as its primary path forward it will continue to produce catastrophe.

Neither of these “rethinkings”—neither security nor the economy—will be easy. Both will go against existing failed doctrines and the powerful interests that back them. But, without doing this, we face the certainty of continuing national decline.

The highest-level rationale for rejecting a 50% increase in the Pentagon’s budget is that the military simply doesn’t win wars. Sure, it can knock off defenseless, pipsqueak principalities like Grenada, or Serbia, or Libya. But whenever it goes up against a committed adversary, especially one that fights back, it loses.

It lost in Vietnam to a nation of rice farmers that hadn’t even entered the industrial age. It killed more than 3 million Vietnamese, 4 million Southeast Asians when you count Laos and Cambodia. Yet, it lost.

It lost in Iraq, despite Iraq having been bombed for the prior decade, since the first Gulf War in 1991. Even in losing, the US killed more than a million Iraqis and spawned ISIS, one of the most virulent terrorist organizations ever let loose on the world.

It lost in Afghanistan, despite 20 years of trying to win. Afghanistan was a fourth-world country, with the Taliban literally living in caves. The Taliban had only hand-held firearms. No air force. No artillery. No satellite intelligence. The US still managed to lose.

Ukraine isn’t over, yet, but it is lost. Russia has crushed every one of the fabled “wonder weapons” the US has thrown at it. Remember when Trump was going to end the Ukraine war “on Day One”? We’re now past Day 500. It hasn’t ended because Trump is too weak to take the Loss on his watch. But it is lost.

Iran is the most recent—and damaging—case of catastrophic US military failure. It has a military budget one-one hundredth that of the US. Yet, Iran has “humiliated” the US, at least in the words of German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz. Neocon heavyweight Robert Kagan recently wrote, “It’s hard to think of a time when the United States suffered a total defeat in a conflict, a setback so decisive that the strategic loss could be neither repaired nor ignored.”

None of these outcomes are equivocal. None are ambiguous. Is that the kind of outfit we want to give a 50% raise to when it can never come close to accomplishing its essential mission? And when it never learns from its repeated failures?

This is one of the major rethinks that will have to be conducted before any thought can be given to giving even one extra dollar to the Pentagon. We need to hear from the leadership what, exactly, is going to change. And we don’t mean fiddling at the margins. We mean at the core of the institution. For example…

US weapons systems are not made to be able to win in battle. They are made to deliver maximum profits to the weapons makers. Consider…

The Patriot missile system is easily baited with low-cost drones into giving away its location and radar signature. “Here I am! Here I am!” It is then a sitting duck for cruise missiles, hypersonic missiles, even swarms of the same low-cost drones.

The HIMARS rocket launcher uses common GPS as part of its guidance system. This is easily jammed resulting in missiles sometimes landing kilometers away from their intended targets. Its greatest value might be that every battery reliably drains $20 million from US taxpayers.

The M-1 Abrams tank wears a gigantic “shoot me” sign as soon as it’s spotted by one of the Russian drones that saturate the skies over Ukraine. The phrase “Fish in a barrel” comes to mind.

The bigger problem—bigger than weapons that don’t work—is that the US economy is not set up to support sustained, high intensity warfare. It gave up that capability decades ago, when it decided to de-industrialize so its companies could make more money building their stuff in China.

This is one of the reasons the US, via its proxy, Ukraine, has not been able to defeat Russia: it simply cannot supply the amount of ammunition Ukraine would need to prevail. Russia is firing 5-10 times the amount of artillery Ukraine is, and there’s literally nothing the US can do about it.

It would take decades to rebuild the weapons-focused industrial capacity the US possessed in the 1960s. Given the failure of the larger military enterprise in the US, there is no certainty that, once delivered, it would not be ill-conceived, misdirected, or already obsolete. In fact, given the Pentagon’s track record, the likelihood is that it would be all three.

The deepest problem for the US in grappling with increased Pentagon funding is rooted in its world view.

That was formed in the aftermath of World War II and reinforced following the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991. After both events, the US stood astride the world like a colossus, unchallenged in its ability to destroy any other country. Heady stuff but the world doesn’t sit still.

Countries do not acquiesce in their own destruction. They organize themselves to fight back; they collaborate with other countries for collective self-defense; and they employ asymmetric strategies to defeat predators, as Vietnam and Afghanistan did, and as Iran has just done. The US military hasn’t gotten the memo.

