Do Americans who engage in lawful and peaceful protest enjoy the protection of the United States Constitution? Not any more, the Trump regime says in authorizing the shameless misconduct and lethal violence ICE agents are perpetrating against citizens in Minnesota.

ICE has invaded the state of Minnesota to show America that nothing can restrain Trump’s army of thugs. Not the Constitution. Not the laws which make it a crime to commit assault and murder. Not public opinion. And not thousands of citizens exercising their rights.

Although far from the first instance of ICE brutality, the slaying of Renee Nicole Good shocked the nation as a clear case of murder in cold blood.

The killing was not in “self-defense”—if a car is really hurtling toward you, you don’t pause to take out your gun, aim and shoot, because you know shooting won’t stop the car. You run. Good’s autopsy confirms that it was murder: the fatal bullet was the one fired into the victim’s left temple, when the ICE agent shot through the driver’s side window from alongside the car.

In response to the homicide, President Trump false asserted the agent had been run over, and charged the victim with the “crime” of having been “very, very disrespectful to law enforcement”; the chief of Homeland Security called Good a “domestic terrorist,” supposedly “stalking” ICE (meaning she followed them to observe their conduct); and the Department of Justice launched an investigation, not of the killing, but of the victim’s widow.

Meanwhile, the Vice President proclaimed ICE impunity. Speaking of Renee Good’s killer, Vance stated, “That guy’s protected by absolute immunity.”

The claim is legally baseless, but ICE agents got the message they can brutalize and even summarily execute at will, without consequences. And now, within weeks, ICE agents have committed another murder, this time of Alex Pretti, a citizen who was an ICU nurse, with a burst of bullets in the victim’s back while he lay defenseless on the ground.

Since the Supreme Court approved of ICE stopping individuals based on racial profiling, ICE agents have seized and frequently assaulted individuals simply because they appeared to be Hispanic—or Hmong or Somali or Native American. They are freely employing the same tactics in Minnesota.

Do you carry proof of citizenship with you? Neither do I. But in an echo of Nazi Germany, ICE agents demand to “see your papers,” particularly if you are non-white.

Targeting journalists and citizen observers. An official policy of breaking into homes without a judicial warrant. Detaining children. Handcuffing individuals until they come up with proof of identity. Dragging people out of their cars without probable cause to think they committed a crime. Assault on suspected “illegals.” Attacking nonviolent, peaceful demonstrators with pepper balls, tear gas, rubber bullets. Threatening with guns, shooting at cars, and now, actual murders.

These are the abuses of a conquering army, inflicted upon an occupied nation.

ICE and Border Patrol, the entities now inflicting these wounds on our democracy, are no more law enforcement agencies than was Hitler’s Gestapo. ICE is an unrestrained, racist, violence-craving gang, trying to impose Trump’s will on a state. It should be disbanded.

Hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans have taken to the streets to bravely defy ICE’s intimidation and violence, to insist on their rights under law, and to express solidarity with their neighbors who are ICE victims. And across the nation, many thousands came out in support.

In other places where liberty has been challenged, Americans and our leaders identified with a threatened people. “I am a Berliner,” President John F. Kennedy affirmed at the Berlin Wall in 1963. “I am a Greenlander,” some now say in response to President Trump’s threats to invade an ally’s territory.

The threats and the invasion have come home. If our constitutional rights are not to be erased, we must act with the courage displayed by Minnesotans. “I am a Minnesotan.” So are we all.

Many people assume that Germany instantly transitioned from representative democracy to totalitarianism following the ascension of Adolf Hitler to chancellor on January 30, 1933. Actually, the Weimar Republic had already been reeling from the global Great Depression, unpopular austerity measures and overreliance on emergency decrees that restricted civil rights. Throughout the 1930s until the invasion of Poland formally marked the start of World War II, the Nazi leadership had to tolerate—less so as time passed and they consolidated power—the German deep state: conservative economists, a military general staff dominated by Prussian aristocrats whom the former Austrian corporal couldn’t stand yet couldn’t do without, the civil service lifers who kept the bureaucracy functioning, and the legacy German judiciary and its overlapping state and national courts presided over by judges beholden mostly to laws passed before the fascist seizure of power.

The 1934 Enabling Act turned the Reichstag into a rubber-stamp parliamentary validation for anything the Führer State proposed. Even so, during the early years of his reign, Hitler’s regime focused on big-picture policies like economics while leaving intact thousands of pre-Third Reich civil and criminal laws concerning picayune administrative matters like tax rules and traffic regulations and street crime.

The tension between a German state based on law and order, and a Nazi regime hellbent on savaging its enemies manifested itself in the SA, the Stormtroopers known as Brown Shirts, and the SS. Theoretically, both organizations were incorporated into the formal state and military apparatus. But members swore personal loyalty to Hitler. These paramilitaries were assigned to do his dirty work—and assured that they would never be held to account under those pesky old pre-Nazi laws that remained on the books.

Surprisingly, Richard J. Evans writes in The Third Reich in Power, SA goons were sometimes arrested for assaulting Jews and leftists. And not just these enemies of the state. “Gangs of stormtroopers got drunk, caused disturbances late at night, beat up innocent passersby, and attacked the police if they tried to stop them.”

As a result there were, Evans writes, “more than 4,000 prosecutions of SA and SS men for crimes of various kinds that were still before the courts in May 1934…Many others had been quashed, and more offenses still had never been prosecuted in the first place, but this was still a considerable number.” Even among upright local cops in Berlin and other cities, the authorities sussed that the fix was in, the mooks were protected, and that they—and any judge with the courage to convict one and send him to prison—imperiled their careers and their persons unless they turned a blind eye. Prosecutions ended.

ICE under Trump is rapidly becoming his SA: overwhelming, vicious, gleefully assaulting anyone and everyone, in charge of their own private network of concentration camps, personally loyal to The Leader, above the law and thus able to operate with impunity. Local police are afraid of ICE.

State violence in which the government self-servingly ignored its own laws in order to randomly attack political opponents and scapegoats was a key building block of the Nazis’ consolidation of power.

It’s nearly impossible to overstate the traumatizing impact of state violence on the population of an ordered society. You can’t trust anyone or anything. You pay taxes, but the government does nothing for you. You’re on your own. I gained insight into the psychology of state violence when a high-ranked officer of the New York City police department neglected to block his caller ID before he left a death threat on my voicemail and a truckload of right-wing firefighters smashed the door of my apartment building. Who could I report him to—the NYPD? Perhaps, counting on his de facto immunity as he committed a felony and a firing offense, he didn’t bother to cover himself up. The firemen went away after my journalist buddy appeared with his camera.

I’ve experienced state violence firsthand in the U.S., where cops have roughed me up and falsely accused me of offenses, big and small, I didn’t commit, and judges have sided with them despite their brazen lies. And I’m a white guy.

I’ve witnessed state violence during my travels to places like the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. Visiting a friend in Kazakhstan in the late 1990s, my traveling companion was shocked to encounter a rotting corpse of a man who’d gotten run over by a car days earlier, still lying in the street. “Aren’t you going to call the police?” my friend asked our Kazakh host. Shooting me a knowing glance and dark grin, the Kazakh laughed: “Your friend, this is his first time here, yes?” In a country with state violence, you don’t call the cops to go after criminals. Cops are the criminals.

State violence is worse than anarchy. Where there is no state, you can be robbed or raped or killed and nothing will happen to your robber or rapist or killer. It’s deeply unsettling. On the other hand, you also enjoy perfect immunity for self-defense or revenge. If you get the better of your assailant or get even with him, nothing will happen to you either. You’re on your own but, with luck and smarts and strength and charm, you may thrive. It’s Darwin’s world; we live in it until someone eats us up.

I’ve seen anarchy in places like Afghanistan, when there were no police or courts or other authorities. I often feared for my life. On a few occasions, I caused others to fear for theirs. Over time, I connected enough friends and allies to create, if not civilization, a working modus operandi. Now, under the Taliban, there is law and order. It’s the main thing that government is able to provide, but don’t shortchange it—few things are more valuable than law and order when they’re absent.

A lawless state is the worst of both worlds. You have neither the freedom to kill or be killed, nor freedom from a hypocritical state that accuses you of everything and shows no mercy while refusing to even pretend to hold itself to the same rules.

A lawless state declares that the right to carry a firearm is a sacred constitutional right unless it doesn’t care for your apparent political affiliation, in which case it can kill you. It investigates its foes with punitive legal fishing expeditions while refusing to investigate when its agents gun down peaceful unarmed citizens. It fights for the free speech rights of its allies overseas as it arrests its enemies for barely saying a word out of turn.

A government fully committed to state violence, as Nazi Germany’s government would wink at the murderers in its employ years before the first pellet of Zyklon B was used to murder a person, and as the U.S. is doing now—not even bothering to lie decently about the Venezuelan fishermen and peaceful Minnesotans it slaughters to amuse itself—makes one long for the far better non-system system of anarchy.

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

 

The post “Mad Max” Anarchy Is Safer Than Trump’s Terror State appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Kristi Noem, Donald Trump, Greg Bovino, and even whiskey Pete Hegseth are all out there trying to tell us that Alex Pretti was a domestic terrorist who came to a protest with the intention to “massacre” ICE agents.

But that’s not their real message.

Back in 1980, I went into Uganda during the Civil War against Idi Amin to take over a refugee camp up in the Karamoja region. When I was leaving the country, going through the Entebbe airport (which had only intermittent electricity and considerable damage from the war), I was confronted by three armed men, two of them Tanzanian soldiers (who’d just successfully occupied the country as Amin fled to Saudi Arabia) and one a local Ugandan policeman.

One of the soldiers had an AK-47 over his shoulder and he grabbed the clip and rotated the gun down so the barrel was pointed right at my nose from a distance of about 6 inches.

“I could kill you right here, right now,” he said with a smile, “and nobody will ever know. Nobody will ever punish me. Now, give us half of your money.”

His message was essentially the same message that the Trump regime is trying to communicate to all of us today:

“We have all the power. You have none. We can get away with murder, repeatedly, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

In other words: “Obey or die!”

It certainly worked for those three; I split the little money I had with them and they let me get on my plane.

These weak men, knowing well their own fear, sense weakness the way a mouse senses cheese. They smell fear, and right now, as Republicans and most Democrats have gone into hiding, Washington reeks of it.

This “we have all the power and you have none” is the classic, eternal message of fascism, wherever and whenever it appears in the world.

Kristi Noem and Greg Bovino aren’t trying to convince anybody (other than the pathetic, brainwashed suckers who watch Fox “News”) that both Alex Pretti and Nicole Good were “domestic terrorists.” They know that both were merely well-intentioned citizens protesting the occupation of their city by masked federal goons.

Their real message — and Trump’s, Miller’s, and Vance’s real message — to Democrats and to America is:

“Challenge us and we will kill you. And we will get away with it. That’s how powerful we are, so you shouldn’t even try to resist.”

And it appears, indeed, that they will get away with it. They’ve already shut down the investigation of Renee Good’s murder, and have now seized the evidence from Alex Pretti’s murder. And suffered no consequences whatsoever for this naked obstruction of justice.

Hakeem Jeffries is hiding someplace in Washington DC, perhaps under the same table as Chuck Schumer. Both should be in Minneapolis right now holding ad hoc hearings and engaging the nation in nonstop media the way Noem and Bovino are: you don’t fight corrupt power by cowering. You have to show up.

Meanwhile, the generally useless and certainly feckless Republicans in Congress are anxiously counting their campaign contributions, particularly the ones to their leadership PACs that they can take with them when they leave office.

Billionaires are buying fancy homes around DC so they can continue to purchase Republican politicians, while rightwing media struggles to convince people that what they’re seeing with their own lying eyes isn’t true.

And the message under it all is:

“We’re in charge here. You may not resist us. We are in control, not you. Obey or die.”

Studies show that conservative men, and law enforcement officers particularly, are generally submissive men who need a “strict father” figure to tell them what to do and who crave regular reinforcement — often achieved by using violence — for their fragile sense of masculinity.

— When a young woman tried to make her peaceful protest known, these cucks felt threatened so they violently threw her down onto the ice and sprayed her in the face with liquid pepper and other chemicals.

Their message: “Obey or die!”

— When Alex Pretti tried to put himself between the CPB/ICE thugs and the young woman they were beating up, he enraged them by claiming some power for himself. Thus, he also had to be punished, so first they knocked him to the ground and sprayed liquid pepper into his face, too, to blind and disorient him.

Their message: “Obey or die!”

— When he staggered back up from that, again asserting his personal power, it was apparently the final straw: to preserve their masculinity, this man — like the woman who’d laughed at impotent officer Jonathan Ross two weeks earlier — had to be taken down.

Their message: “Obey or die.”

— Finding his gun — a symbol of male power they were offended he dared legally carry — was pure gold for them. They eliminated any threat his gun might have represented by removing it and then — like the cowards they are — put as many as ten bullets into his back.

