Politics has become strangely empty. We sign petitions with a click, make five-dollar donations with a tap, and mistake engagement for participation.

Capitol Hill Citizen believes that democracy requires something more substantial than that. It requires attention, presence, and involvement. It requires something tangible.

That is why we print a newspaper.

In the absence of tangibility, we are each reduced to data, data that corporations use to manipulate us, predict us, and sell us back to ourselves. In a world where corporations are treated as people under the law, Capitol Hill Citizen calls upon its readers to do something that a corporation cannot do: hold a newspaper. Better yet, do democracy.

Democracy requires action. That means showing up, which is exactly what our journalists do as they report from the frontlines of the institutions that shape our lives. And it is what our readers do when they carry that reporting back into their communities. Action means feeling the paper, engaging with your fellow human beings, and speaking to people face to face.

Human engagement is the first thing the machine strips away from us.

Doing things with your hands, with that which distinguishes you from the machine, is a revolutionary act. We are living, breathing human beings with emotions and feelings, sights and smells. To hold a newspaper is a small reminder that we still inhabit bodies, communities, and a democracy that exists somewhere beyond the screen.

We strive for a world in which we are informed with the paper in our hands—a world in which we run with that paper to our elected representatives and demand, “What the hell are you doing? Why aren’t you addressing this? It’s on page 14. Look at it.”

To read Capitol Hill Citizen is to refuse to disappear into the churn of algorithm-driven news cycles and superficial political opportunism. We put Capitol Hill Citizen on every congressmember’s chair. And every congressmember does the same thing: they move it. But at least they move it.

This is not merely Golden Age thinking. We do not want things to go back to how they used to be. We want to take back something that has been stolen from us: the tangible, the embodied, the uniquely human. We want to read print.

This article first was first published in the Capitol Hill Citizen, an independent antiwar print newspaper for citizens done with the corporate duopoly and the internet addictions that keep the citizenry depressed, dejected, distracted and defeated. It appears at Common Dreams with permission.

The statements seem as belligerent as Pete Hegseth on a bad hair day.

“We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” says Jonathan Cowan.

Cowan is president of Third Way, described by The New York Times as a “leading centrist Democratic group.” Cowan’s Third Way is preparing a $15 million war chest to “discredit democratic socialism.”

Pointing to Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in the Michigan Senate primary last week, Cowan warns that “it is deeply troubling to see radical, far-left candidates winning in places that are potential presidential swing states.”

Well, I find it deeply troubling that faux centrist groups are declaring war on progressives in the pages of The New York Times, without the Times revealing who they really are.

If you bother to look at the funding sources of Third Way — those that have been made public, that is (Third Way is structured as a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization that’s not legally required to publicly disclose its donors) — you’ll find a Star Wars cantina of billionaire megadonors, Fortune 500 CEOs, corporate dark money bundlers, and giant corporations.

Odd that The New York Times chooses to describe Third Way as a “leading Democratic centrist group” without revealing that it’s simply a Trojan Horse for corporate America.

Third Way senior vice president Matt Bennett has even conceded that “the majority” of Third Way’s donor support comes from the group’s board of trustees, most of whom are from the finance sector. (That’s the same Matt Bennett, by the way, who helped stage the infamous “Dukakis in a tank” photo-op that helped sink Dukakis’s 1988 presidential campaign.)

Here’s Third Way’s Board of Trustees (the most recent list available):

• Jonathan Vogelstein, chairman of New Providence Asset Management and senior advisor to private equity firm Warburg Pincus.
• David Heller, formerly global head of equity trading for Goldman Sachs.
• Bernard Schwartz (chairman emeritus), chairman and CEO of BLS Investments.
• David Horvitz, chairman of the board and CEO of SouthOcean Capital Partners, LLC and SouthOcean Investment Partners, LLC.
• David Coulter, managing director and senior advisor at Warburg Pincus, focusing on the firm’s financial services practice, and former vice chair of JPMorganChase.
• William Daley, vice chairman of Bank of New York Mellon, former vice chairman of JPMorganChase, former board member of pharmaceutical companies Abbott Labs and Merck.
• John Dyson, chairman of Millbrook Capital Management, Inc. (MCM), a private investment firm that manages a manufacturing company, a vineyard and wine group, and a hedge fund.
• Michael Edwards, deputy CIO of investment adviser Weiss Multi-Strategy Advisors.
• Andrew Feldstein, CEO and Co-CIO of BlueMountain Capital Management, board member of PNC Financial Services Group, former managing director of JPMorganChase.
• Brian Frank, founder and managing partner of Declaration Partners LP, an investment firm seeded by the founder of a large private equity firm.
• David Greenwald, chairman of finance law firm Fried Frank, former international general counsel and a deputy general counsel of Goldman Sachs.
• Derek Kaufman, former head of global fixed income at Citadel and a member of the firm’s Portfolio Committee, former managing director at JPMorganChase.
• Derek Kirkland, managing director and co-head of the Global Financial Institutions Group at Morgan Stanley’s Financial Institutions Group in Investment Banking.
• Doug Lawrence, CEO of DPL Green Investment and also managing principal and co-founder of 5 Stone Green Capital, formerly a managing director at JPMorganChase.
• Joseph Zimlich, CEO of private family financial manager the Bohemian Group, board member of First Western Trust Bank.
• Mark Spilker, founding member of GPS Investment Partners LLC, chairman of Chiron Investment Management LLC, former co-head of Goldman Sachs’s Investment Management Division, former president of Apollo Global Management, former member of Google’s Investment Advisory Committee.
• Barbara Manfrey Vogelstein, former venture capitalist, former partner at Warburg Pincus and Apax Partners & Co. Ventures.
• William Reeves, co-founder of BlueCrest Capital Management, former managing director at JPMorganChase.