The unprovoked Iran debacle has boosted the fortunes of Russia and China, the US’ principal rivals. It has elevated Iran to being the hegemon in the Persian Gulf. That rise is abetted by a quartet of Islamic powers that are tired of US and Israeli bullying: Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. They are forming an “Islamic NATO” to keep the US and Israel out of the Gulf. This is super important.

Since World War II, the Middle East has been one of the most important regions in the world because of its vast oil wealth. A 1945 US State Department memo stated that “Arab oil resources constitute a stupendous source of strategic power and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.”

It is the Trump Pentagon, the Pete Hegseth Pentagon, that has destroyed the US’ control of that “greatest material prize in world history.” Actually, it’s even worse than that. By forcing 50% higher oil prices on the rest of the world, the US is draining wealth from every country on Earth. Many of those countries were already economically tenuous. There’s not a one that doesn’t despise the US for the extortion.

Is that an organization to which we want to grant an additional half a trillion dollars a year? Every year? So it can wreak more destruction on US fortunes? Before it rethinks itself and how it can contribute responsibly to US well-being in the world? It’s not even fatuous. It’s insane.

So, if a $1.5 trillion budget for the military is not the solution to the US woes, what is?

The US could more plausibly revive its fortunes in the world by investing the would-be increase in Pentagon spending into the civilian economy, instead.

It should invest in the nation’s people—education—so as to improve the economy’s productivity. It should invest in the nation’s infrastructure to increase the economy’s efficiency. It should invest in scientific research and development to boost innovation. And, it should re-invest in alternative energy to build resilience.

Productivity. Efficiency. Innovation. Resilience. Those are what built the US in the 20th century. They are the real foundations of national well-being. None of them are mysteries as far as how they lead to a better economy and a stronger state. None are conceptually hard to carry out.

Donald Trump is doing exactly the opposite.

He is gutting education, rescinding major infrastructure projects, savaging scientific research, and in all ways possible dismantling alternative energy. Those avenues all go against the essence of Trumpism, which is looting, shifting national resources and wealth to the already wealthy—Trump’s base.

Looting is what Trump’s proposed increase in the Pentagon budget is really all about. It is the Mother of All Trump Grifts. It is 277 times larger than his laughable $1.8 billion Slush Fund. It wants to hide the grift under the quasi-sacrosanct cover of military spending.

But it doesn’t begin to even acknowledge, to say nothing of fix, the deep failings in the military. It actively damages the economy by diverting scarce resources to parasitic looting that inflicts more harm than it heals.

Trump’s proposal improves the fortunes of the already very wealthy, as all things from Trump do. It lards them with $500 billion of unaccountable giveaways every year. It is a payoff to his rich backers and to the military Trump thinks he’s going to need to finish his overthrow of the government when the time comes, in 2028.

The era when the US could dominate, intimidate, and expropriate the rest of the world is over. If it continues to push military power as its primary path forward it will continue to produce catastrophes like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Iran, all of which have degraded US power, influence, and standing in the world.

Alternatively, it can invest in the economy, in the American people, to create higher growth, income, equality, resilience, and prosperity. Instead of trying to shoot our way out of our self-inflicted decline, we can try to think our way out, earn our way out, work our way out. It’s not certain. Nothing ever is. But it has so much more dignity and likelihood of success about it.

Back when the Obama administration was negotiating a nuclear agreement with Iran, I asked National Security Council officials, “Why are you expending all of your economic leverage, and political and diplomatic resources on stopping Iran from developing a bomb they don’t have (and even if they did, could never use), while these same resources could be mobilized to pressure Iran to end its meddlesome behaviors that are destabilizing countries across the region?”

Despite this reservation, when the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was announced, I supported it for three reasons. First, “the nuclear deal” was a negotiated settlement, which is always better than conflict. And despite White House spokespeople saying otherwise, Catherine Ashton, a top British diplomat involved in the negotiations, offered assurances that the deal was only a first step and that Iran’s behaviors would be next on the agenda. My hope was that sane minds would prevail and the initiated process might lead to a regional security compact and framework for peace.

The second reason was the way Republicans were working overtime to sabotage the agreement. It was unconscionable that they invited a foreign leader, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to address a joint session of Congress to urge members of Congress to vote against their own president. That was unacceptable interference in US politics.

The third (and maybe most unexpected) reason was the reaction to the JCPOA inside Iran. In a poll we conducted months after the deal was announced, we found a significant change in Iranian public opinion. Our earlier polls had demonstrated Iranians largely in favor of the regime’s spending money on allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. With the hint of peace, Iranians turned their priorities inward, with declining support for the regime’s foreign involvements. Instead of resources going abroad, Iranians wanted them to be used at home to create employment and opportunity. They also elevated their demands for greater personal freedom and political rights.