He didn’t obey, so he had to die.

These craven weaklings, desperate to prove their manhood and reassert their power, murdered Alex Pretti for having dared to challenge them, and then applauded themselves as one said of Pretti’s death, “Boo hoo.” Just like Putin does when average people challenge him in Russia, Orbán does in Hungary, the Ayatollah does in Iran, Erdoğon does in Turkey, and El Sisi does in Egypt, among others.

This is how fascist men roll and have throughout history; it’s an entirely predictable playbook as Ruth Ben Ghiat, Mary Trump, Jason Stanley, Timothy Snyder, and Miles Taylor can tell you: “Obey or die.”

It’s particularly ironic that right now, as a the USS Abraham Lincoln and a small armada of accompanying warships are scheduled to arrive off the coast of Iran by the end of this week, that Iranian state TV is running clips of ICE gassing and killing Minnesotans on a loop.

They’re openly saying that Trump is doing the same as they did a few weeks ago, therefore justifying executing their own “domestic terrorists.”

And now, in a pathetic joke, Trump says he’s going to punish Iran’s mullahs for killing their own people on the streets of Tehran at the same time he brags about and justifies gunning down Americans on the streets of Minneapolis.

The brutal, cold-blooded murders of Good and Pretti also show clearly that ICE’s and CBP’s presence in Minnesota has little to do with immigration; there are only an estimated 130,000 undocumented people in the entire state, although Texas and Florida each have millions.

Minnesota, however, is a swing state that Trump lost three times and Republicans are looking at an electoral disaster this fall: something had to be done to set an example there that might cow other Democratic-led states.

When Pam Bondi sent her letter to Minnesota’s Governor Tim Walz saying that if he’d just turn his voting rolls over to her (presumably so she could “clean” aka “purge” the list to rig this November’s election), she’d pull ICE and CPB out of the state.

That’s how Putin, Orbán, and Erdoğon, et al remain in power, by intimidating the population at the same time they rig their elections. It’s the model Trump has in mind for 2026 America, and tried to execute in 2020 with his phony electors scheme, a conspiracy with over 140 Republicans who voted not to confirm Biden, and, when those didn’t work, finally the attack on January 6th.

Trump’s message on January 6th was the same: “Obey or die.” Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi barely escaped being killed by Trump’s murderous mob, and four police officers lost their lives at the hands of the GOP’s shock troops.

We’re nuts if we think Trump and the people around him wouldn’t try it again, particularly when they’re all looking at the possibility of prison time if an impeachment effort is successful because so many Republicans could lose their seats this fall.

Trump himself has already been convicted of fraud multiple times, as well as stealing money from a children’s cancer charity and raping E. Jean Carroll, and his lickspittles have to know that John Mitchell, Nixon’s Attorney General, and 40 other senior officials (including a Cabinet member) went to prison in the 1970s.

Trump is a weak, psychologically damaged man, as were Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and most of the world’s other historic strongmen. Their weakness and emotional damage are what drive them to their “Obey or die” proclamations.

Such people not only draw others with a similar malady into their circles, but they also typically inflict generationally-destructive damage on their own countries when people push back against them.

These weak men, knowing well their own fear, sense weakness the way a mouse senses cheese. They smell fear, and right now, as Republicans and most Democrats have gone into hiding, Washington reeks of it.

History is unambiguous about what happens when bullies aren’t confronted early and publicly: their violence escalates, their lies morph into history and law, and intimidation against anybody who dares speak up becomes the new normal.

Soon, everybody is silent.

Good and Pretti weren’t accidents, and they weren’t about immigration: these intentional killings, these murders, were unambiguous messages as clear as the one I got in Uganda that fall afternoon: “Get in our way and we will kill you, and nobody will do anything about it. Obey or die.”

And unless Democratic leadership takes a cue from the good people of Minnesota and steps up and fights back hard, the next message will be even broader and bloodier, because authoritarians always interpret silence as permission.

There’s a fable about how Bear Bryant, the legendary coach of the University of Alabama, found the toughest players. He would, supposedly, drive through dusty Alabama towns with a dead dog tied behind his car. He’d then stop his car where the high school boys hung out and wait. The kid who came over and kicked that dead dog would get a scholarship.

JD Vance aspires to be the captain of the MAGA team when Trump moves on. The way to get there, he seems to believe, is to kick the dog, whichever one is most helpless (and not being eaten by Haitians), and show that he’s even meaner than Trump. His rhetorical style is all about the strong beating up on the weak, something Vance seems to relish. There are just too many examples of Vance’s delight in kicking to ignore.

Dog Eaters

The one that made these attacks Vance’s signature concerned the unsubstantiated story that his Haitian constituents in Ohio were eating their pets, which Trump and then Vance not only said, but then repeated despite denial from local authorities that it was happening. But Vance didn’t care. He went even further by admitting it was a false story, but one that he still proudly put forth:

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

The hell with the Haitians he supposedly represented in the Senate. And to hell with the truth.

Zelensky Muggers

When Volodymryr Zelensky visited the Oval Office on March 25, 2025, to secure American support against the Russians invaders, Vance took the lead role in a carefully orchestrated effort to humiliate the Ukrainian leader. Vance accused Zelensky of campaigning for the Democrats and for not thanking Trump profusely for all of the US support.

Vance said to Zelensky, “I think it’s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office to try to litigate this in front of the American media.”

The vibe of this made-for-TV reality show reminded me of how bullies operate: Trump pinning back Zelensky’s arms, while Vance landed the body blows.

Denmark Trashing

JD wants to be a point person in taking Greenland from the Greenlanders and Denmark. In a visit to the Pituffik Space base last March, he belittled the sacrifice made by Danes who lost more soldiers per capital than any other ally in Afghanistan. But, as he put it, that was

“years ago, just as, for example, the French honor the sacrifice of Americans in Normandy 80 years ago…. Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland…”

It must be such a rush for a leader of a country with 340 million people to threaten a county of 6 million. They can’t touch you. You’re invincible.

Killing "Domestic Terrorists"

Without waiting for an investigation of any sort, Vance jumped to defend the ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, who killed Renee Nicole Goode in Minneapolis by firing three shots through her car window at close range:

“The reality is that his life was endangered and he fired in self-defense.”

No, the reality is that Vance wants to demonstrate to the MAGA world that he is a bad ass who owns the libs, over and over, and supports killing them, if necessary.

And stomping on reporters who dare question his unsubstantiated finding is blood sport:

“Everybody who’s been repeating the lie that this is some innocent woman who was out for a drive in Minneapolis when a law enforcement officer shot at her: you should be ashamed of yourselves, every single one of you.”

Kicking the Five-Year Old

You’ve got to have a heart made of stone not to show sympathy and kindness for a five-year-old who had his father taken away during an ICE raid. But if you want to be a MAGA leader, you have to look past any maudlin sentimentality even when the facts are lined up against you. According to the family’s asylum lawyer,

“The family was not eluding ICE in any way. They were following all established protocols, pursuing their claim for asylum, showing up for their court hearings, and posed no safety, not flight risk and should never have been detailed.”

Vance could care less about the facts:

“When they went to arrest his illegal alien father, the father ran. So, the story is that ICE detained a 5-year-old. Well, what are they supposed to do? Are they supposed to let a five-year-old child freeze to death?”

Although the boy’s school and relatives offered to take care of the child, he was shipped with his father to a detention center in Texas.

So what? Why should Vance care any more about this child and his father than about dog-eating Haitians? Even though asylum seekers in the judicial process are legally here, Vance, a Yale Law School graduate, ignores the facts because the only facts that matter are proving that he will back ICE no matter what; that he will support the deportation of immigrants, legal or otherwise; that he will be seen as tough enough and mean enough to become the MAGA crown prince.

Cruella de Vance.

P.S. As the world learns that Alex Pretti was brutally murdered by federal agents, Cruella has yet to stomp on his dead body. Instead, he has issued a wilting word salad about “the engineered chaos” that is “the direct consequence of far left agitators, working with local authorities.” You offer that kind of gibberish when you’re worried that a real investigation might make you look like a fool.

On January 24th, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old white US citizen, was murdered by a Border Patrol agent in Minneapolis. This comes less than three weeks after ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Nicole Good.

Video footage shows Pretti, an ICU nurse, stepping in between a woman and a federal agent who was pepper-spraying her. That agent proceeds to pepper-spray Pretti who was filming the encounter with his phone in one hand and nothing in the other. Several agents approached and forced Pretti onto the ground. He was restrained.

Despite this, one agent unholstered his gun and fired one shot at close range. As that agent continued to fire, another grabbed his gun and fired additional shots. In total, at least 10 shots were fired within five seconds.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) immediately began spreading their state-sanctioned propaganda. Via Twitter-X, DHS posted that federal agents were conducting a “targeted operation” when an armed individual approached. “The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted. […] Fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers, an agent fired defensive shots.” Without offering a shred of evidence, DHS wildly speculates that “this looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” Like Good, the Trump administration immediately labelled Pretti a “domestic terrorist.”

Both Good and Pretti were victims of state-sanctioned executions conducted by federal agents illegally occupying the state of Minnesota against the will of its people and its elected officials.

Regardless of your thoughts on ICE’s presence in Minnesota specifically or the Trump administration in general, this is beyond debate: there was absolutely no reason for federal agents to fire a single shot—let alone ten. Pretti was not a threat to anyone—let alone several heavily armed federal agents. They chose to abuse the power and “absolute immunity” that the Trump administration granted them to publicly execute a US citizen at their own discretion.

We vote for representatives, not kings.

The Trump administration, in their utter disregard for the safety and well-being of Americans, has unleashed an army of poorly trained, heavily armed, masked agents without any guardrails or accountability. Several news outlets have reported that the federal investigation into Renee Good’s murder is more focused on any possible ties between her wife, Becca Good, and activist groups rather than Ross’ conduct. Thus far, six federal prosecutors in Minnesota have resigned over the Justice Department’s reluctance to investigate Ross.

An FBI agent who was working with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) also resigned. Shortly after opening a civil rights investigation into Good’s death, she was ordered to reclassify it as an investigation into an assault on the ICE agent. The FBI also blocked the BCA from participating in the investigation.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has already announced that DHS will be leading the investigation of the Border Patrol agent that murdered Pretti. To emphasize, the department that, before the investigation even began, fabricated a series of lies meant to publicly exonerate Border Patrol agents will be investigating their conduct.

Given this precedent, why exactly would federal agents show restraint? Why deescalate when excessive violence is unconditionally excused? Even if they murder someone, President Trump will only go as far as acknowledging “that mistakes sometimes happen” and “that 99% of our ICE officers are doing the right thing.” Following Pretti’s murder, Trump wasted no time defending Border Patrol. He claimed that federal agents “had to protect themselves” against “the gunman.”

While Trump highlights Pretti’s gun as some kind of excuse, whether he was armed changes nothing. This is America – a country with over 80 million gun owners whose right to bear arms is inscribed in the Second Amendment. A fact that President Trump and his allies are usually so eager to point out. Pretti had a permit to carry a concealed handgun. Not only was he completely within his rights to carry, no video shows him even holding it.

Even Noem refused to directly answer whether Pretti brandished his weapon. Instead, she insisted that “I don’t know of any peaceful protestor that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign.” Yet, of course, she does. The J6 protestors were armed, attacked law enforcement and yet Noem supported Trump pardoning them. Kyle Rittenhouse traveled to another state, went to a peaceful protest armed, shot three people and received widespread praise from the Trump administration.

DHS is so blatantly lying that even staunch Trump supporters like Tim Pool are questioning the official state narrative.

The Trump administration’s careless indifference towards the truth means that, regardless of what they say, we must continue to record and share videos of federal agents. We simply cannot trust the words of an administration whose first impulse is to justify the death of US citizens.

But, there is a deeper worry. It may be tempting to see these lies as an attempt by the administration to justify the violence. An attempt to use the state’s massive propaganda machine—which includes media outlets like Fox News, the New York Post, Bari Weiss’s CBS and Elon Musk’s X—to convince the American public that federal agents are trying to faithfully execute their jobs.

By his own admission, Trump is only limited by his “own morality.” Even if his own supporters disagree with him, Trump remains steadfast–as he puts it, “MAGA is me.” Driven by narcissism, greed, and a litany of grievances, Trump shows little regard for the Constitution, Congress, court rulings, and the “international rules-based order.”

I would add to this list: the people. To think that Trump cares about convincing the public is to believe that Trump still cares about their opinion. Trump does not. He has ‘joked’ about cancelling the midterm elections. In August 2025, his administration quietly removed an online tool from Regulations.gov that allowed advocacy groups to collect and submit public comments to federal agencies. Doing so makes it much harder for individuals to weigh in on agency regulatory proposals. He also pursues a series of unpopular policies including seizing Greenland, occupying Venezuela and renaming the Kennedy Center.