Oh, and Third Way’s honorary co-chairs have included West Virginia’s former Sen. Joe Manchin and Arizona’s former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. Enough said about its governing structure.

In 2020, Third Way claimed that Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All plan would add more than $13 trillion to the federal deficit, although most other analyses — including one by the Koch-funded Mercatus Center — found that Sanders’s plan would save trillions while providing healthcare to millions of uninsured Americans.

Well, of course Third Way attacked Bernie’s plan. Among Third Way’s donors are pharmaceutical giant Amgen, pharmacy benefit manager CVS Health (which acquired health insurance giant Aetna in late 2018), and health products and drug company Baxter International.

Other corporate donors to Third Way are or have been members of the GOP-aligned American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate bill mill that links lobbyists with state lawmakers. Amgen, Baxter Healthcare, CVS Caremark, DuPont, and trade groups the Consumer Technology Association and NCTA - The Internet and Television Association are members.

Third Way donors have also given money to the Republican Attorneys General Association, which helps elect Republicans who fight federal environmental and other regulations. Among them, Entergy, Facebook, Google, and Reynolds American, according to tax records.

Christopher Leonard, author of Kochland, revealed that Koch Industries secretly funded a report by Third Way intended to promote the Republican free trade agenda to Democrats.

After the Democrats’ 2024 election losses, Third Way argued that the party should reduce its dependence on small-dollar donors. In a five-page memo of “takeaways” from the election, Third Way asserted that small-dollar donors’ preferences “may not align with the broader electorate.”

The memo stopped short of naming alternative funding sources, but the implication was clear: Less grassroots support means more reliance on big checks from super PACs and wealthy donors, which is exactly what Third Way prefers.

The memo also included calls to curb “far-left influence,” adopt a “pro-capitalist” stance, and stop “demonizing wealth and corporations.”

***

So, please, disregard whatever you may hear from Third Way or any other so-called “leading Democratic centrist group.”

And pay no attention to headlines about “Democratic centrists preparing for war” against a “rising Left.”

Instead, focus on what’s really happening.

Voters want people in power who are going to fight for them, and not for the super-wealthy or big corporations and Wall Street.

This is especially true now — when the bottom 90 percent of Americans are struggling to pay the bills, a record portion of the nation’s wealth is in the hands of the richest one-tenth of one percent, big corporations and Wall Street have never been as powerful, Washington has been taken over by legalized bribery and corruption, and there’s no “center” between democracy and neofascism.

Live 12 Noon Monday, Streaming Anytime:

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas analyze the Middle East conflict and Trump’s attempts to extract the U.S. from his war with Dr. Seyed Mohammad Marandi is an Iranian-American academic, professor of English literature and Orientalism at the University of Tehran, and a prominent political analyst.

Son of physician and former Iranian Health Minister Alireza Marandi, he spent his early years in the US before moving to Iran at age 13 after the 1979 revolution. As a teenager he volunteered in the Iran-Iraq War (serving with Basij/IRGC forces) and survived chemical attacks. He earned degrees from the University of Tehran and a PhD from the University of Birmingham (thesis on Lord Byron, critics, and Orientalism).

Formerly head of North American Studies at Tehran University and an adviser to Iran’s nuclear negotiating team, Marandi frequently appears on international media (BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, etc.) analyzing Middle East geopolitics, Western narratives, and Iran-related issues.

LIVE ON RUMBLE: https://rumble.com/c/DeProgramShow
https://x.com/tedrall
https://x.com/JamarlThomas
#tedrall #jamarlthomas #news #politics

The post Iran War: Deal or No Deal? | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

You may not have heard about this latest tax from Trump. That could be because he’s not going through Congress to get it. Also, this scam could get buried in the middle of his many other grifting schemes. Trump is starting a new special subscription service to his social media platform, Truth Social, where big investors will pay $100,000 a month for advance access to Trump posts that can move markets.

This means that the next time Trump posts that he will blow Iran off the map and sends oil prices soaring, the people who paid Trump’s fee will have the opportunity to buy oil futures before the jump. The same story applies on the way down, as when he posts that a deal with Iran’s leaders is imminent.

And the inside information goes well beyond oil prices. He may announce a big military contract with Lockheed or one of his sons’ companies, sending stock prices soaring. Or he could announce a big DEI investigation of Disney or some other Hollywood entertainment company, causing their stock to plummet.

There are an infinite number of ways that Trump Truth Social announcements can move markets. This subscription service allows rich investors around the country to get in on the action.

If it’s not clear how Trump’s scheme amounts to a tax on your 401(k), think more carefully. If Trump’s clients get the jump on a big rise in oil prices, that means that they get the money, not you. This is true even if, like the vast majority of small investors, you are not actively managing your funds.

The person who is managing whatever fund(s) you hold will pay the higher price for oil or stock or anything else the funds might buy because Trump’s accomplices got their first. The same applies on the way down. The fund will get less money because the Trump gang already sold the stock before your fund manager had the chance to do so.

At this point, we can’t know how much money is involved because we don’t know how many big investors are prepared to sign up for what is blatantly an insider trading scheme. But we can do some speculation.

First, we need to calculate how much money an investor would expect to make from a service where they are paying $1.2 million a year. Since this scheme would likely lead to civil and possibly criminal charges if the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or Justice Department ever gets taken over by honest people, it seems a very big payoff would be required.