A decade after the JCPOA, the Middle East and the Gulf region are in a more precarious place than ever.

When, after Donald Trump’s election, he cancelled the Iran deal and began threatening the regime, we repeated the poll. The results had reverted. When citizens feel their country is being threatened, they tend to be less critical or to “rally around the flag.”

In the ensuing years, amid continuing signs of hostility from all sides—US, Israel, and Iran—the situation has shown no promise of improvement. Despite promising a better agreement, Trump did nothing more than deepen the animosity. The Biden administration was handed the thankless task of bringing a dead deal back to life—a task to which they never appeared to be fully committed. For its part, Iran continued to behave as a bad regional actor, all the while making threats and building its military capabilities.

Left on their own, the Arab Gulf states sought to create stability out of the possibility of chaos with which they were forced to contend. Unlike Iran, which had decided to use its wealth to export its influence and its anti-Western ideology, the Arab Gulf states had taken a different path, focusing on development, tourism, and trade. Their continued prosperity required a stable regional environment. And so, amid the tensions between the US and Israel and Iran, these Arab states made diplomatic and economic overtures to Iran, hoping for a more secure environment in the Gulf. They even hoped that the lure of joint prosperity and security might move the Iranians to join them in pursuing a more stable and prosperous future and convince the Israelis to resolve the longstanding wound of Palestinian dispossession and occupation, fostering conditions for regional peace. There was to be no such luck!

Israel wanted the economic benefits of regional peace but was unwilling to play its part. It intensified its occupation and the repression and strangulation of Palestinians. Then came October 7, and the region exploded. In short order, as Israel was pursuing a genocidal war in Gaza, Iran’s ally in Lebanon became engaged in a fateful and costly exchange with Israel in the north, a miscalculation with devastating consequences. The Israelis launched a deadly bombing campaign killing thousands of Lebanese, including Hezbollah’s leader. Months later, Israel and the US attacked Iran and killed Iran’s spiritual leader. Iran returned fire setting off a broader confrontation.

Negotiations produced what were called “cease fires” during which Palestinian and Lebanese death tolls continued to mount. When, egged on by Israel and Republican neocons, President Trump decided to “finish the job” by defeating the Iranian regime, the conflict took on a new character. Iran intensified its attacks on neighboring Arab Gulf states that housed US bases and closed the Straits of Hormuz, cutting off 20% of the world’s oil and gas supplies and negatively impacting the Gulf region’s economies.

Reading some of the Israeli, Arab, and US press is enough to make one pull out one’s hair. Some Israeli commentators from the far-right (and their American neocon acolytes) remain convinced that all that’s needed is another massive bombing campaign, coupled with yet a few more “targeted assassinations”—as if those tactics, which Israel has used repeatedly, will be any more successful than they’ve been in the past.

Meanwhile, hard-line Arab opinion writers celebrate the “brilliance” of Iranian tactics. It’s hard to see how incurring the enmity of their neighbors and putting their own and the region’s economic futures at risk can be construed as anything but reckless.

The US media is even more confounding, with its apparent addiction to breathlessly and uncritically following the barrage of confusing and contradictory posts coming from the president.

And so, a decade after the JCPOA, the Middle East and the Gulf region are in a more precarious place than ever. Although the situation is far more complicated than a decade ago, and the enmity on all sides so much deeper, the way forward is recognition that piecemeal approaches to the region, playing whack-a-mole, have only made the region less secure.

As difficult as it may be to imagine it now, what will be required is to work toward a regional security framework built on non-aggression, non-interference, and respect for the sovereignty of all states, and an end to the Israeli occupation and denial of Palestinian rights. This entails the recognition that there are no military solutions to the region’s political issues. In fact, each round of violence only exacerbates existing problems. It’s a tall order requiring leadership that is smart, courageous, and visionary. That may not exist today, but it’s necessary—and it’s the goal toward which we must direct our efforts.

It probably is not a surprise to most people outside the Trump administration, but it looks like their mass deportation has not done much to help the native-born workforce. The unemployment rate for native-born workers in May was 4.2%. That’s up from 4.1% last May, and 3.8% in May of 2024, when Joe Biden was in the White House, and immigrants were taking all the jobs.