Most Americans think ICE is making cities less safe, but Trump doesn’t care. Hours after Pretti’s murder, Attorney General Pamela Bondi sent a letter to Governor Tim Walz (D-MN) making three demands:

1.Walz’s office must share state records on Medicaid, and Food and Nutrition Service programs with the federal government

2.Repeal sanctuary city policies, force all state correctional facilities to fully cooperate with ICE, honor immigration detainers, and permit ICE to interview detainees to determine immigration status

3.Grant the Department of Justice complete access to the state’s voter rolls to confirm that its registration policies comply with federal law

These demands are a direct assault on the sovereignty of Minnesota. A day after a major statewide economic blackout and protest, the Trump administration is ordering Walz to betray the will of his own constituents. And to be clear, these are demands. As Bondi emphasized on Fox News, Walz “better support President Trump. He better support the men and women in law enforcement because if he doesn’t, we are.”

For the Trump administration, Minnesota is not about immigration enforcement or fraud. It is a trial run for his administration’s fascist apparatus. He is testing whether there are any limits to his power beyond his own judgment. After all, thus far Congress and the Supreme Court have utterly failed to keep him in check—not that either has really tried.

Walz cannot capitulate to the Trump administration. But we also cannot depend on elected officials to solve this problem. Now is the time for collective action—not just in Minnesota but across the entire country. After all, there is one thing that Trump definitely cares about: the economy. A nationwide economic blackout and protest would hit him where it hurts.

No matter which state you live in, you are not safe from Trump. Do not be fooled by victim-blaming narratives that fault Good and Pretti for being ‘where they were not supposed to be.’ The notion that we, as Americans, cannot protest unlawful law enforcement is a repulsive austerity policy masquerading as genuine critique. It is to surrender ourselves unconditionally to the whims of the state.

We vote for representatives, not kings. If ever our elected officials fail to reflect our will, then they must be made to submit—not the other way around. Trump has forgotten how things work; we would all do well to remind him.

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Today we discuss:

•  Minneapolis Crisis: Americans are turning against Trump and his ICE surge against Minneapolis, where agents executed an unarmed nurse, U.S. citizen Alex Pretti—with no signs of a real investigation in sight over the president’s personal Kent State. Democrats are threatening to close the government later this week over Homeland Security funding. Republican politicians are starting to read the room but most continue to defend ICE. ICE offers to leave Minneapolis in exchange for voter records—what’s that about?

• Military top brass purged in China.

• Rafah border crossing reopened: Will Israel make it a one-way trip?

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When Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, wanted to change his agency’s dietary recommendations, he did something very simple. He took the food pyramid and turned it upside down. After years of promoting healthy grains, pulses, and vegetables, the agency was now favoring meat and dairy.

It seemed like a joke. It wasn’t.

Kennedy called his upside-down pyramid, with meat at the top and whole grains at the bottom, “Eat Real Food.” A better name would be “Support Cattle Farmers and Have a Heart Attack.”

The Trump administration’s topsy-turvy approach applies to every aspect of American policy.

The Trump administration shouldn’t be surprised when the world that it is trying to turn upside down unites against it.

The United States needs undocumented immigrants to maintain the economy by filling jobs in agriculture, the construction industry, and the service sector. So, the Trump administration is deporting them.

The United States is the only major industrialized country without universal healthcare. So, the Trump administration is making it more difficult for people to access medical insurance.

The United States, before 2024, was the largest oil and gas producing nation on the planet, but needed government support to make the transition to clean energy. So, the Trump administration eliminated those clean energy subsidies and invested even more into expanding the fossil fuel sector.

In other words, the Trump administration is doing everything it can to harm people and the planet. They are like comic book villains, and they don’t even realize it

The upside-down nature of Trump’s approach to policy can perhaps best be seen in the foreign policy realm.

Donald Trump has talked over and over again about the importance of peace. He has lobbied for the Nobel Peace Prize. When asked about his New Year’s wish this year, he said, “Peace on Earth.”

But all he has done recently is promote war. His administration bombed Nigeria on Christmas Day. The United States invaded Venezuela right after the New Year in order to kidnap the president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife.

The administration is now preparing to attack Iran. Trump has insisted that the United States must seize Greenland, by force if necessary. And the US president expects that the government in Cuba will fall as well, and that Secretary of State Marco Rubio will one day be that country’s leader.

The Trump administration has emphasized the critical importance of US sovereignty. It doesn’t want any other country or any international institutions interfering with US policies.

However, the Trump administration doesn’t care about the sovereignty of any other country. Trump believes he can intervene anywhere. Even close allies are not off limits. He has suggested absorbing Canada. And he seems willing to fight a fellow NATO member, Denmark, in order to control Greenland.

Respect for sovereignty is a bedrock principle of the United Nations. All states rely on this principle to safeguard their borders and protect against the interventions of other countries. Trump’s challenges to sovereignty in Venezuela and elsewhere threaten to unravel the world order.

This contempt for international treaties and institutions led the administration early on to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate as well as the UN Human Rights Council. This year, he has ordered the withdrawal from 66 international organizations, half of them connected to the United Nations. These include the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the body responsible for the yearly Conference of Parties (COP), and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

From 2005 to 2024, carbon emissions in the United States dropped 20%, a rare bit of good news from a country with the second-highest rate of emissions in the world. Last year, under Trump, US emissions made a dramatic U-turn, rising by 2.4%.

Trump has nothing but contempt for international law. He has done more than just denounce legal bodies like the International Criminal Court. He has actively sought to destroy the ICC with sanctions. And he has threatened even more sanctions if the ICC doesn’t rewrite its founding document to ensure that Trump and his cronies are never prosecuted for the war crimes that they have most definitely committed.

The violations of sovereignty, the withdrawal from international institutions, and the contempt for international law: These all form a different kind of war. The Trump administration has launched an offensive against the very edifice of the world order. He wants to get rid of the United Nations, reverse the decolonization process, and return the world to a time when only power determines the course of events.

This is the world of Stephen Miller, Trump’s hard-right adviser. “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world... that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Miller recently told CNN. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

This is, of course, nonsense. Power, as even authoritarian leaders learn, has its limits. Autocrats can’t change their societies by force alone. They are overthrown by peaceful protests. They are tried in court and sent to jail.

History is littered with the wreckage of empires that attempted to rule by force alone. That is the iron law since the beginning of time.

And it is just a matter of time before the Trump administration discovers that it too faces limits. The European Union is banding together to fend off any attempt on Greenland. The US courts are laying down limits on what the Trump administration can and cannot do, with even the conservative Supreme Court ruling recently that the administration cannot send the National Guard to Chicago against the wishes of the mayor and the governor.

And popular protests continue throughout the United States, most recently to protest the killing by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents of a young mother in Minneapolis.

The Trump administration shouldn’t be surprised when the world that it is trying to turn upside down unites against it. An upside-down pyramid is not stable. Eventually, it will collapse.

Climate change isn’t looming somewhere down the road. For millions of families, it’s already showing up as higher insurance bills, higher utility costs, flooded roads, closed schools, and budgets stretched past the breaking point. And for others, it’s far worse—lost homes, lasting health impacts, and lives cut short. The damage from the climate crisis isn’t a distant projection. The bill is real, and it’s already due.

The problem is who’s paying it.

Right now, American families and state governments are picking up the tab for climate disasters while the fossil fuel companies that knowingly caused the damage keep raking in record profits. Every storm that wipes out a neighborhood, every heatwave that overwhelms hospitals, every wildfire that shuts down a school adds another line item to public budgets, and another cost pushed onto taxpayers and our families.

That imbalance is why, from January 26 to 30, advocates, lawmakers, students, workers, and faith and community leaders across the country are coming together for a Make Polluters Pay Week of Action. It’s the opening push of the 2026 legislative session and a clear signal that polluter accountability is no longer a fringe idea, but a governing priority.

Big Oil accountability is coming. The only question is how much longer taxpayers will be left holding the bill.

The logic is simple: If you caused the harm, you should help pay for the repair.

This is how we already handle toxic waste, oil spills, and industrial contamination. We don’t send the cleanup bill to families who live nearby. We send it to the companies that made the mess. Climate superfund laws apply that same common-sense principle to the climate crisis, and voters understand it.

In fact, support is growing fast. Recent polling shows that 77% of voters now support making oil and gas companies pay their fair share for climate damages, including majorities of Republicans and Independents. Support has jumped more than 10 points in the past year as the real-world costs of climate damage become impossible to ignore.

In 2024, Vermont and New York became the first states in the nation to pass climate superfund laws, requiring fossil fuel companies to contribute billions toward disaster recovery and climate resilience. In 2025, nearly a dozen more states introduced similar legislation. In 2026, that momentum is only accelerating.

The Week of Action reflects that reality. Across the country, states will introduce new climate bills, hold lobby days and town halls, deliver petitions, publish op-eds, walk out of classrooms, and rally public support—all aimed at starting the year with one message: Taxpayers shouldn’t be the default insurer for fossil fuel pollution anymore.

This push is happening now because delay has a cost. Every year we fail to act, the damage compounds and the bill gets bigger. A recent study found that climate costs to the US economy likely topped $1 trillion in 2025. That’s money coming out of household budgets, local tax bases, and already stretched state services.

This is also happening as federal accountability collapses. Agencies meant to protect communities and prepare us for disasters, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Weather Service, are being gutted, with another 1,000 FEMA jobs reportedly on the chopping block just as disasters intensify. At the same time, President Donald Trump is cozying up to fossil fuel executives, helping them dodge accountability and fight efforts to make polluters pay.

Every dollar collected from polluters is a dollar that doesn’t come from taxpayers. Climate superfund funds can build flood protections, harden the grid, prevent wildfires, create lifesaving cooling centers, and keep hospitals and schools functioning during disasters. It also supports good jobs, since rebuilding roads, bridges, and energy systems requires skilled labor. For families, stronger grids mean fewer outages and repairs, and ending fossil fuel subsidies and loopholes can free up billions to lower utility costs, expand clean energy access, and invest in communities instead of corporate giveaways.

The fossil fuel industry wants this conversation to feel radical. It isn’t. What’s radical is a system where companies profit while the public pays, where disasters are treated as unavoidable acts of nature rather than the predictable result of decades of pollution.

Big Oil accountability is coming. The only question is how much longer taxpayers will be left holding the bill. The Make Polluters Pay Week of Action is about answering that question with action. Not someday. Not after the next disaster. Now.

Alex Pretti was a strong man. An ICU nurse at the VA, he showed up every day with courage and care, standing by veterans on the precipice of death. Brave, kind, generous, he had skills that could save lives and the presence to accompany people through the heaviest moments at the end of life. When not at work, he hiked the beautiful nature of Minnesota with a beaming smile. He was the kind of man every parent dreams of raising, the kind of neighbor who makes a community feel like home. He was a real man.

On Saturday, January 24th, when not on the job, Alex showed up to a protest to bear witness. Just weeks after Renee Nicole Good was murdered, and then smeared as a terrorist by the Trump administration despite video evidence of her peaceful protest, Alex knew that recording was essential. He understood what we all must: that witnessing is an act of patriotism, a constitutional duty to hold power accountable when they try to twist reality before our eyes. When he saw a woman accosted by thugs, he went to help her. He stood between her and the attackers, one hand in the air and the other holding a phone to record. He was pushed to the ground and shot ten times. He was murdered, executed publicly.

The thugs who pushed her down, who executed him in front of dozens of witnesses who recorded every second, they are not strong. They are cowards. The soulless man who sat on a toilet in a marble bathroom in the White House in the middle of the night spreading lies about Alex on social media is not strong. He is a coward. This is what cowardice looks like: destroying thousands of lives of public servants who maintain our quality of life, trampling on the Constitution repeatedly, throwing our global standing into uncertainty threatening war on allies, unabashedly brandishing Nazi ideology. These are the acts of the past year of Trump’s administration, not of strength, but of pathetic weakness. This backward, weak, unimaginative, soulless being is not a strongman. Trump is the weakest, most pathetic man this country has ever known.

Trump and any other leader who attacks communities that sustain our collective wellbeing are the weakest, most pathetic, spineless people in the world.

Stop Calling Cowards Strong

As we fumble for ways to understand the current global political moment, scholars and political analysts have guided our collective attention toward the "strongman" type of leadership. Putin, Orbán, Bolsonaro, Trump, and many others who follow ethics of domination and oppression are placed under this banner, this political framework. Given what we are seeing in the United States, I believe it is dangerous to keep using such a false descriptor of these dynamics of dehumanization. These men are not strong. Their violence is not power; it is the telltale marker of weakness. They resort to brutality because they possess no moral authority, no true courage, no capacity to lead through anything but fear.

Trump and any other leader who attacks communities that sustain our collective wellbeing are the weakest, most pathetic, spineless people in the world. Trying to understand what we are experiencing now through the language of "strongmen" is dangerous and inaccurate. We have to name reality with more intention. Men deserve better than this. People are raising boys into beautiful, strong men like Alex Pretti. In Trump, in Steven Miller, and the thugs who carry out their unconstitutional orders, we are seeing cowards who are so weak that they must destroy humanity because they cannot stand their own emptiness.