Any person paying Trump for insider information would need to expect substantial legal bills, and also the possibility of being forced to leave the country or face prison time. (Ask Martha Stewart.) Let’s say the payoff has to be at least 20 to 1, which would mean they would need to earn $24 million a year for their Trump Truth Social subscription to make sense.

Then we need to speculate on how many people are prepared to sign up for Trump’s racket. We know Wall Street is a cesspool, but this level of open corruption is probably too sleazy even for most of the big traders. Still, there could be a 1,000 Trump-loving sewer dwellers who don’t mind being open about their thefts.

In that case, the Trump insiders would be siphoning off $24 billion a year from other investors in the market. That is not huge in the context of a $7.5 trillion budget, but it is larger than many things we have big fights over.

For example, the AIDS program for Africa, which saved tens of millions of lives, and Elon Musk eagerly fed into the wood chopper, cost $6 billion a year. That’s roughly a fourth of Trump’s 401(k) tax. The cost of extending the subsidies in the ACA exchanges, which Trump and the Republicans ended, would have been a bit higher at $27 billion a year.

So, 401(k) holders and other small investors are paying a considerable chunk of money through this “tax” to Trump and his enrolled insiders. As I said, this tax is not going to Congress for approval, but we can assume that all the Republicans in Congress approve of it. If not, Trump would be impeached for such a blatantly illegal scheme, but we know the Republican motto: “If Trump Does It, It’s Good.”

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

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

Today we discuss:

• The civil war in the Democratic Party moves to Wisconsin tomorrow. State Rep. Francesca Hong is the front-runner to become the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, fueled by a populist campaign tapping into voters’ cost of living concerns. The DNC corporatist establishment prefers David Crowley, the Milwaukee County Executive backed by outgoing Gov. Tony Evers.

• Israel rejects Trump’s 15-point plan to disarm Hamas in Gaza. Iran insists that the U.S. meet its demands before the Strait of Hormuz reopens. And Turkish leaders insist that a new trilateral defense pact with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan is not directed at Iran.

• Former President Joseph Biden’s prostate cancer has spread to other parts of his body, leaving him in pain, his son Hunter says.

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

https://x.com/tedrall

https://x.com/JamarlThomas

#tedrall #jamarlthomas #news #politics

The post Centrist Dems Struggle to Stop Progressive Francesca Hong | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The upset victory of progressive Dr. Abdul El-Sayed in the Democratic primary for Michigan’s Senate seat has put the Democratic civil war in sharp relief. Are moderates more electable? If so, who cares—if they won’t do anything once they get into office?

The post The Centrist’s Lament appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The Trump administration marked the 250th anniversary of US independence with a series of statements in support of American empire.

Despite the fact that President Donald Trump campaigned against endless war and the White House issued a National Security Strategy that rejected “global domination,” the Trump administration celebrated the nation’s 250th anniversary by glorifying empire as one of the country’s highest achievements. Administration officials praised moments in US history when US leaders embraced empire, such as when Thomas Jefferson and John Adams spoke in favor of an “empire of liberty” and Theodore Roosevelt acted to take Panama.

At a time when many people in the country were reflecting on the ideals of liberty and equality that Jefferson had emphasized in the Declaration of Independence, the Trump administration glorified the country’s imperial history, creating a rationale for Empire First.

“We just tamed the wilderness and conquered the frontier and built the empire,” Trump said in an address from the National Mall on the Fourth of July. “It’s called the empire of liberty.”

Imperial Apologia

In recent decades, several thought leaders have been making the case for American empire. Bucking the norm of empire denial, which holds that the United States is not an empire, they have characterized the United States as an empire and called on the United States to play an imperial role in the world.

Advocates of empire gained ground during the years before and after 9/11, when they produced an outpouring of work that brought discussion of empire into the mainstream of US political discourse. Max Boot built momentum in articles such as “The Case for American Empire” and “American imperialism? No Need to Run Away From Label.” In a major feat of imperial apologia, Niall Ferguson constructed a lengthy defense of American empire in his book Colossus.

“Let me offer you the following straightforward conclusion,” Ferguson said in 2003. “The United States is an empire. It has long been an empire. It should be an empire.”

Although the country’s imperial apologists grew quiet as the Bush administration’s military operations turned into unpopular forever wars, the Trump administration is now bringing imperial rhetoric back into the mainstream of US political discourse.

Strategists and diplomats also spoke in favor of empire, although they did so largely in unofficial roles. Before joining the Bush administration as its first director of policy planning, Richard Haass advocated for Imperial America. Prior to becoming ambassador to NATO in the Obama administration, Ivo Daalder insisted that the United States is an empire.

Perhaps the closest a high-level official came to calling the United States an empire occurred in 2004, when a senior adviser to President George W. Bush told The New York Times that “we’re an empire now.” Various observers have speculated that the adviser was Karl Rove, one of the president’s closest aides, but Rove was careful not to openly advocate for empire.

In public, the Bush administration accepted the norm of empire denial. Again and again, Bush denied that the United States is an empire.

“We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire,” Bush said in his State of the Union address in 2004. “Our aim is a democratic peace, a peace founded upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman.”

The Latest Imperial Turn

Although the country’s imperial apologists grew quiet as the Bush administration’s military operations turned into unpopular forever wars, the Trump administration is now bringing imperial rhetoric back into the mainstream of US political discourse. Having spent much of its initial time in office calling for the annexation of other lands and countries, it is now openly talking about empire, something previous administrations avoided.