This outcome shouldn’t be a big surprise to people who have given the issue much thought. Most of the jobs that immigrants do are not ones that native-born workers are lining up for. Few people born in this country want to work on farms picking lettuce or tomatoes or in meat-processing plants. It’s the same story with low-paying jobs such as home health care aides or custodians.

It was Trumpian silly to think that mass deportation of immigrants was going to lead to a huge wave of jobs for native born workers. In fact, as much research has shown, immigrant workers tend to act as complements to native-born workers, not substitutes.

This is perhaps most clearly seen in the construction industry, where close to 30% of the workforce are immigrants. The availability of lower-cost immigrant labor allows many projects to go forward that would not otherwise. In this way, it is a net job gainer for native-born workers. This is likely true in many other areas as well.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean that immigrants never lower the wages of native-born workers. There are likely cases where workers on H1-B visas have reduced the wages of workers in some occupations, even if the effect of the program in general may still be positive. I am also confident that if we eased the immigration barriers to foreign-trained doctors, the pay of our doctors would not still be twice as high as in other wealthy countries, thereby lowering healthcare costs.

Also, negative impacts may not be reversible. There is now solid evidence that opening trade to China cost the US millions of manufacturing jobs. That doesn’t mean that putting up tariffs will bring the jobs back. Half a century ago, the meat-packing industry had many good-paying union jobs that were later taken by low-paid immigrants. Chasing away immigrants now will not bring those good-paying jobs back.

Anyhow, the results to date are clear. Trump’s mass deportation has not led to any sort of windfall for native-born workers. As the Trumpers say, “Trump was wrong about everything.”

Amid a rapid escalation between Israel and Iran, Yemen’s Houthis have rejoined the Iran war, launching a volley of missiles at Israel and pledging to implement a “complete and total ban” of Israeli shipping in the Red Sea. It’s safe to say that the tenuous ceasefire in the Middle East is now unraveling.

President Donald Trump demanded that all parties deescalate, writing on Truth Social Monday morning that “Final negotiations on ‘Peace’ are proceeding” so long as “ignorance or stupidity” don’t get in their way. But the latest developments suggest that the United States has limited control over the path of the conflict, which is now entering its fourth month.

After Iran struck Israel on Sunday in what Tehran described as retaliation for Israeli ceasefire violations in Lebanon, Trump publicly urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stand by and wait for negotiations to bear fruit. “I call the shots,” Trump told the Financial Times. “Netanyahu doesn’t call the shots.”

Just a few hours later, Israel launched strikes across Iran, hitting what it called “strategic defense systems.” Iranian officials said Israel also hit a petrochemical plant in southwestern Iran.

The rapid return to war is a stark reminder that, while the US chose how to start this conflict, it has only one vote on how to end it. Israel has shown little interest in bringing the war to a close, and many influential pro-Israel voices in the US argue that Trump must “finish the job” and overthrow the Iranian government. And, while Iran has made clear that Lebanon must be part of any ceasefire, Israeli officials remain determined to keep up the fight against Hezbollah, including through large-scale attacks on Beirut.

Trump’s public demands that Israel deescalate suggest that the US is trying to create at least some public separation between its actions and Israel’s. But Iran is weary from years of staccato conflict with Israel and determined to make the most of the leverage it has gained by blockading the Strait of Hormuz.

In practice, this means Tehran is no longer willing to distinguish between US and Israeli attacks. “No one believes the Zionist regime acts without coordination with the United States,” a spokesperson for Iran’s foreign ministry said Monday.

Still, Iran has so far avoided launching new attacks on US assets in the Middle East. This relative restraint may be due to Tehran’s desire to maintain options for future escalation. Another possible explanation is that Iran believes recent reports indicating that Trump has privately said he won’t return to war unless Tehran kills more US soldiers.

The reentry of the Houthis into the war throws an uncertain variable into these calculations. The group earned sympathy throughout the Middle East for its attacks on Israel in retaliation for alleged Israeli war crimes in Gaza. With Israeli forces bogged down on multiple fronts, the Houthis now seemingly see another opportunity to increase their legitimacy and pursue their long-standing goal of confronting Israel.

If the Houthis follow through on their threats to block Israeli shipping, then the Trump administration will face significant pressure to help Israel reopen the key strategic waterway, which is now a crucial pathway for exporting Persian Gulf oil from Arab states because of the Hormuz closure. But even the US military has shown a limited ability to force the Houthis to stand down, despite the best efforts of both the Biden and Trump administrations in recent years.