I Have Seen This Before, Many of Us Have

I think often about my childhood in Romania these days. My mom telling me about her beloved mentor who was disappeared because he held views that were dangerous to the dictator's fragile sense of self. I think about my dad who was tortured, whose body and spirit never recovered. I think about the pathetic leader who built monstrous palaces while his people starved, who paraded in fur coats while we scrounged for clothes from bins donated by German churches.

Ceaușescu turned neighbors against one another through a system of informants. Neighbors received special favors, maybe a bag of flour when no one else had any, to report any dissent in the neighborhood. A few people around Ceaușescu, the corrupt politicians, got richer and richer the more we were undernourished and the more our future was uncertain. They were untouchable. The Epstein files have made clear this too is a reality here: one system of justice for the powerful, another for the rest of us. Different rules. Different accountability. Different worlds.

Your neighbor who checks on the elderly woman next door every morning. Your co-worker who goes to immigration court to bear witness. The man at the grocery store who remembers everyone’s birthdays and makes them handmade cards. These are strong people.

My parents risked everything, my father's body and mind bore the scars of torture until his last breath, so that I could live in a place where I could speak freely, think freely, question power without fear. To see that precious dream of freedom, bought with their blood and sacrifice, now being crushed by what increasingly resembles the Securitate, Romania's secret police, is a betrayal beyond words. To live these things all over again, yet with more vivid brutality than I ever imagined, is unspeakably painful to describe. People are being disappeared. The pathetic, spineless monster is building his palaces while loving, generous neighbors are being murdered in the streets. ICE is recruiting people by offering bonuses, turning our neighbors into spineless thugs too, just as Ceaușescu's informants were recruited with bags of flour.

Ceaușescu was a spineless coward building his palace around him. My grandfather, who went into the fields every day and raised the chickens and pigs that kept me alive, he was strong, he was a strong man. My dad, who risked his life to escape authoritarianism because he believed that somewhere a place existed where I could speak my mind freely, he too was brave and strong. Your grandfather who worked double shifts so his children could go to college. Your neighbor who checks on the elderly woman next door every morning. Your co-worker who goes to immigration court to bear witness. The man at the grocery store who remembers everyone’s birthdays and makes them handmade cards. These are strong people. These are real men and women. This is what strength looks like.

What True Power Looks Like

Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist and philosopher, wrote that unless colonial structures are radically overturned, any decolonization that just swaps elites leaves intact a brittle, violent form of power built on the permanent dehumanization of the masses. This is what we see now: brittle, violent power terrified of true strength. Fanon understood that we cannot simply replace one set of elites with another, we must radically overturn the structures themselves. This is what we are called to do now: refuse to reinforce systems that reward spineless cowards with authority, and instead build the world Alex Pretti died protecting. A world where showing up for your neighbor is valued more than hoarding wealth. Where recording truth is patriotism. Where welcoming immigrants and refugees, people like my father, welcoming little boys like Liam Conejo Ramos, fleeing authoritarianism in search of freedom, strengthens rather than threatens our communities. Where offering sanctuary is recognized as the strength it is, not twisted into a crime. Where collective wellbeing matters more than individual domination. Trump and his thugs are terrified of this vision. They are terrified of Renee Good smiling instead of cowering. They are terrified of Alex Pretti walking toward thugs to make sure a woman is not brutalized by them. They are weak cowards.

Trump and his thugs, and other thugs like that anywhere in the world, are afraid of true power. They are afraid of our true power, our true strength. They are terrified of Alex Pretti, someone who embodied true strength, who was skilled, kind, and moral. Because true power exposes them for what they are: morally corrupt, spineless, empty, weak thugs.

Strongmen do not have power of over us. They are afraid of us. It is time for us as a collective to remember what true power is. We are strong. We, who care for each other, are strong. They are weak. They are pathetic. And they know it.

The strength we have, the strength we see in the community members who rush toward a 16-year old child who is abducted by ICE and thrown out of the van after being brutalized, the clergy who kneeled in protest at the airport, the strength we see embodied in Alex Pretti walking to protect a woman being brutalized by thugs, that strength is not rare, it is the fabric of our communities. It has always been here, quietly holding us together while cowards build palaces and spread lies. It is time we recognize this power for what it is: unstoppable, abundant, and ours. We are strong. We, who care for each other, are strong. This is real strength. And it is ours.

President Trump claims to be an economic nationalist. But the only real jobs program he has created has been ICE and the associated gulags he is constructing for undocumented migrants to be brutalized and deported. How does he square “America First” with outsourcing the jobs of concentration camp guards to foreign countries?

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More focus is needed on the downsides of the AI “revolution,” which is better understood as a speculative bubble (built in part through shaky circular financing deals between chip maker Nvidia, cloud provider Oracle, and model builder OpenAI, among others) that’s liable to burst. If and when that happens, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s preemptive lobbying for a taxpayer-funded bailout is likely to pay off, leaving the public on the hook. That would be outrageous, of course, considering how much direct and indirect financial support tech giants have already received from federal and state governments, before and throughout the ongoing artificial intelligence frenzy. On the other hand, if AI “succeeds”—destroying millions of jobs, pillaging communities, and despoiling ecosystems in the process—working people will have subsidized our own subjugation. Widespread opposition to planned data centers across the political spectrum suggests that the public understands this.

Here’s a tangible downside: The prices of many essential goods are already rising as a result of the anti-democratic rush to build hyperscale data centers and the growing use of AI programs in numerous sectors. In what follows, we explain how the proliferation of both AI software (i.e., seemingly immaterial computational tools) and hardware (i.e., the resource-intensive and highly polluting infrastructure underpinning those tools) is driving up the costs of necessities now and in the future.

Skyrocketing Electricity Bills

Energy-hungry AI systems require immense amounts of computing power. That’s why tech giants like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are investing billions of dollars to expedite the construction of massive, primarily gas-powered data centers across the United States. This AI-driven surge in electricity demand, combined with the Trump administration’s ongoing attacks on renewable energy supply and battery storage, is putting increased strain on the power grid. The result? Higher utility bills.

According to a Bloomberg analysis published in 2025, “Wholesale electricity costs as much as 267% more than it did five years ago in areas near data centers. That’s being passed on to customers.” The rapid development of data centers connected to PJM Interconnection—the largest power grid operator in the United States, serving 67 million customers throughout the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic—increased the cost of procuring electricity by $9.3 billion from June 2024 to June 2025, with expenses only expected to rise further.

If this trend continues and data centers become the majority-users of a utility, then utilities may demand even deeper sacrifices from everyday ratepayers to keep their most powerful customers happy.

Residential ratepayers are shouldering this burden unfairly. As the beneficiaries of state-granted monopolies, for-profit utilities are subject to state regulation of prices. Public utility commissioners are supposed to set rates that enable customers to receive affordable power and utilities to cover operating costs and make enough profit to attract investors to fund infrastructure expansions and upgrades. For years, however, increasingly captured commissioners have been approving rate hike requests that pad the pockets of utility executives and shareholders (to the tune of $50 billion per year in excess profit, according to the American Economic Liberties Project).

Now, there’s mounting evidence that state regulators are subsidizing Big Tech’s out-of-control power consumption by forcing customers to fund discounted rates for data centers. This is a boon for investor-owned utilities, which profit from greater energy use. For the rest of us, it makes it harder to scrape by every month. If this trend continues and data centers become the majority-users of a utility, then utilities may demand even deeper sacrifices from everyday ratepayers to keep their most powerful customers happy.

Automated Health Insurance Denials, Home Insurance Rate Hikes

Earlier this month, the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) launched the so-called Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction (WISeR) Model. This pilot program allows six companies in six states to use AI to determine whether traditional Medicare enrollees’ requested medical care should be covered.

Reporting on this AI-powered prior authorization program last year, the New York Times noted that “similar algorithms used by insurers have been the subject of several high-profile lawsuits, which have asserted that the technology allowed the companies to swiftly deny large batches of claims and cut patients off from care in rehabilitation facilities.” Firms tapped to manage the WISeR Model “would have a strong financial incentive to deny claims,” the newspaper observed. “Medicare plans to pay them a share of the savings generated from rejections.”

An early warning that CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz is imposing “AI death panels” aimed at preventing seniors from accessing needed healthcare is apt. It’s also worth stressing that Medicare Advantage and private insurance plans have already been using AI-powered prior authorization, with costly and deadly effects for ordinary people.

Property insurers, too, are increasingly relying on AI to project—with zero transparency and questionable accuracy—climate risks, which is contributing to coverage withdrawals and rate hikes in communities around the United States. According to a recent report from McKinsey & Company, the insurance industry’s growing use of AI has led to “a 10 to 15% increase in premium growth.” While industry profits and executive compensation are on the rise, homeowners and renters alike are being hurt by the declining availability and affordability of home insurance. A climate and insurance-driven foreclosure wave, which would starve municipal budgets and could trigger a broader economic crisis, is a real possibility.

Algorithmic Price Gouging

Two shoppers could walk into the same grocery store at the same time and purchase the same product—and yet be charged different prices. This was the conclusion of a recent experiment conducted by Groundwork Collaborative, Consumer Reports, and More Perfect Union. The study, which focused on online grocer Instacart, found that nearly three-quarters of items tested were offered to customers at multiple price points, with an average difference of 13% between the lowest and highest prices.

What the hell are we doing building ruinous housing for super-computers when we could—and should—be building healthy housing (and clean energy and mass transit) for people?

How is this possible? Unfortunately, this increasingly common practice of “surveillance pricing” is the logical outcome of allowing rent-seeking firms to transform our personal data into an asset that can be endlessly mined. AI is turbocharging this phenomenon, from RealPage’s rent-gouging software to Delta Air Line’s use of Fetcherr, an AI-fueled pricing technology.

Negative Environmental and Health Externalities

AI is already wreaking profound havoc on public and environmental health. The rare earth elements used in the microchips that power AI systems tend to be mined in ecologically harmful ways. Data center construction implies habitat destruction, and completed facilities produce significant amounts of toxic electronic waste, which typically contains mercury, lead, and other hazardous materials. Data centers consume tremendous amounts of water, sometimes dispossessing local residents of access in the process. Making matters worse, Big Tech’s quest for cheap electricity is leading it to build data centers in all kinds of places, including drought-stricken states like Arizona and Nevada, compounding preexisting water shortages.

Moreover, most data centers are being powered by planet-heating fossil fuels, especially methane gas. In addition, forecasted AI-related energy shortfalls are leading utilities to keep aging coal plants running and even to revive particularly dirty “peaker” plants, while the use of on-site diesel generators is also growing.

On top of the fact that fossil fuel-powered data centers spew heat-trapping gasses into the atmosphere, research has shown that AI degrades air quality in other ways. Specifically, across its full lifecycle—from chip manufacturing to data center operation—AI contributes to the emission of fine particulate matter or soot, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide. These pollutants are linked to numerous adverse health impacts, including lung cancer, asthma, heart attacks, cardiovascular disease, strokes, cognitive decline, and premature mortality. One study estimates that data centers are on track to account for at least 1,300 premature deaths and $20 billion in public health-related costs per year in the United States by 2030. These deleterious consequences are poised to hit already-disadvantaged populations the hardest. That includes the low-income, predominantly Black neighborhoods currently fighting back against Elon Musk’s xAI data centers in South Memphis.

Deferred Green Economic Development Means Climate-flation

What the hell are we doing building ruinous housing for super-computers when we could—and should—be building healthy housing (and clean energy and mass transit) for people? The opportunity costs of supporting Big Tech’s AI data center buildout are striking.

A new analysis from the Rhodium Group estimates that for the first time in two years, US greenhouse gas emissions increased in 2025. The 2.4% uptick in national GHG pollution was driven in large part by data centers and crypto mining. This regressive form of economic development is destabilizing the climate and leaving people less materially secure. It is also being pursued as a reactionary alternative to green economic populism.

It seems clear that a major reason why the ruling class is so heavily invested in AI’s triumph is because they dream of burying organized labor and worker demands once and for all.

Despite recent efforts to decouple climate and affordability, the two issues remain inextricably linked. There’s mounting evidence that climate inaction is exacerbating the cost-of-living crisis. The best way forward is to fight for policies that would simultaneously decarbonize and democratize our society, to confront climate chaos and grotesque inequality at the same time.

Failing to do so, as we are now amid AI-mania, will only lock-in more fossil fuel pollution, thus aggravating extreme weather and with it, supply chain disruptions and price shocks. Current and future generations will be forced to endure a more brutish and expensive world full of economic insecurity and uneven, but rampant, suffering.