A major turning point came during the country’s celebrations of its 250th anniversary. Rather than simply delivering platitudes in praise of freedom and democracy, as many US leaders did, the Trump administration added an extra dimension by openly glorifying empire.

During his visit to the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in early July, Trump repeatedly commended the country’s imperial history. He praised Roosevelt for his role in seizing colonies from Spain during the War of 1898.

When the country’s founders envisioned the United States as an empire of liberty, they were thinking of white US settlers moving into new territories, displacing Indigenous people, taking over their lands, and creating new states for entry into the United States.

“We got them all,” Trump said, citing Guam and Puerto Rico, both of which remain US colonies today. He also cited Cuba, a country which he wants to take for the United States. “After many, many decades, it’s coming our way,” he said.

In addition, Trump hailed Roosevelt for taking action to seize Panama, which had been part of Colombia. The acquisition of the Panama Canal Zone, Trump indicated, may have been the former president’s greatest achievement.

Roosevelt made the United States into “one of the greatest empires,” Trump said, making the point in both a speech and statement posted on the White House’s website.

After returning to Washington, Trump then gave a major speech in which he openly celebrated American empire. Speaking from the National Mall on the Fourth of July, Trump praised the conquest of the continent and declared that the United States is “the empire of liberty.”

Although many commentators dismissed the president’s remarks, with Rolling Stone calling them “bizarre,” he was not alone in bragging about empire. War Department official Elbridge Colby also delivered remarks in which he boasted that the United States is an empire.

“We are already, as our Founders put it, an empire of liberty unto ourselves,” Colby told a conference of defense ministers on July 8th. “I say this with pride, of course, not arrogance.”

With his remarks, Colby made an effort to reframe some of the president’s commentary. Providing context for the concept of an empire of liberty, Colby connected it to the country’s origins, when founders such as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had used the phrase.

In addition, Colby attempted to disassociate American empire from imperialism. Whereas Trump had glorified American conquest and expansion, Colby insisted that “we do not need imperial possessions or dependencies.”

The American empire has nearly always featured imperial possession and territories, however, from its earliest history to the present day. By invoking the concept of an empire of liberty, both Trump and Colby appealed to an imperial idea that featured conquest and expansion at its very core.

When the country’s founders envisioned the United States as an empire of liberty, they were thinking of white US settlers moving into new territories, displacing Indigenous people, taking over their lands, and creating new states for entry into the United States. The founders may have claimed that expansion would provide liberty for white US settlers, but they also knew that it would mean dispossession and extirpation for Indigenous people.

“If ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi,” Jefferson wrote. “In war they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.”

A Basis for Empire First

Apologia for American empire may not have been a main theme of most people’s celebrations on the Fourth of July, but the Trump administration presented its own vision. Rather than sticking to the liberal ideals of the Declaration of Independence, including its powerful symbolism of opposition to empire, the Trump administration lauded the United States for being an imperial power.

The Trump administration’s actions marked a significant shift in modern US politics. Whereas previous administrations let pundits and strategists do the dirty work of advocating for empire, the Trump administration is presenting its own arguments.

The administration’s empire talk is also promoting imperial values. With the president flouting international law and threatening countries with war crimes, the administration is cultivating an imperial culture. US military forces are taking pride in conducting extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific.

“The United States military is killing people and bragging about it,” Senator Tim Kaine (D-Va.) observed last month.

Congressional leaders have refrained from condemning American empire, but they may not be able to ignore the issue much longer now that the Trump administration is glorifying empire as an ideal to be praised and celebrated rather than avoided and condemned.

Indeed, the Trump administration is providing its own apologia for American empire, creating a basis for Empire First, with the president playing the leading role.

I initially wrote this piece in 2024 during the student uprisings that took place around the United States. The content was focused on Gaza and the people who made up the movement for Palestine in the belly of the beast. I've rewritten some of it and replaced Gaza with Cuba. The arguments needed no editing at all.

In March, a delegation traveled to Cuba to bring medical aid to Cubans who were suffering under the fuel blockade imposed on them by the United States of America. In recent months, people and organizations who took part, including my own organization, have been targeted by the Trump administration via investigations, subpoenas, and threatening reports such as Marco Rubio's 100-page report "The Capital of 21st Century Communism." In this report, people who bring aid to Cuba or merely speak out against the unilateral policy of starvation that the US implements upon Cuba are accused of being foreign agents and linked to terrorism. People in the comment section of our videos echo the smears because if the accusation is coming from someone powerful like Marco Rubio, it must be true.

I’ve seen them suggest that CODEPINK and other organizers are acting on behalf of someone other than ourselves and perhaps paid to do so. And Rubio has even gone on record saying that the people he is targeting might even be "unpaid" agents of Cuba, which just sounds like he might be going after people for simply having their own opinions that are different from his.

Cuba has dealt with rolling blackouts, fuel, food, and medicine shortages as well as a looming threat of US invasion or attacks as threatened by the Trump administration. People are not getting the medicine they need or the nutrition, which can and will lead to a slow genocide in Cuba if the US starvation policy stays intact. That is what people are so against: the deliberate slow starvation of 11 million human beings, just 90 miles away from our own border. This recent escalation comes after 60 years of aggressive US policy toward Cuba that has punished its people for pursuing an economic and political system that strays from the US model of capitalist exploitation. Cuba, once existing as a playground for the wealthy elite of the US, is now a representation that not only can a small country overthrow US-backed puppets like Fulgencio Batista, but also pursue socialism.