It will take time to determine the exact impact of the Houthi threats to Israeli shipping. Previous Houthi attempts to partially blockade the Red Sea have already forced many shipping companies to reroute around Africa rather than traveling through the Suez Canal. While the Houthis have generally claimed to target only Israeli ships, the group has used a broad definition to define what counts as Israeli, making it difficult for companies to determine whether they are free to pass.

Meanwhile, Iran is signaling that it wants to stop the latest round of escalation with Israel, saying in a statement Monday that it will stop its attacks so long as Israeli forces halt strikes in Lebanon. The message is clear: if Trump wants a deal with Iran, then he’ll have to restrain Israel first.

If you have ever had the opportunity to visit the Normandy American Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer, France it is something that stays with you. The rows of white gravestones silhouetted against green grass and blue sky bear silent and eloquent witness to what happened on June 6, 1944. The cemetery contains the graves of 9,389 of Americans, most of whom lost their lives in the D-Day landings and the battles in France in 1944.

From the cemetery, you can see down to Omaha Beach the bloodiest part of the D-Day battlefield. While estimates vary, 2,400 to 3,600 total American casualties (including killed, wounded, and missing) occurred on Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944. For me, the most moving part of the Cemetery is the Walls of the Missing where inscribed 1,557 names of the soldiers and sailors who were missing in action and have never had their bodies recovered.

For decades, American politicians have been visiting the Normandy Beaches to pay tribute to all the Americans and Allies (primarily British and Canadian) who fought on June 6, 1944. Particularly well-known is the speech that President Ronald Reagan made in June of 1984:

The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or on the next. It was the deep knowledge—and pray God we have not lost it—that there is a profound, moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest. You were here to liberate, not to conquer, and so you and those others did not doubt your cause. And you were right not to doubt. You all knew that some things are worth dying for.

For an American politician, remarks at the Normandy beaches ought to be simple and straightforward. All you have to do is pay tribute as best you can to the extraordinary sacrifice made on June 6, 1944. As hard as it is to believe, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth failed this simple task. Rather than just pay tribute to the efforts of those who “hit the beach” on June 6, 1944, Hegseth launched into an anti-immigrant and far-right rant. As the New York Times reported:

In his remarks, Mr. Hegseth said that “freedom is not free” and especially praised the role played by American troops, but said that over the past eight or so decades, some European countries had grown “comfortable.” “Today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies,” he said. “Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion? Or is it too late?”

I am sure it escaped Hegseth the fact that many of the Americans he heralds for their sacrifice were the sons of immigrants to the United States. To compare refugees coming to Europe fleeing war and economic oppression with Nazi tyranny defies belief.

It is not surprising that Hegseth cannot identify with the men who fought on D-Day. They were not the much hyped “war fighters” ignoring politically correct rules of engagement that Hegseth celebrates. Instead, they were ordinary men doing extraordinary things to defeat the most terrible tyranny the world has ever seen. History will remember the deeds of those who defeated Nazi tyranny, while Hegseth's far-right rhetoric will be nothing more than a footnote to a sad chapter in American history.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

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

Today we discuss:

• Iran launches ballistic missiles at Israel late last night after an Israeli attack in Lebanon against Hezbollah. It said its acceptance of a cease-fire had been conditioned on a halt in the fighting on all fronts. Hours later, the Israeli military struck Iran. Explosions were heard in Tehran, and the cities of Tabriz and Isfahan. The Israeli military said it had detected more missiles launched toward Israel from Iran.

• Six people are injured in a mass stabbing by an apparently disturbed homeless man at New York’s Penn Station.

• Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s ruling party wins parliamentary elections, preliminary results show. Pashinyan’s push to forge closer ties with the West and move Armenia out of the orbit of Russia has drawn rebukes from President Vladimir Putin. Pashinyan had the backing of Europe and the United States.

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The Israeli government under Benjamin Netanyahu refuses to alter course or accept any criticism of its genocidal policies. This has prompted many who previously favored a two-state solution to now call for the abolition of the Israeli ethnostate, which in turn causes supporters of Israel to accuse their critics of eliminationism.

The post My Right to Exist Is My Right to Kill You appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Every week in our law school eviction court clinic, we see parents hustling from their workplaces, still wearing fast food and home healthcare uniforms, hoping to push back the day when they and their kids will be sleeping in their car. We see seniors and persons living with disabilities on the verge of eviction because they had to spend their rent money filling prescriptions. We see some of the 43 million people in the US who are living with hunger.

Every person suffering like this is a rebuke to the core promise of the Declaration of Independence. We should commemorate the Declaration’s 250th anniversary with a renewed commitment to the pursuit of happiness, which means our government fulfilling basic economic needs.