Endgame: Wage Repression, Tyranny, and Unlimited Rent Seeking

Some AI-related costs have not yet been realized. But if Silicon Valley oligarchs succeed in empowering firms all across the economy to eliminate jobs (and deskill further pockets of the workforce), skyrocketing unemployment would empower bosses to suppress wages. It seems clear that a major reason why the ruling class is so heavily invested in AI’s triumph is because they dream of burying organized labor and worker demands once and for all. Meanwhile, the collision of declining pay and rising prices would push more and more people closer to the brink.

How are people supposed to enjoy the leisure time ostensibly provided by AI advancements if they can’t afford basic necessities? Is rapid access to information a net-positive no matter the quality of that information? Isn’t it more likely that society’s capacity for critical thinking will be further degraded? And if we deprive the next generation of literacy while immersing them in a poisoned information ecosystem, doesn’t that increase the likelihood that authoritarian demagogues will retain power?

That’s why billionaire techno-fascists are trying so hard to imprison us within their AI-dominated world. Whether by preempting regulation of AI inside existing borders or violently establishing new, regulation-free jurisdictions where they can impose their will, a tiny class of digital overlords and their political allies are seeking to end democracy so they can extract rents with no constraints. We can’t afford to let their dystopian vision become reality.

In 2022, my wife and I lost our first child. We named them June. They were deeply wanted and fiercely loved. In one fateful appointment, our entire worlds changed. We learned that June had a severe fetal bladder abnormality and was unable to produce amniotic fluid. Without it, their lungs would never develop. They would not survive.

We made the impossible decision to end the pregnancy—an act of compassion, love, and medical necessity.

At the time, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) had a total ban on abortion care and counseling.

No exceptions for rape. No exceptions for incest. Not even to save a veteran’s life.

Veterans and our families deserve futures built on compassion, justice, and love—not fear.

After our loss, the only way I felt I could keep breathing was to turn that grief into meaning. I shared our story with lawmakers to help reverse this dangerous policy so that veterans and their families could turn to the VA—no matter the circumstance or where they lived. That fall, the VA finally took steps to reverse the ban, signaling a long-overdue shift toward care, autonomy, and dignity.

But that progress was short-lived.

The VA just finalized a new abortion ban policy that, once again, excludes exceptions for rape or incest and offers only vague assurances that it will intervene if our lives are at risk. They initially implemented this enormous change in secret without telling veterans or their families.

In effect, it returns the VA to what was once the most extreme abortion ban in the country—an outright prohibition on care and counseling that applies to every VA facility nationwide, regardless of state law.

This isn’t just a rollback. It’s a deliberate erasure of rights that we fought for in the wake of deeply personal and collective loss.

And it is not happening in isolation. The same administration driving this ban is also working diligently to eliminate gender-affirming care, defund programs for minority and underrepresented veterans, and strip inclusive language and data collection from federal policy. The message is unmistakable: Some veterans count. Others don’t.

Veterans are not a monolith. We are a diverse community—LGBTQIA+, people of color, disabled, parents, caregivers, survivors, and yes, women too. Our community exists at every intersection of identity and experience, and our families serve alongside us. Our care cannot be conditional. Our humanity is not negotiable.

Policy is never just about one issue. It is intersectional—because our lives are intersectional.

Reproductive care cannot be separated from gender-affirming care, from disability access and mental health, from racial justice, or maternal health. Our needs don’t exist in silos, and neither do we. When one right is taken away, the loss reverberates across all the others.

I’ve seen what’s possible when we refuse to stay silent—how lived experience can reshape policy and expand care that has never existed before. And I know exactly what is at stake when care is denied. Pregnancy can change on a dime.

June’s life, though brief, transformed mine. Through their memory, I found purpose. I found a voice. And in their honor, I will continue working to ensure that no veteran or family ever has to face what we faced alone.

We should be building systems rooted in care, equity, and truth. We should be honoring the fullness of who veterans are, how we serve, and how we build our families. Instead, our fundamental rights are being stripped away—one policy memo at a time—and once again, we are being asked to fight for the right to make personal decisions about our health, our futures, and our families.

I will not allow June’s legacy to become another casualty of politics. Their life will be a call to care.

This moment demands more than endurance. It demands action.

The policies we pass—within the VA and beyond—shape the futures of veterans and the people who love us. Had my wife not been able to access critical care in her time of need—had we not been given the chance to make the most compassionate choice amid impossible circumstances—we might never have known the joy of raising our child today, a joy born from grief and shaped by love.

Veterans and our families deserve futures built on compassion, justice, and love—not fear.

Because in the end, we are all only human.

The Trump administration’s exercise in armed regime change in Venezuela should have come as no surprise. The US naval buildup in the Caribbean and the attacks on defenseless boats off the Venezuelan coast—based on unproven allegations that they contained drug traffickers—had been underway for more than three months. By the end of December 2025, in fact, such strikes on boats near Venezuela (and in the Eastern Pacific) had already killed 115 people.

And those attacks were just the beginning. The US has since intercepted oil tankers as far away as the North Atlantic Ocean; run a covert operation inside Venezuela; and earlier this month, launched multiple air strikes that killed at least 40 Venezuelans while capturing that country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife.

Both of them are now imprisoned in New York City and poised to face a criminal trial for narco-terrorism and cocaine importing conspiracies, plus assorted weapons charges. Even more strikingly, President Donald Trump recently told the New York Times that the US could run Venezuela “for years.” On how that would be done, he (of course!) didn’t offer a clue. Naturally, a Venezuelan government forged in the face of a possible US occupation would comply with the whims of the Trump administration—assuming that such a government, capable of stabilizing the country and earning the loyalty of the majority of its people, can even be pulled together.

Trump’s rush to war in Latin America is a phenomenon that, until recently, seemed long over. Its revival should raise multiple red flags, given the history of Washington’s failed efforts to install allied governments through regime change. (Can you spell Iraq?) In fact, given this country’s lack of success with such attempts since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it’s a good bet that regime change in Venezuela will not end well for any of the parties concerned, whether the Trump administration, the new leaders of Venezuela, or the people of our two countries.

Trump’s fixation on actually grabbing territory and his hyper-militarized interpretation of the 200-year-old Monroe (now, Donroe) Doctrine suggest that perhaps he wants to take America back to the 1850s.

In the meantime, Trump has already suggested that he might entertain the idea of launching military strikes on neighboring Colombia. After a White House phone call between that country’s president Gustavo Petro and him, however, Time Magazine speculated that, when it comes to “who’s next?,” it might not be Colombia but Cuba, Mexico, Greenland, or even Iran. What’s not yet clear is whether Trump and crew will use the US military, CIA-style covert action, economic warfare, or some combination of all of them in pursuit of their goals (whatever they might prove to be).

The one thing that should be clear by now is that pursuing such global regime-change campaigns would be sheer madness. Going that route would sow chaos and instability, while harming untold numbers of innocent civilians, all in pursuit of a futile quest for renewed US global supremacy.

When, long ago, President Trump first started using the term “Make America Great Again,” I assumed he was thinking of the 1950s, when a surge of post-World War II economic growth and government investment lifted the prospects of a select group of Americans (while pointedly excluding others). That period, of course, was when the efforts that produced the modern civil rights, women’s rights, and gay and trans rights movements were in their early stages. Prejudice was the norm then in most places where Americans lived, worked, or got an education, while McCarthyism cost untold numbers of people their jobs and livelihoods and had a chilling effect on the discussion or pursuit of progressive goals.

Such a return to the 1950s would have been bad enough. However, Trump’s fixation on actually grabbing territory and his hyper-militarized interpretation of the 200-year-old Monroe (now, Donroe) Doctrine suggest that perhaps he wants to take America back to the 1850s. If so, count on one thing: We’ll pay a high price for any such exercise in imperial nostalgia.

Intervention as the Norm: The History of US Aggression in Latin America

The Trump administration’s attempt to control Latin America and intimidate its leaders and citizens is, of course, nothing new. At the start of the 20th century, President Teddy Roosevelt announced his own “corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, which went well beyond the original pronouncement’s warning to European powers to avoid challenging Washington’s dominance of the Western Hemisphere. Roosevelt then stated that “chronic wrongdoing… may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.”

The Office of the Historian at the US State Department points out that, “[o]ver the long term, the [Roosevelt] corollary had little to do with relations between the Western Hemisphere and Europe, but it did serve as justification for US intervention in Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.”

In fact, there were dozens of US interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean in the wake of Roosevelt’s statement of his doctrine. Later in the century, there were US-aided coups in Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1964) and Chile (1973); invasions of Cuba (1961), the Dominican Republic (1983), and Grenada (1983); armed regime change in Panama (1989); the arming of the Contras in Nicaragua (1981) and death squads in El Salvador (1980 to 1992); and support for dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay in the 1970s and 1980s.

In all, according to historian John Coatsworth, the United States intervened in the Western Hemisphere to change governments 41 times from 1898 to 1994. Seventeen of those cases involved direct US military intervention.

In short, the Trump administration is now reprising the worst of past US policies toward Latin America, but as with all things Trumpian, he and his cohorts are moving at warp speed, and on several fronts simultaneously.

The Perils of Regime Change

Although Trump officials are no doubt celebrating their removal of Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela, the battle there is far from over. When the US drove Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces out of Kuwait in a six-week military campaign in 1991, there was a great deal of celebratory rhetoric about how “America is back” or even that the United States was the single most impressively dominant nation in the history of humanity. But as historian Andrew Bacevich has pointed out, the 1991 Gulf War was just the start of what became a long war in Iraq and the greater Middle East. In Iraq, the ejection of Hussein was followed by relentless bombing, devastating sanctions, and a 20-year war of occupation that ended disastrously.

Wishful thinking was rampant in the run-up to the Bush administration’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, with administration officials bragging that the war would be a “cake walk” and would cost “only” $50 to $100 billion. When all was said and done, however, that war would last 20 years at a cost of well over $1 trillion; hundreds of thousands of civilians would die; and hundreds of thousands of US military personnel would be killed, maimed, or left with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBI).

The Venezuelan debacle—which is surely what it will be considered once all is said and done—is but another sign that the Trump administration’s tough-guy rhetoric and bullying foreign and economic policies are, in fact, accelerating the decline of American global power.

The opportunity costs of America’s post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere have indeed been enormous. The Costs of War Project at Brown University estimates that the taxpayer obligations flowing from those conflicts exceeded $8 trillion. As the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies has noted, that $8 trillion would have been enough to decarbonize the entire US electrical grid, forgive all US student-loan debt, and triple the investment in green energy and related items initiated by the Biden administration under the Inflation Reduction Act (investments that have since been rolled back by the Trump administration).

Of course, that money is gone, but given the experience, you might think that this country’s leadership (such as it is) would go all in to avoid repeating such costly mistakes, this time in Latin America, by attempting to dominate and control the region through force or the threat of it. Consider it a guarantee that such a policy will never end well for the residents of the targeted nations. And count on this as well: It will also exact a high price on Americans in need of food, housing, education, a robust public health system, and a serious plan to address the ravages of climate change.

Why Venezuela? Oil, Ego, and the Quest for Dominance

The Trump administration’s original rationale for pursuing regime change in Venezuela was to stop the flow of drugs into the United States, a position that didn’t stand up to even the most casual scrutiny. After all, Venezuela isn’t faintly one of the more significant sources of drugs heading into this country and, in particular, it isn’t a supplier of fentanyl, the deadliest substance being imported.

Donald Trump has since stated repeatedly (as in a January 3 press conference), that the intervention he ordered was, in fact, about seizing Venezuela’s oil resources and developing them to the benefit of the US through the activities of American oil companies. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world,” he said, “go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”

Writing in The Nation, Michael Klare pointed out that upping Venezuela’s oil output would, in fact, be no simple matter. Trump’s comments, he suggested, were “imbued with nostalgia and fantasy” and “all this flies in the face of economic and geological reality, which stands in the way of any rapid increase in Venezuelan output and oil profits.” That country’s oil supplies are, in fact, mostly in the form of heavy crude, which is particularly difficult to extract, and its infrastructure for accessing such oil is decrepit, thanks to years of sanctions and neglect. As Klare points out, the London-based consultancy firm Energy Aspects has suggested that it would take “tens of billions of dollars over multiple years” to restore Venezuela’s oil production to the higher levels of years past.

Realism, however, has never been Donald Trump’s strong suit, and his dream that seizing Venezuela’s oil resources will be a piece of cake only reinforces that point. The same can be said for his assertion that the United States could rule Venezuela, perhaps for years, and that everything is bound to go smoothly. The disastrous consequences of the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, among other places, suggest otherwise.

Beyond oil, the intervention in Venezuela satisfies Trump’s personal will to power, advances Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s goal of weakening and perhaps overthrowing the government of Cuba (by denying it Venezuelan oil), and puts progressive governments in Latin America on notice that if they don’t bend the knee to US economic and political demands, they may be next.