How do we, in the greatest interest of preventing future wars, stop reproducing this accusation so much that it becomes the dominant narrative about anti-war activists?

The accusations of being foreign agents or affiliated with terrorist groups aren’t new or innovative accusations levied against anti-war activists. This narrative has been used since there were wars and people against them. So there are a few questions to be asked: Is it so un-American for regular people (not policymakers) to care about the disastrous loss of human life? Who is levying these accusations that some malign foreign entity pays (or doesn't pay) Americans who care about death and destruction to do so? And lastly, how do we, in the greatest interest of preventing future wars, stop reproducing this accusation so much that it becomes the dominant narrative about anti-war activists?

Is It So Un-American to Care About the Loss of Human Life?

There have been massive resistance movements to every single war, and whether politicians like it or not, many of the people who have participated have been Americans. If it’s un-American to disagree with our government, then we might as well pack it all up and call it a day on this whole democracy schtick. The accusation of being foreign agents or terrorist sympathizers denies the basic trajectory of social life at this present moment. In the United States, our neighbors are truly from all over the world, and humans are social animals. If we are, enjoyably, living our lives, then we will meet our neighbors, we will become their friends, and we will care deeply for them. Friends introduce each other to other friends, and we learn to care for people who live in places we have never been. Some forces seek to squash that diversity and others use it merely symbolically without accepting the fact that it might challenge who our country does or does not bomb. But both forces use the “foreign agent” accusation to destroy the lives of activists and squash movements into the curb until they have no teeth anymore. It has happened over and over again.

If we move ahead with the idea that it is not inherently un-American to care about massacres or blockades, what we are left with is that the accusation is a tool to get everyone to shut the hell up about what the pigs in power are doing to our families and friends far, far away from here. Or in some cases, right here at home when some of the most powerful people in the Trump administration launch First Amendment chilling investigations into regular people to attempt to stop them from talking about the massacres our country facilitates.

If the peace movement was such a well-funded foreign apparatus, we would never have a war ever again. We would never have blockades and embargoes that starve people to death. The war industry is far better funded than those of us in opposition to it.

So, I don’t think it’s inherently un-American to care about suffering. It is just an American expectation to get threatened by the State Department for giving a fuck. And the inverse is true: it’s also quintessentially American to remain apathetic to the massacres and not utter a word about them and be awarded some temporary comfort. For example, the quiet may have no subpoena in the mail this week or next. If you fall into the latter category, congratulations on your unthreatening inboxes, but I have some bad news for you: One day our country might do something that will anger you. Or, god forbid, your children become adults who decide to care. Then you or your children will become vulnerable to the same accusation and subsequent treatment, including repression, arrest, and murder (like we've seen in the cases of Alex Pretti and Renée Good). Unless we stop reproducing this narrative about protesters at this very critical moment, disagreeing with the government will continue to get you investigated, thrown in jail, or your life ruined by red scare tactics the US government continues to rinse and repeat.

Who Is Levying These Accusations That Some Malign Foreign Entity Pays Americans Who Care About Death and Destruction to Do So?

The short answer is the American elite. The politicians and rich have a vested interest in keeping us at war and attempting to drive communist countries like Cuba into the gutter. The US is the largest weapons dealer in the world, and the companies that make the weapons are the biggest donors to many of our politicians. Politicians are bought and sold by the war profiteers, but also by private equity that sees investment opportunities in Cuba. The ruling class has done a great job of making war a profitable industry for themselves. So they built up militarized domestic surveillance to protect the war industry from dissent. If the accusation of being foreign agents scared people into silence about what our country was doing to Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and so on, why wouldn’t this repression tactic work for what’s happening in Cuba? Besides the fact that the tactic has worked in the past, there’s also a part of it that might be a telling projection: that because the elite need to get paid for their morals and opinions, maybe everyone else does too.

So, their tactic of accusing people of being terrorists or foreign agents works at repressing the masses. They’ve learned this over and over again. Can we say the same, that we’ve learned the same lesson over and over again? It appears that we cannot. But we have the opportunity to do things differently right now.

How Do We, in the Greatest Interest of Preventing Future Wars, Stop Reproducing This Accusation So Much That It Becomes How We All View Anti-War Activists?

The longer we go without challenging this narrative, the longer it gets passed down to the war resisters after us. We don’t remember the US wars on Vietnam or Iraq kindly. So why do we still write off the people who resisted those wars? Maybe a lot of the Vietnam War protesters were communists, but they were also right when it mattered. It doesn’t matter if you disagree with the war in Vietnam now. Over 2 million Vietnamese people were killed by our government. It is long over. It only matters if you’re right when it’s actually happening or before it happens, not when the blood is already dried on the pavement.

And as it so happens, being a communist might be the most American thing you can do as more and more people feel like everyone around them somehow got the short end of the stick. Who has the long end of the stick? We’ve never met them.

Americans happen to have their own opinions, and many of us are not paid to have them. You can tell that is a fact by how few of us have healthcare. If the peace movement was such a well-funded foreign apparatus, we would never have a war ever again. We would never have blockades and embargoes that starve people to death. The war industry is far better funded than those of us in opposition to it.

If you ever disagree with the war machine, the titles of “foreign agent” or “terrorist sympathizer” will be waiting for you at your doorstep. It’s really just a matter of time.