From the very first moment of its existence, the United States embraced economic rights. The Declaration of Independence’s second paragraph commits our government to protecting the pursuit of happiness as an unalienable right. The founders, as flawed as they were, knew that this promise included ensuring that basic needs are met.

“Not a Charity but a Right”—The Founders and Government’s Role in Ending Poverty

The Declaration’s main author, Thomas Jefferson, lamented the democracy-undermining existence of poverty. Natural rights are violated, Jefferson wrote, when some residents struggle and others prosper. So he insisted that the government has a duty to act to remedy the injustice, including through aggressively progressive taxation.

Freedom and democracy cannot exist without first meeting the rights to basic human needs.

Other founders agreed. Alexander Hamilton explained that the General Welfare Clause in Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution (“The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect taxes... to provide for the General Welfare of the United States”) creates a government that addresses unmet economic needs. Hamilton’s fellow Constitution framer James Madison called for the new nation to enact laws that would “reduce extreme wealth toward a state of mediocrity, raise extreme indigence toward a state of comfort.”

For 18th century politicians, this type of government intervention was not hypothetical. Colonial governments instituted price controls on food and aggressively regulated gristmills to keep the cost of bread affordable for all.

The founder with the most pronounced vision of economic rights was Thomas Paine, author of the seismic pamphlet Common Sense and a driving force behind the American Revolution and the new government it birthed. Paine called for the redistribution of wealth via progressive taxation and for direct government anti-poverty interventions like old-age pensions, support for families with young children, full employment, and a basic income. “It is not charity but a right—not bounty but justice that I am pleading for,” he said.

The Meaning of the “Pursuit of Happiness”

Beyond the founders’ own words, it is clear from historical context that a 1776 commitment to protecting the unalienable right to the “pursuit of happiness” includes ensuring that subsistence needs are met. Law professor and dean Linda Keller’s comprehensive review of political thought and contemporary use of this critical phrase during the 18th century led her to conclude that basic economic rights are deeply rooted in the nation’s foundation.

“Its inclusion was not merely a rhetorical flourish, but rather the pursuit of happiness established an ‘unalienable right’ that includes an economic dimension,” Keller writes. “In particular, there are minimum needs that must be met in order to pursue happiness, for instance food, shelter, and clothing. Thus the government must provide the conditions to enable individuals to pursue happiness.”

Over the decades, other scholars have agreed. “The Declaration of Independence manifests a government’s affirmative role in protecting rights,” writes law professor Bert Lockwood. “Both the plain and ordinary meaning of happiness and its common usage in the 18th century indicate that the notion of happiness cannot be entirely separated from material well-being. Access to the minimal necessities of life, such as shelter or basic medical care, is thus an indispensable prerequisite to the notion of happiness.”

Charles Black, the longtime Yale Law professor and civil rights advocate who helped argue the legendary desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education, said the point was obvious. “The possession of a decent material basis for life is an indispensable condition, for almost all people at all times, to the pursuit of happiness,” Black wrote. “The right to pursuit of happiness is going to be for all but a small minority of those in poverty, a pale sardonically grinning ghost of a right.”

“Necessitous Men are not Free Men”

US leaders since the founders have underscored this same point: Freedom and democracy cannot exist without first meeting the rights to basic human needs.

“Necessitous men are not free men,” Franklin Roosevelt announced as the foundation of his proposal for a Second Bill of Rights ensuring access to housing, healthcare, and living wages.

US voters have consistently expressed concern over our rampant wealth inequality, supported a government jobs guarantee, and called for recognizing housing and healthcare as government-enforced human rights.

Soon after, the international community heeded Roosevelt’s call. Virtually every nation has ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which enshrines into law the rights to housing, healthcare, and living wage incomes.

Yet the US has not ratified the treaty known as the ICESCR. Not coincidentally, every wealthy nation that has ratified does far better than the US in protecting the pursuit of happiness. Those nations have comprehensive and successful programs ensuring housing, healthcare, and adequate incomes for their residents. In those countries, the grim eviction court scenes we witness every week are almost unheard of.

We can do better, too. US voters have consistently expressed concern over our rampant wealth inequality, supported a government jobs guarantee, and called for recognizing housing and healthcare as government-enforced human rights.

These rights are necessary for the pursuit of happiness. The founders knew it, and so do we. Along with fireworks and picnics, let’s celebrate the 250th by finally fulfilling the real promise of the Declaration of Independence.