Interventionism on Steroids: A Recipe for American Decline

Since the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and his wife in Venezuela, administration rhetoric about possible attacks on Colombia and the seizing of Greenland has only accelerated. At another moment in history, perhaps such claims could have been dismissed as the idle bluster of an aging oligarch. But the Trump administration has already acted on too many of its most outlandish policy proposals—with its attempt to seize and control Venezuela high on the list—for us to treat the president’s aggressive statements as idle threats.

The Venezuelan debacle—which is surely what it will be considered once all is said and done—is but another sign that the Trump administration’s tough-guy rhetoric and bullying foreign and economic policies are, in fact, accelerating the decline of American global power. The question is, given the administration’s costly and dangerous military-first foreign policy, how much damage will this country do to people here and abroad on the way down?

Were Washington to put down its sword and invest in the real foundations of national strength—a healthy, well-educated, unified population—it could play a constructive role in the world, while delivering a better quality of life and a more responsive government to the American public.

It doesn’t have to be this way, of course. There could be a shift from this country’s current addiction to war as a central feature of its interactions with other nations to a policy of restraint that would recognize that the days when the United States could presume to run the world are over. In truth, US dominance was always overrated, given fiascos like the interventions in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, where the US could not impose its will on much smaller nations with far fewer resources and far less sophisticated weaponry. Those experiences should have taught policymakers of both parties to proceed with caution, but the learning curve has, at best, been slow, painful, and erratic—and in the era of Donald Trump, seemingly nonexistent.

Warmed-over appeals to restore American greatness through the barrel of a gun are, of course, dangerously misguided, as our recent history has so amply demonstrated. It is long past time for us to demand better stewardship from our elected and appointed leaders.

Were Washington to put down its sword and invest in the real foundations of national strength—a healthy, well-educated, unified population—it could play a constructive role in the world, while delivering a better quality of life and a more responsive government to the American public. This would not mean eliminating the ability to defend the country by force if need be, but it would mean acknowledging that the need to do so should be rare, and that a more cooperative approach to overseas engagement, grounded in smart diplomacy, is the best defense of all. That, in turn, would mean a smaller military (and a far more modest military budget) that could free up resources to address urgent needs, from dealing with climate change and preventing new pandemics to reducing poverty and inequality.

At this moment in our history, the vision of a less militarized America may seem like a distant dream, but striving for it is the only way out of our current predicament.

Will a jury in Middle America’s flyover country care enough about the genocide in Gaza to acquit four protesters arrested for nonviolent civil resistance? Will it matter once they’ve seen “Bringing Gaza Home?”

That’s the question eight jurors will decide in Toledo a few weeks from now when they hear from four activists arrested October 3 for blocking the entrance to the local office of US Sen. John Husted (R-Ohio). They, along with the local peace movement, had run out of patience with Husted because of his continuing support for Israel’s genocide.

The final straw was when Husted refused to even make a statement supporting our friend and fellow Toledoan, Phil Tottenham, a former Marine, who was abducted in international waters by Israel during last fall’s Sumud Flotilla. That simply demanded the strongest nonviolent response we could make. We simply could not sit in comfort here in Toledo and watch this obscenity and simply hold a sign on a street corner to protest. We had to do more.

The other three people arrested were Al Compaan, professor emeritus of physics, University of Toledo; Nancy Larson, retired counselor-social worker; and Steve Masternak, retired industrial engineer. Two others were arrested but have since pled guilty and paid fines.

Our hope at trial is that our fellow citizens and neighbors will be as horrified by what Gazans have suffered as we are and decide it’s time to stand and be counted.

Information we will show the jury is included in the extensively documented Veterans For Peace report, Bringing Gaza Home. The report is compiled from information published by international news outlets such as the Guardian, Al Jazeera and Anadolu Agency, reporting on the effects of two years of Israel’s US-funded genocide in Palestine.

What makes it local to Toledo, county seat of Lucas County, Ohio, is comparing the destruction in Gaza to what Lucas County would be like after similar bombardment. The methodology simply compares Gaza’s area and population to Lucas County’s and calculates the comparable numbers.

We will hold up large photos and show videos of human casualties and physical destruction in Gaza, and describe to jurors what the effect would be in our own neighborhoods. We will tell the jury, “If this sounds utterly impossible or like a horror movie script, it’s neither. But for the grace of God this could be us instead of Gaza.”

• 27,292 county residents would be dead, including 350 medical personnel, 528 people seeking food aid from official sites, and 61 reporters and media workers;
• 93 people would have starved to death;
• 737 would be imprisoned without charges or trial;
• 450,170 tons of bombs would have been dropped on our county in two years—four times what was dropped on Dresden, Hamburg, London, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki combined in World War II;
• Over 34,300 people would be wounded; over half women and children;
• 324,520 people (75% of the county population) would be infected with disease from polluted water and open sewers;
• 384,500 people (90% of the population) would have endured severe lack of food;
• Over 90% of residential buildings would be destroyed and 92% of all schools would require complete reconstruction;
• 264,000 people (62% of the population) would have lost legal documentation for property ownership; and
• Over 340,000 unexploded bombs would lie buried in Lucas County.

Our hope at trial is that our fellow citizens and neighbors will be as horrified by what Gazans have suffered as we are and decide it’s time to stand and be counted, that blocking the entrance to a senator’s office is a minimal response to a genocide.

AI is being diffused throughout society under chatbots, models, and agents which are explicitly reactionary and create communicative and physical walls to defend the status quo.

Capitalism has elected AI as the next tool to distribute and dismantle labor, create a new power structure in the world, and repress social and political movements. Unchecked, it will bring us right up to a collapse brought on by war and climate chaos.

Forget about the Terminator stories of Artificial General Intelligence and Artificial Superintelligence. These are closer to sci-fi than to reality. We don’t need to speculate about things that don’t exist in the AI realm. What we do need to look at are the things that already exist and are being deployed massively.

The main objective of AI is the automation of historical automation itself. AI holds an irresistible promise for capitalist elites: to be able to automatically direct most of the instructions that guide human activity, reducing the power of social classes other than the owners of the algorithms. Complete economic and social planning for the rich. In particular, they want to reduce the power that the working class has exercised in the past, the power to push toward the future and gain the political, social, and economic transformations that reduce or eliminate inequality and injustice.

Data centers today are nightmare factories.

A key and complementary objective of AI is to create an overwhelming monopoly over knowledge, codified via Large Language Models, Computer Vision, Convolutional Neural Networks, and other Machine “Learning” models. This monopoly is being designed to utterly transform social relations and install a reactionary hegemony that widely surpasses neoliberal capitalism and feeds a far-right dystopia.

The third essential objective has to do with the control of violence and political repression. For that effect, AI provides different tools to be used in declared and now mostly-undeclared states of war. During the Gaza genocide, human targets were chosen with AI, its models were used to determine the biggest impacts for sequences of targets in order to achieve maximum infrastructure and human suffering consequences. Obviously, AI is used to maximize efficiency in all war logistics, calculating payloads, schedules, and material distribution. In Ukraine, most of the war is being conducted with drones, many of them autonomous and with self-selecting target capabilities powered by AI. Automated killing machines that don’t question orders or targets are not only available, but already deployed in different war fronts. On the other hand, automated political repression and persecution in the streets and protests is growing, though it is currently at the data gathering and training phase. In the USA, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is deploying different apps developed by companies like Palantir to maximize social disruption and to capture the most vulnerable people in the country.

There is huge pressure to prevent any meaningful regulation of AI, in particular for AI used by police and the military. Surveillance with facial (FRT) and body recognition is used outdoors to map out movements and participants in protests and actions. Mapping of movement connections and alliances can be done via online pattern recognition, as well as out in the streets. Automatic protest repression combined with purposeful miscommunication and disinformation might make the usual protests simply nonviable.

And of course, AI can is being used for hacking by private companies and states. Considering the hackable systems now in place throughout society and the economy—banking systems, social security, electric and transport systems, aviation and navigation systems, pension management, surveillance apparatus, healthcare systems and, of course, all the internet and the data in public and private servers—massively disruptive events at large or small scale are inevitable. Many political and social movements will be targeted. This can mean accounts erased, financial assets blockaded, and growing personal political repression via the suppression of communication capacities. This can also happen at a much bigger scale, targeting cities, countries or entire regions.

For the most important investments and political efforts, AI is being introduced as a labor replacement tool, a cultural hegemony monopoly creator, a military and surveillance weapon. Most of this is being done with people actively engaging and inviting the models into their everyday life (even more than it already was). The resistance to large data center projects is important and inspiring, but the overwhelming threat of AI goes well beyond its emissions, water consumption, and land occupation (although they plan on multiplying by many factors the current numbers, especially in Europe). Data centers today are nightmare factories.

So far, AI hasn’t been able to deliver on a key aspect: successfully automated processes that allow for the mass firing of people, substituted by effective algorithms. This is clear: 95% of all investment made by companies in AI has led to no profit, which is making capitalists nervous. But it hasn’t in any meaningful way stopped its spread.

When we say AI, we mean Machine Learning, Robotics, and Expert Systems. Currently AI is mostly a process of recognition, classification, and very high probability calculation, based on massive amounts of data with a good human interface. The interface is the most important trick for the general public. The public debate surrounding this issue is deeply anti-historical and anti-materialist, almost entirely it is white noise.

AI is not replicating or reproducing human intelligence. It is trying to encode human activities into repeatable procedures that can create reproducible algorithms. As it is not imitating our biological intelligence, it is trying to imitate what it can more or less “comprehend” about the previously referred algorithms—it is copying labor and social relations, their mechanisms and their predictable outcomes. Like other abstractions that rule our lives, such as money, algorithms produce real outcomes. AI ushers an irresistible promise for capitalist elites: to be able to automatically direct most of the instructions that guide human activity, reducing the power of social relations, in particular the power of the working class to impose political, social, and economic transformations that reduce inequality and injustice.

AI’s neural networks don’t mimic the human brain at all, but instead automate the “labor of perception,” classifying and interpreting written, numeric, and visual data and establishing associations. This creates a synthesis of knowledge, of the collective form of knowledge that comes from social cooperation. As explained before, another of its objectives has been to establish a monopoly over knowledge, scrapped from every website, database, online encyclopedia, and bite it is fed. It is then no wonder that Elon Musk and the far-right are going after Wikipedia.

These are some of the reasons why attempting to hard-code ethical rules or constraints into these models will not work, as they will not change the underlying political and economic functions of the data it is trained under and the algorithms generated and fabricated. Of course we understand that language itself is an algorithm, all the data as well and, of course, the internet as well. But with AI, we’re talking about a new level of control. The fundamental abstract purposes of AI as it exists now are the extension of quantification, control, and exploitation. The Labor Theory of Automation posits that AI is the result of a set of technological advancements that have abstracted automation to the point where it can automate itself. As we now have the technical ability to make such machines and capitalism has the economic incentive to massively deploy them, they want to use it to reorganize the division of labor even further in their favor. It is the apex of automation: Automation of Automation.

Facing such seemingly insurmountable odds, social and ruptural movements cannot but ask what to do about AI. There are basically two options: Drop out of the grid or acquire tech capabilities that allow us to resist the onslaught of these algorithms of collapse.

As a guest on the 2019 podcast “Post-doom with Michael Dowd,” terrestrial ecologist Tom Wessels agrees humanity is entering a “bottleneck,” a condition that can afflict any species that ceases to live in relationship and reciprocity. Ballooning populations get stuck trying to claim space in an un-expandable hole, and many die.

This is what’s going through my head as I idle in an impossibly long single line of traffic on the road into Mount Kisco, New York. My kids are in the back of the car, asking for snacks. It is three days since Renee Good’s murder, 10 days since the end of the deadliest month in the deadliest year for people in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody.

“No snacks,” I tell the kids, scanning for parking. “You should eat your meals. Then I wouldn’t have to throw away food and bring a buffet everywhere we go.”

Pedestrians pass our car with protest signs as car exhaust blows through the vents. I feel an unexpected pang of tenderness for our quiet kitchen table, its leftover bowls of cereal and uneaten peanut-butter toasts. I already know I’ll give in, as all mothers do, when they can, when their children want to eat.

This land is no one’s land. This land was not made for you and me. This land is part of us, as we are part of it.

“But we compost the food,” my 7-year-old says, “so it’s actually good for the Earth when we throw it away.”

Our eyes meet in the rearview mirror as I prepare a response, but then the car behind me beeps and I see a distant light has turned green.

We crawl past the demonstration and I honk in support. Upbeat `80s pop blares from a speaker, backdrop to the protesters’ screams, whistles, and bells. My three-year-old, already a musician, moves his head as close as his car seat will allow, trying to deconstruct the music and noises.

“Go again, mommy,” he says. But at that moment I find a miraculous spot, just down the street from the main event, open perhaps because of the one-hour limit on the meter. I claim the space anyway; lug the kids, coats, and backpack out of the car; lock the doors; fill the meter; and grab hands for the walk toward the protest.