Some of us can shake these accusations off. Two years ago, we all saw a photo of a young Palestinian girl with her face falling apart and her father trying to press her back together. We decided her life was worth more than any job or future opportunity we could ever lose from saying something. Her life was worth more than any threat I could ever receive—but the stakes don’t need to be so high for us to stand up for what’s right if we collectively decide right now that they don’t need to be. We can get it right when it comes to Cuba before it's too late. Power is reproduced in every single one of us. The accusations stick every time we don’t refute them on behalf of others. The accusations work every time it isn’t shot down or called out. So we must.

I am proud to be the national co-director of CODEPINK. I am called a foreign agent or terrorist sympathizer every time I post about a child being murdered in Gaza. Or that I don't agree with a policy of collective punishment in Cuba. Or when I dare suggest that the United States shouldn’t be stoking a war with China. The US and China both have nukes. I don’t have to be paid off by a foreign government to have the opinion that a confrontation between two nuclear powers would be a disaster.

Right now, CODEPINK, along with other organizations, are the subject of a smear campaign to discredit our work toward peace. We were accused of being funded by a deep and large web of interests that led back to the Chinese Communist Party, and now we are accused of being agents of the Cuban government. I am sorry to our haters and clickbait journalists, but that is just completely untrue. It is a disrespect to the fearless leadership of women in North America who don’t like blockades being imposed in our name and to our thousands of donors who make our work possible. Now, as the Trump administration escalates its hybrid war on Cuba and people are standing up for what they believe in, the same accusation is coming down on each and every one of us who happens to care about the 11 million Cubans who will go into this fall and winter without electricity, or without the medicines they need to survive. If you ever disagree with the war machine, the titles of “foreign agent” or “terrorist sympathizer” will be waiting for you at your doorstep. It’s really just a matter of time. If we want history to stop repeating itself, if we want to stop the senseless slaughter carried out by our government, we have to stop falling for the same tricks.

When the American elite make the inevitable pivot, and start telling you what country to hate: See through it. And when they start pointing fingers at people who think we shouldn’t go to war—ask if their accusations are actually admissions about their own integrity. You are not bought to care about Cuban life; your comrades aren’t either.

This moment, and every moment of resistance that comes after we are gone, requires us to learn this lesson and fast. The movement and the people sympathetic to it must stand up for themselves and reject the notion that it is fundamentally un-American to care about people or despise massacres.

Wanìshi means thank you in the Lenape language. This is the lyrical word we recently had the privilege of learning from a principal emissary from the Piscataway Indian Nation, and experiencing together. Wanìshi for the quiet moments between hard conversations and watching sunsets, where we shared in the spirit of collaboration, together with 18 other thinkers and doers who are deeply troubled by the trajectory of public agriculture policy, and its historically principal vehicle, the Farm Bill.

We embraced and shared in this collaborative mindset over the three days we spent with the America the Beautiful for All Coalition’s Legacy Lands workgroup in Maryland. The Farm Bill was one of the issues we discussed. A bill currently being treated by politicians as technical, as boring, as someone else's problem. When in our realities, it is none of those things. The Farm Bill decides who eats and who doesn't. It decides who is healthy and whose health is negotiable.

Between us, we have spent a combined five decades serving the communities this bill affects: rural families losing food, farmworkers losing protections, Black farmers losing land, tribal nations losing voice. So at that convening, and with this piece, we are expressing plainly a reality every farmer, rancher, and all of us who steward land intimately know. That land is a body and must be nourished. That we cannot cut it into fundable pieces and expect the pieces to bleed separately. The Farm Bill is a health bill. It cannot be cut into pieces without harming land and people. We do not view the content of the draft as a public health crisis because we have been trained to view it as agricultural policy. But it is, in fact, a public health crisis, and that crisis has a physical address: every community where conservation funding has been cut and every family living downstream of the farms and lands that lost it.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed on the Fourth of July last year, cut $187 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). More than 4.5 million people have lost their food assistance since then. In rural counties where the nearest grocery store is a 40-minute drive and the nearest doctor is farther, losing SNAP is not a policy change. It is a sentence. It means a child eating less, and then eating worse, and then showing up in an emergency room that is itself understaffed and underfunded. The Senate Farm Bill draft does not restore a single dollar.

That land is a body and must be nourished. That we cannot cut it into fundable pieces and expect the pieces to bleed separately. The Farm Bill is a health bill. It cannot be cut into pieces without harming land and people.

Both versions of the new bill cut funding for the conservation programs that keep farmland productive and water clean. The Senate draft alone slashes nearly $2 billion from EQIP, the program that helps small farmers put cover crops in, manage nutrients, and protect water. When those programs shrink, the runoff increases. Babies, adults, pets, and wildlife in the communities downstream all drink that water.

The agency responsible for delivering conservation to farmers is disappearing. The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) lost nearly a quarter of its staff in one year. One hundred and forty-one counties went from having NRCS employees to having none. These were the people who helped farmers manage nutrients, reduce fertilizer runoff, and protect water. In their absence, nitrate from agricultural runoff enters rural drinking water unchecked. Research links nitrate contamination to colorectal cancer, thyroid disease, and birth defects in newborns, at levels below what the Environmental Protection Agency considers safe. The communities drinking that water are the same small rural towns that just lost their NRCS offices. A beginning farmer in southern Georgia or a small rancher in northern New Mexico picks up the phone and no one answers. Their neighbors downstream drink what runs off the fields no one is helping them manage.

For Latino communities across the rural West, acequias, the community irrigation systems that have sustained families for centuries, depend on the conservation programs this bill is cutting. A farmer in the San Luis Valley who has irrigated land the way her family has for six generations does not experience a conservation cut as a line item. She experiences it as a ditch that doesn't flow, a garden that doesn't grow, a family that buys what it used to harvest.