A few steps into the journey, a woman asks if she can photograph my kids. I smile and say, "No thank you," covering their faces with my hands. Photos become a constant request over the next hour. Many people ask, but others just lift and click. My son picks up a sign in the grass and I read it to him: No Fascist USA. More phones point in our direction.

I survey the crowd and think of something Monique Cullars-Doty, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Minnesota, said on the news the other day. “America has never addressed its love affair with white supremacy,” she said, connecting the ICE murder of Renee Good to the state-sanctioned violence that has assaulted Black and brown communities for centuries.

It is one thing to agree with this assessment—that white supremacy made colonialism possible, slavery imperative, resource hoarding commendable, ecological collapse acceptable, and ICE inevitable. It is quite another to admit our complicity, to connect our daily transgressions—a need for the latest gadget, an idling tailpipe, a thoughtless unkindness—to the generations of violence that made all this possible.

I squat in the wet grass and dig through the backpack, dipping my fingers deeper until I hear crinkling plastic. The kids hold out their hands expectantly and whisper, “Yes!” when their favorite granola bars emerge from the bag.

The music stops abruptly, and a woman with a kind face speaks over a microphone. She is Woody Guthrie’s granddaughter, simply by association evoking a simpler time, a sepia time, a time of acoustic guitar and faith in good intentions.

Thinking of her grandfather makes me think of mine—a Jewish Romanian immigrant’s son who stood with Black neighbors in 1950s Milwaukee when other Jewish neighbors, newly minted “white” by America’s slippery standards, wanted to prevent more Black families from moving in. My grandfather now floats above the scene, a beloved figure whose own people’s history was weaponized as justification for more land grabs and violence.

Guthrie’s granddaughter begins to sing:

This land is your land; This land is my land

And my blue-eyed son who loves music, the child I’ve always somehow felt the need to remind people is technically Jewish despite his blonde hair and last name, drops his snack, steps forward into the circle, and opens his mouth to sing along. A hundred phones rise in unison to capture the image.

I resist the urge to cover his face, crouch next to him, and try to join in. But the words catch in my throat.

My land. Your land.

As far as I can tell, not a single Indigenous Lenape person, the first peoples who walked this place now called Mt. Kisco, is present.

This land was made for you and me.

Behind the song circle is a vast cement parking lot, and before it a busy road. The bear, wild turkey, wolves, birds, and aquatic species once so abundant as to be considered eternal, are nowhere to be seen.

From California to the New York island

Places unnamable and unknowable, claimed in this song that once defined a movement, but never created a path or vision for us all.

And yet, here is my son singing, somber, understanding that what he’s participating in is important. And there is my daughter, running around behind the crowd, feeling the joy of community together, the freedom of cool air on her skin. The wrongness and the beauty of it all seem too hard to untangle, and I wonder if this is one way the bottleneck shows up—as the end of the road for a fundamental myth.

In the 2019 interview, Wessels addresses this. He speaks with curiosity about what might come next. Communities for much of human history were “…actually emotionally quite rich,” he says. “They had vibrant relationships within their clan community, they had a vibrant relationship with Mother Earth, they had stories and myths that made that linkage even stronger… so life could have been physically hard, but might have been experientially rich.”

Is there a way for us to treat our past myths with tenderness, while still recognizing where they went horribly wrong? Can we compost rather than discard them, and maintain the parts that serve? Can we teach our children new myths to carry them to a richer, more vibrant, gentle, reciprocal, and inclusive world?

This land is no one’s land. This land was not made for you and me. This land is part of us, as we are part of it.

The song ends, and worries of a parking ticket push a new world’s mythologies from my mind. I grab my son’s hand and scan for my daughter, whose silhouette I spot immediately. She’s reaching for the branches of an ancient fir tree by the road, drawn in by its shade and pungent scent, as so many have been before.

As Trump’s violent dictatorial grip over America worsens, his violations of our Constitution, federal laws, and international treaties become more brazen. Only the organized people can stop this assault on our democracy by firing him through impeachment, the power exclusively accorded to Congress by our Founders. This is one of the few things that Trump cannot control. According to a PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute) poll, “A majority of Americans (56%) agree that ‘President Trump is a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy,’ up from 52% in March 2025.” Trump’s recent actions will only further increase this number.

In earlier columns, I discussed the potential power of 1) The Contented Classes; 2) The small minority of progressive billionaires; and 3) The huge potential of the four ex-presidents – George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, who detest Trump but are mostly silent, and are not organizing their tens of millions of voters angry about Dictator Donald’s attack on the rule of law.

A fourth formidable constituency, if organized, is retired military officers who have their own reasons for dumping Trump. Start with the ex-generals whom Trump named as Secretary of Defense (James Mattis), John Kelly, as U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security and White House Chief of Staff, and Mark Milley, who headed the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

A fifth constituency is the legal profession, and their bar associations at the national, state, and local levels. There are over one million Attorneys in the U.S. who, when they are admitted to the state bars to practice law, are designated as “officers of the court.” This status makes them quasi-official persons with a monopoly to represent clients in courts of law.

Bruce Fein and others have called on licensed attorneys to become “our first responders” to violations of the rule of law, especially by government entities.

So, what have they done? A tiny minority are bravely on the legal ramparts representing clients victimized by Trump and winning many cases at the federal district court level, only to be often stalled by the circuit courts of appeal and the U.S. Supreme Court.

As far as the bar associations are concerned, during Trump’s first term of serial lawless actions (he said in 2019, “With Article II, I can do whatever I want as president”), they were largely silent and AWOL. Bruce Fein and I sent two letters to all 50 state bar associations calling for them to stand up for the rule of law over Trump’s regime. Not one responded to our letters. (See Letter to Bar Associations, February 14, 2025).

We informed these bar associations and the American Bar Association (ABA) of the courageous “white papers” issued in 2005-2006 by three task forces brought together under then ABA President Michael Greco. They charged the Bush/Cheney regime with three impeachable offenses. The task forces had liberal and conservative lawyers working together on these statements. (See the ABA White Papers).

Greco’s successor to the one-year presidency of the ABA told him she was not going to extend the ABA’s watchdog project on the lawless presidency. This abdication has continued to this day, with one exception. Both the ABA and many state/local bar associations took a collective position in March 2025 against Trump’s punishing law firms for representing disfavored clients. They called his “lawlessness” an attempt to “remake the legal profession into something that rewards those who agree with the government and punishes those who do not.”

In June, the ABA punctuated this charge with a federal lawsuit against the Trump regime. (Pending).

Going beyond protection “of the guild,” the New York City Bar Association released a report in late 2025 that called out the Trump Administration’s “ongoing abuse of presidential power and a grave breach of the public trust.”

Other bar associations signed a statement accusing the Trump administration of “treating [the law] as merely advisory, narrowly instrumental, mercilessly enforceable, or utterly irrelevant.”

It is not surprising that these actions by the bar associations received very little media coverage. They were not backed up with any further actions, testimonies, convocations, or alliances with grassroots groups to show the media that they mean business. There was no call for impeachment or even congressional hearings to expose these known, ongoing serial violations of the law, the Constitution, and treaties. (See Letter to President Trump – 22 Impeachable Offenses, April 30, 2025. New version to be released later.)

Reporters and others understand the difference between statements for the record and action on the ramparts. Words not followed by the exercise of these bar associations’ manifold status and power are largely ignored, especially when they are in legalese, and lacking conclusory judgments about Trump’s unfitness for office. Incredibly, Trump declared, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Not the Constitution or the laws of the land.

Trump is a shameless, arrogant bloviator who is self-indicting daily. Critics who want to deter his slanderous and absurd outbursts should use tough, accurate language to describe his vicious actions and autocratic control of the federal government. Words like “dictator,” “serial law violator,” “extortionist,” “inciter of violence,” “persecutor of innocents for purposes of vengeance or bigotry,” “racist,” “abuser of women,” “chronic egotistical liar about serious matters of state,” “shredder of safety and health protections” and constantly “delusional,” and so forth.

New leaders from the legal community (including prominent law professors) need to immediately come forth and jolt this largely AWOL profession into action, with all its unused powers for justice and the rule of law behind our constitutional Republic. Lawyers are called members of a learned profession. They operate within ethical standards. Why aren’t they seriously working to counter Trump’s assault on the administration of justice in America?

John Maynard Keynes famously wrote in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919): “There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of Society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”

The United States mastered this art of destruction by weaponizing the dollar and using economic sanctions and financial policies to cause the currencies of targeted countries to collapse. On January 19, we published “The US–Israel Hybrid War Against Iran,” describing how the United States and Israel are waging hybrid wars on Venezuela and Iran through a coordinated strategy of economic sanctions, financial coercion, cyber operations, political subversion, and information warfare. This hybrid war has been designed to break the currencies of Iran and Venezuela in order to provoke internal unrest and ultimately regime change.

On January 20, just one day after our article, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent publicly confirmed, without qualification, apology, or ambiguity, that our description is indeed the official US policy.

It is high time that the world’s nations face up to America’s rogue economic behavior... This lawlessness is illegal, reckless, harmful, destabilizing, and ultimately ineffective in achieving America’s own goals, much less global objectives.

In an interview at Davos, Secretary Bessent explained in detail how US Treasury sanctions were deliberately designed to drive Iran’s currency to collapse, cripple its banking system, and drive Iran’s population into the streets. This is the “maximum pressure” campaign to deny Iran access to international finance, trade, and payment systems. Bessent explained:

President Trump ordered Treasury and our OFAC division, Office of Foreign Asset Control, to put maximum pressure on Iran. And it’s worked, because in December, their economy collapsed. We saw a major bank go under; the central bank has started to print money. There is dollar shortage. They are not able to get imports, and this is why the people took to the street.

This is the explicit causal chain whereby US sanctions caused the currency to collapse and the banking system to fail. This monetary instability led to import shortages and economic suffering, causing the unrest. Bessent concluded by characterizing the US’ actions as “economic statecraft,” and Iran’s economic collapse as a “positive” development:

So, this is economic statecraft, no shots fired, and things are moving in a very positive way here.

What Secretary Bessent describes is of course not “economic statecraft” in a traditional sense. It is war conducted by economic means, all designed to produce an economic crisis and social unrest leading to a fall of the government. This is proudly hailed as “economic statecraft.”

The human suffering caused by outright war and crushing economic sanctions is not so different as one might think. Economic collapse produces shortages of food, medicine, and fuel, while also destroying savings, pensions, wages, and public services. Deliberate economic collapse drives people into poverty, malnutrition, and premature death, just as outright war does.

This pattern of suffering as the result of US sanctions is well documented. A landmark study in The Lancet by Francisco Rodríguez and colleagues shows that sanctions are significantly associated with sharp increases in mortality, with the strongest effects found for unilateral, economic, and US sanctions, and an overall death toll comparable to that of armed conflict.

Economic warfare of this kind violates the foundational principles of international law and the UN Charter. Unilateral sanctions imposed outside the authority of the UN Security Council, especially when designed to cause civilian hardship, are illegal. Hybrid warfare does not evade international law by avoiding bombing (though the US and Israel have also illegally bombed Iran, of course.) The illegality of US “economic statecraft” applies not only to Iran and Venezuela, but to dozens more countries being harmed by US sanctions.

While the US sanctions work in the short run to create misery, their incessant use is rapidly encouraging other economies to decouple from the US financial stranglehold.

Europe has perhaps begun to learn that being complicit in America’s economic crimes is no salvation, since Trump’s government is now turning on Europe in the same way, albeit with tariffs rather than sanctions. Trump has threatened Europe with tariffs for not turning over Greenland to the US, though he rescinded that threat at least temporarily. When Trump “invited” France to join Trump’s Board of Peace, he threatened to impose a 200% tariff on French wine if France declined the invitation. And on and on.

The United States can wage this kind of comprehensive economic warfare because the dollar is the key currency in the global financial system. If third countries don’t comply with US sanctions on Iran and Venezuela, the US threatens to impose sanctions on the banks of those third countries, specifically to cut them out of dollar-based settlements (known as the SWIFT system). In this way, the US enforces its sanctions on countries that otherwise would be happy to continue trading with the countries that the US is trying to drive to economic collapse.

While the US sanctions work in the short run to create misery, their incessant use is rapidly encouraging other economies to decouple from the US financial stranglehold. The BRICS nations, and many others, are expanding the conduct of international trade in their own currencies, thereby building alternatives to the use of the US dollar and thus avoiding these sanctions. The US ability to impose its financial and trade sanctions on other countries will decline soon, probably precipitously in the coming years.

It is high time that the world’s nations face up to America’s rogue economic behavior. The US has been waging economic warfare with increasing intensity, all the while calling it “economic statecraft.” This lawlessness is illegal, reckless, harmful, destabilizing, and ultimately ineffective in achieving America’s own goals, much less global objectives. Europe has been looking the other way until now. Perhaps now that Europe too is under threat, it will wake up and join the rest of the world to put a stop to America’s brazen and illegal behavior.