Black families once farmed 16 million acres in this country. Today they hold barely over 1%. Heirs' property, land passed down without clear title, is one of the mechanisms through which that loss continues: A single partition sale can erase a century of family ownership in an afternoon. The families who lose their land don't just lose wealth. They lose the foundation for food sovereignty, the one asset that could have fed a family, a neighborhood, a generation. A deed problem becomes a health problem, passed down the same way the land was supposed to be.

As we watch this Farm Bill, we carry with us the word our Piscataway colleague shared. Wanìshi. Thank you. We offer it now in the spirit of collaboration.

We will offer it again, in the spirit of gratitude, when Congress writes this bill for all of us.

We are waiting.

In July, the US launched the first of three controversial 2026 deep-seabed mining lease sales in the waters of American Samoa, to be finalized in August; the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, to be finalized in November; and Alaska, to be finalized in December. Once the lease sales are sold, it is nearly impossible to reverse the sales unless they are purchased back from the federal government.

In Alaska, fishing is not just a sport; it is a critical element of food security for many Alaskans. As the Arctic faces increasing pressure on fish stocks, including but not limited to overfishing, marine pollution, and rising ocean temperatures, the US is now debating issuing deep-sea mining permits in Alaska waters, the use of which could further harm our marine ecosystems affecting everything from phytoplankton to whales.

Proponents of deep-sea mining argue that the minerals extracted from the seabed are critical to strengthening modern supply chains for technological advancement and national security. At this time, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) is assessing the potential for Alaska’s Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) to mine cobalt, nickel, and rare earth elements.

At Pacific Environment, we are deeply concerned about the permits that BOEM is considering selling. Deep-sea mining isn’t just about sticking a vacuum on the ocean floor to surgically suck up particular minerals. It also involves large-scale exploration and extraction that will further disrupt already fragile ecosystems, creating increased pollution from discarded sediments, sharp increases in noise, and other potential dangers to the marine environment and food security of Arctic Peoples.

The Risks of Deep-Sea Mining in Alaska

Deep-sea mining would deploy mining equipment in some of the deepest and least understood areas of the ocean such as hydrothermal vents and seamounts. The wildlife that inhabit these areas—including plankton, corals, fish, and marine mammals—often exist only in those places and nowhere else on the planet. When damaged, these ecosystems are slow to recover, and the damage is likely to be permanent. Sea mining activities also result in massive sediment plumes that smother marine life on the bottom and in the water column.

When BOEM opened a commenting period for the public to weigh in on deep-seabed mining, over 90,000 comment letters poured in from individuals and groups opposing the sale of leases for this largely untested technology.

It is proven that noise in the ocean disrupts whale communication and migration and may also impact other communities of ocean life. Deep-sea mining will increase noise pollution in ways that are yet to be studied because it is challenging and costly to study deep ocean ecosystems.

Alaskans are already seeing declines in our salmon populations, creating a fishing crisis along the Yukon River and elsewhere, empty smokehouses, and Indigenous communities without a primary protein resource and with cultural traditions unpracticed. We are seeing whale strikes and die-offs along the Northwest coast of the United States, further negatively impacting coastal communities. We watch as the ocean warms; Arctic sea ice melts at a faster and faster pace and a critical tipping point for nitrogen—a critical element of ocean life—has passed.

Public Opposition Reflects Growing Concern

When BOEM opened a commenting period for the public to weigh in on deep-seabed mining, over 90,000 comment letters poured in from individuals and groups opposing the sale of leases for this largely untested technology. These comments highlight concerns about the lack of understanding of the long-term impacts these leases will have on Arctic waters that depend on intricate balances to support marine life.

While arguments can be made that we need to secure additional access to critical minerals, the risks of what we could lose are very significant. Arctic ocean ecosystems are fragile, not well understood, and already under intense pressure as the region warms four times faster than the rest of the planet. Alaska, and the world, depend on the marine environment for so many things; it makes no sense to jeopardize this sensitive ecosystem for an unproven and largely untested technology.

This piece was first published on the Pacific Environment blog.

“Nation” equals identity. I’m an American! Hurray!

It’s almost embarrassing to confess this, but yeah, that’s me (or used to be me), sitting back in my easy chair, waving a flag. My “nationality” is such a profound, lifelong part of who I am I rarely actually questioned it. At best I shrugged, then momentarily glared in anger at... the government, the media, whoever. Why do we have a trillion-dollar military budget, or a president who wants to up it to $1.5 trillion? Why do we always have an enemy or two or three, who isn’t as human as we are and must be defeated, or at least arrested?

At least being an American comes with a fair amount of rights—freedom of speech, freedom to question authority, and so-o-o much more—and usually I embrace those rights with a sense of hope that the future will be saner. But that sense of hope has been ebbing lately. I have come to realize over the years that I am no longer just an American. I’m a citizen of Planet Earth.

I say this with a sense of paradox. I love the life this nation has given me, and value much of what it claims to stand for, but I think it’s time for humanity to reach beyond nationalism and borders and connect with a larger god—a larger global organizing principle. And I do not claim that this will be simple or obvious.

The global military expenditures in 2025 were $2.9 trillion, a total that’s been increasing every year for the last 11 years.

But it’s time. “Nation” equals war. It equals “get outa here!” The more power it has, the more it sustains itself with the worst of who we are. This means it always needs an enemy... or two, or three, or 50,000.

And our enemy becomes the norm. Here’s where I truly lose hope that the human race can survive nationalism. We dehumanize our enemies, which gives us “permission” to kill them: to shatter their social structure, to erase them from existence. Ho hum.