Affordability will remain a top issue in 2026, continuing to draw political attention and likely defining this year’s midterm election races. Among the principal contributors to the cost-of-living crisis are power bills. For millions, the cost of keeping the lights, heating, and cooling on feels like “a second rent,” a problem that the explosive growth in the development and use of AI and associated data center capacity appears poised to aggravate.

The nation’s capital is no exception. A quarter of residents in the District of Columbia are unable to pay their power bill and in debt to the city’s private electricity company Pepco, which prioritizes short-term profits over affordable service. In 2024, the utility sent disconnection notices to 187,000 customers, threatening to shut off their electricity if they did not pay their arrears in full and forcing them to choose between, for instance, keeping their home safe and comfortable and food fresh or making their car payment.

Thankfully, we have a proven alternative–public ownership of power–that has worked for decades in thousands of towns and cities and is being actively pursued in the District and other communities across the country.

Alongside rent, home prices, dining, and entertainment, our electric bills have shot upwards. The only difference? Our power rates are comprehensively regulated. To protect against the monopoly power of Pepco, we have the Public Service Commission (PSC): a three-person board that reviews Pepco’s costs when the company wants to raise rates. Officially, the PSC acts as our watchdog to protect consumers from being billed thousands of dollars each month and to ensure the lights stay on in an environmentally sustainable way. In reality, it’s a depressingly familiar story of corporate capture of government.

We Power DC, a local campaign for energy democracy, has a simple demand: replacing Pepco with an electric utility that belongs to the people of the District.

In just the past few years, Pepco has jacked up rates while slow rolling climate action and energy efficiency. According to a 2023 PSC report, Pepco obtained only 16% of its power supply from renewable energy sources, while it thwarted the adoption of rooftop solar across the city. In response to this bad behavior, the PSC rewarded Pepco: approving a $147.2 million dollar rate increase in 2021 and a $123 million dollar rate hike in 2023. These dollars flow out of the District and into the coffers of Pepco and its holding company owner, Exelon of Chicago.

Despite a wide-ranging outcry from the community, industry experts, and even landlords, the PSC in November 2024 largely approved Pepco’s latest proposed rate increase. Commissioner Richard Beverly wrote a blistering dissent in which he said the other two commissioners were essentially approving the case “because Pepco said so.”

The effects of the rate increase were immediate and expected. Following a cold winter, the additional 5% bump on bills slammed DC residents, with some customers seeing their bills double or triple. Public anger forced Pepco to suspend shutoffs for the first few months of 2025—but both bill collection and the rate increase stayed in place.

Meanwhile, Exelon flaunted the rate hike in DC as a major success, all the while an impending recession looms across the city and the country at large. Even in bleak times, the pursuit of profits by Pepco (and utilities like it) is relentless.

Unfortunately, the District is not an outlier: Regulators across the country rubber-stamp requested rate increases, despite the lack of economic logic. State regulatory agencies liberally reward utility shareholders even though they assume little risk by parking their money in a safe and stable industry.

Fortunately, there is an alternative for all of us. In towns and cities across the country, utilities are not controlled by shareholders—instead, they are governed by the communities that they serve and run on a not-for-profit basis. Public power is a proven model that altogether supplies electricity to about 55 million Americans in around 2,000 towns and cities across red and blue states, including Los Angeles, Nashville, and Seattle. On average, publicly owned utilities provide electricity that is cheaper and more reliable than their shareholder-controlled counterparts. Public power is not foreign or experimental but firmly established in the United States.

Affordable power is not the only argument in favor of public ownership. The urgency of the climate crisis means that we cannot rely solely on cajoling private utilities to remake our power grid. Despite the declining costs and rapid growth of wind and solar over the past 15 years, decarbonization of the American power sector is not happening quickly enough.

Furthermore, for the next few years, the responsibility of cleaning up the power sector will largely fall to state and local governments. Congress’ gutting of the Inflation Reduction Act in the One Big Beautiful Bill means that federal tax credits for wind and solar will soon dry up. Instead of trying to bribe the private sector to invest, we should take control of the climate transition through direct public investment. New York did exactly this in 2023 when it enacted the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA) and empowered the state-owned New York Power Authority to build large-scale renewable projects and lead a just transition to a clean electric sector.

Inspired by the successful movement behind BPRA and determined to end the unbearable burden of power bills for hundreds of thousands of residents, We Power DC, a local campaign for energy democracy, has a simple demand: replacing Pepco with an electric utility that belongs to the people of the District. A utility governed by us could provide reliable service at lower rates; provide high-quality union jobs; and be a leader, not a laggard, in the fight against climate change. On top of its grassroots organizing, We Power published a report describing in detail how DC would benefit from a publicly owned utility, and how we can get there. While the road to public power can be long, the report outlines key intermediate steps that DC should pursue, including commissioning a study on municipalization of Pepco, taking control of grid planning, and building and operating community solar projects.

We Power is accompanied by fights for public power in places as far flung as Ann Arbor, Michigan; Clearwater, Florida; and Tucson. Last month, a financial feasibility study found that power customers in New York’s Hudson Valley would save money right away by converting their private utility to a locally controlled public power authority. At a moment in which climate action and our political institutions are under full-frontal assault at the national level, We Power is one of many fights to build democratic and sustainable utilities.

Peace ecology considerations make it clear that a long-neglected aspect of armament and military activities is the massive environmental destruction caused worldwide by the military, especially during and after wars (Trautvetter 2021, Scheffran 2022, Moegling 2025). But even in its normal day-to-day operations and military exercises, the military is the largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases. In addition, the environmental destruction and emissions caused by the production of weapons must be taken into account. Emissions from the reconstruction of destroyed cities must also be considered.

The concept of peace ecology has high analytical value and normative appeal and should be used in the future as an important subfield of peace studies and research. Peace ecology addresses peace between people and societies, as well as peace between humans and their ecological context, and in particular the connection between these two perspectives. The point here is that the damaged planetary ecology can only recover if people and societies see themselves as an integral part of nature and live in peace with one another. Only through peaceful coexistence can the energy and necessary measures be generated to curb or reverse the environmental destruction that is already occurring.

Military Domination of Nature

The poisoning and destruction of the environment, with serious consequences for the biosphere, i.e., for the earth, air, water, humans, animals, and plants, is only now gradually coming to public attention on the fringes of the current protests by the environmental and peace movements. However, Norwegian peace researcher Johan Galtung already addressed this aspect in 2004 from a peace-ecological perspective:

One thing is the damage done to the ecosystem, another is the reinforcement of the general cultural code of domination over nature, which is also part of the rape syndrome. Countless millions of people are watching not only how people are being killed and wounded, but also how nature is being destroyed and going up in flames.

Wars not only kill and injure people and destroy infrastructure, they also destroy the planet's ecology in various ways. Wars are an extreme expression of the separation of ruling powers and warring states and groups from their natural environment. What humans do to nature—and thus to the conditions necessary for all life on this planet—is of little interest to the ruling circles that wage wars and attack other states.

The fact that they are destroying the conditions for the survival of future generations is of no concern to imperialist states and governments. And there is no difference between the US and Russia in this regard. Imperialist warfare and the ecological destruction it causes are, in an extreme way, a crime of generational selfishness.

And Vice Versa: If the Climate Collapses, so Does Peace

Peace ecology, as a newer subdiscipline of peace studies and research, makes it clear that wars are not only the cause of climate damage, but that the climate crisis that is already occurring is in turn a further cause of military conflicts and the destruction of political systems, especially in the poorer regions of the world, according to Michael T. Klare (2015), professor of peace and global security at Hampshire College in Massachusetts"

The strongest and richest states, especially those in more temperate climate zones, are likely to cope better with these stresses. In contrast, the number of failed states is likely to increase dramatically, leading to violent conflicts and outright wars over the remaining food sources, agriculturally usable land, and habitable areas. Large parts of the planet could thus find themselves in situations similar to those we see today in Libya, Syria, and Yemen. Some people will stay and fight for their survival; others will migrate and almost certainly encounter much more violent forms of the hostility that immigrants and refugees already face in their destination countries today. This would inevitably lead to a global epidemic of civil wars and other violent conflicts over resources.

In addition, those states that are at war with each other—but also those societies that feel threatened by this—will then use the resources necessary to combat the climate crisis to finance warfare and weapons systems. In particular, the huge sums of money within the European Union, but also in Germany, that will be spent in the future on special programs for the procurement of weapons systems will be lacking in a sensible climate policy—not to mention the enormous arms investments of the US and Russia and their unwillingness to combat the climate crisis.

Some Figures on Environmental Destruction Caused by the Military

The environment is destroyed by wars, but also by normal military operations in peacetime.

A study by Stuart Parkinson (Scientists for Global Responsibility) not only took into account direct carbon dioxide emissions from transport and exercises, but also emissions from weapons production, infrastructure construction, and supply chains. Parkinson calculated 340 million tons of CO2 equivalents for 2017 for the US military, by far the largest in the world, and this figure is unlikely to have decreased. For the global situation, Parkinson calculated that 5.5% of worldwide CO2 emissions are attributable to the military of all nations. This does not include wartime emissions. It can therefore be assumed that the percentage of global CO2 emissions caused by the military is significantly higher.

A study by de Klerk et al (2023) found that during one year of war in Ukraine, both sides of the conflict emitted approximately as much CO2 as Belgium did in total during the same year. This amounted to 119 million tons of CO2 equivalents.

Stuart Parkinson and Linsey Cottrell (2022) summarize their study on climate damage caused by the military and wars as follows:

If the world's armed forces were a country, they would have the fourth largest national carbon footprint in the world—larger than Russia's. This underscores the urgent need to take concerted action to reliably measure military emissions and reduce the associated carbon footprint—especially as these emissions are likely to increase as a result of the war in Ukraine.

Olena Melnyk and Sera Koulabdara (2024) estimate that approximately one-third of Ukrainian soil has been contaminated by toxic substances such as lead, cadmium, arsenic, and mercury as a result of the war. Soil and its fertile layer took thousands of years to form and have now been poisoned by the war within a few years, rendering it unusable for agriculture.

The war in Ukraine is leaving behind a devastated environment, for which the Russian Federation would have to pay billions of euros in reparations, although ultimately only the superficial damage could be repaired. The profound impact on human health due to inhaled emissions, drinking contaminated water, and exposure to radiation cannot be compensated for with money.

Hungarian climate researcher Bálint Rosz (2025) summarizes the CO2 emissions caused by the war in Ukraine in the first two years of the Ukraine war up to February 2024 and compares this with the annual emissions of 90 million vehicles with combustion engines.

Israel's campaign of destruction against the Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, as a disproportionate response to the brutal attack by Hamas, is also causing considerable environmental destruction, in addition to the appalling suffering of the Palestinians. For example, Neimark et al. (2024) estimated that the CO2 emissions from the necessary reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, destroyed by the Israeli military, would be so high that they would exceed the emissions of 130 countries and be comparable to the emissions of New Zealand.

These are just a few examples of military-induced ecological destruction. This anthropocentric madness could be illustrated with numerous other examples (Moegling 2025).

The Common Interest of the Peace and Environmental Movements

Global military activities can be both a cause and a consequence of environmental destruction.

The environmental and peace movements therefore have a substantial common ground in their understanding of peace ecology: The demand for an end to environmental destruction by the military and wars, combined with the demand for internationally coordinated disarmament, should be addressed by both the environmental and peace movements as central expectations of politics.

Furthermore, the analyses and research findings of peace ecology could help both the environmental and peace movements to take targeted action against planetary destruction based on facts.

Who Pays the Ecological Costs?

In this context, the question of financing the remediation of environmental damage caused by the military must also be addressed. In addition to the warring parties responsible, the producers in the arms industry should also be called upon to contribute. It is particularly unacceptable for the arms industry that the (considerable) profits are privatized while the costs are socialized and passed on to the state and taxpayers. Such externalization of costs and internalization of profits in the arms industry, which is typical of capitalist conditions, is no longer acceptable. It is completely incomprehensible why, for example, the manufacturers of landmines should not also pay for their removal and for compensation claims by the victims.

Above all, the exclusion of the military as a climate polluter from the Kyoto Protocol and the attempt to leave this non-binding in the Paris Agreements, particularly under pressure from the US at the time, further highlights the international dimension of the problem. The United Nations in particular is called upon to include environmental issues related to military activities and war missions more bindingly in international climate agreements. This should be easier for them if corresponding international civil society pressure were to be built up via interested governments and internationally coordinated NGO initiatives, e.g., via the Fridays for Future movement, Indigenous NGOs, ICAN, IPPNW, Greenpeace, and the traditional Easter March movement or other activities of the peace movement.

Peace ecology also makes it clear that the more peaceful societies are internally and externally, the more they can work to restore the destroyed ecological order. This is the common interest of the peace and environmental movements.