For instance, here’s a quickie ICE update from ABC News the other day:

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested 51,000 individuals in July, according to sources familiar with the data. The arrests are the largest in a single month in DHS history...

And guess what?

“Those being detained in some cases do not have criminal records and have valid work authorization or parole documents...”

And what does the phrase “in some cases” mean? Maybe a dozen of the arrestees were good guys? That’s what it sounds like, as you give the story a read. After all, remember Donald Trump’s words back in 2015: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best... They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people”

But all of them are aliens! They’re illegals (even if they’re not). They’re wrecking our country. They need to go.

And then, of course, there are the wars going on around the world, wreaking death and hell and genocide: Israel’s bombing of Palestine has killed over 73,000 people at this point, with more than 173,200 wounded. As PBS points out, over 1,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the start of the so-called “ceasefire.” And, my God, the death and casualty toll in the Ukraine war, on both sides, is approaching 2 million people over these last four years.

This is just part of it. The global military expenditures in 2025 were $2.9 trillion, a total that’s been increasing every year for the last 11 years. As Connie Peck, founder of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research Programme in Peacemaking and Conflict Prevention, wrote: “If similar increases continue, and NATO countries enlarge their expenditure to 5% as pledged, global military spending could reach 6.6 trillion by 2035—five times the level at the end of the Cold War.”

In other words, it’s getting worse. The more “they” spend, the more we have to spend. And the only way the world’s nations are safe from one another is by “mutually assured destruction”: a concept that, with the emergence of nuclear weapons, means the threat of planetary annihilation. I think it’s time to evolve beyond nationalism, which is not based on valuing life. It’s based on “winning.”

Peck writes: “Do we really want or need more weapons and more wars? Shouldn’t we, instead, choose cooperative security, collective security, and human security, as represented by the United Nations?”

Let’s stash our cynicism and, as Peck writes, begin addressing the root causes of conflict. We are capable of looking beyond ourselves. She quotes from the UN Charter Preamble.

Here are the words from the Preamble that pierced me most deeply, as I imagined them helping to create a new form of government: “We the peoples of the United Nations (have) determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war... and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person...”

Hurricane season is upon us, and for many Disabled people across the US, it means a renewed sense of insecurity and uncertainty around their well-being. So often, Disabled folks are too often left behind in emergency preparedness and response efforts, and are ultimately treated as afterthoughts. With the 21st anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaching and a continued climate crisis with no end in sight, this glaring oversight is ever present in the minds of Disabled people nationwide.

This isn’t an issue that’s unique to the US, however. It’s something that Disabled communities face on a global scale, and it’s time we took a hard look at what countries across the world can do to center Disabled people in ensuring the safety and security of their citizens.

Take Nigeria, for example. A new investigation from Deaf Nigerian filmmaker and journalist Alexander Ogheneruemu, "Forgotten People," tells, in part, the story of Ayoade Beyioku-Alase, a Deaf man who was nearly killed as a child in Kano because the violence closing in on his house came with no siren, no interpreter, no warning he could access. "A Deaf person can walk right into the middle of danger," he says in the piece.

It’s easy for those of us in the US to read a story like this and feel far away from it. It’s easy to think, ,“This isn’t us.” The truth is that, whether we want to accept it or not, it is us. It just looks a little different.

Disabled people in the United States are two to four times more likely to die or be critically injured in a disaster than nondisabled people.

As a Disabled person who has worked in this space for many years, I can tell you that the system that has failed Disabled people during Nigeria's security crisis is the same system that fails us here in not just natural disasters like hurricanes or wildfires, but active shooter situations, and immigration detention as well. The threat might be different, but we have more in common with these failings than you’d be led to believe.

The alarm itself is the most direct parallel. Federal guidance from the Department of Justice acknowledges that most emergency warning systems in this country were built for people who can hear and see. Sirens, radio, television, flashing lights are all assumed to be visible to everyone. Tornado sirens across the Midwest and South are audio only, offering nothing to a Deaf person indoors when weather becomes a threat. The National Association of the Deaf has told emergency management agencies for years that mass notification systems don’t reach people who rely on video instead of standard calls. This is a serious and blatant example of ableism, where Disabled people are treated as an afterthought in emergency planning.

In Ogheneruemu’s "Forgotten People,” produced by the Disability Justice Project, the journalist says that 4,654 lives were lost in Nigeria's insecurity crisis last year. Our own numbers are just as alarming. Research compiled by the Center for American Progress and the Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies puts it bluntly: Disabled people in the United States are two to four times more likely to die or be critically injured in a disaster than nondisabled people.

During Hurricane Katrina, people over 60 years old, who included many Disabled folks, made up 73% of storm-related deaths in Louisiana. According to the National Council on Disability, 68 of those victims died in nursing homes, some abandoned by staff who left rather than arrange evacuation. Twenty years later, not much has changed. When the Eaton Fire tore through Los Angeles in January of 2025, at least 3 of the 27 people killed were Disabled, and NBC News reported that Disabled people displaced by disaster are almost twice as likely not to return home.

Then there's our own man-made violence. Nigeria's crisis comes from armed conflict, and ours also often comes from gun violence. More than 100 US school shootings have happened since Sandy Hook in 2012, and the response drilled into an entire generation of children is to run and hide. Inherently, this completely excludes Disabled kids. The Washington Post and The Mighty have both documented children left alone in hallways, forgotten in therapy rooms, and locked out of safe zones during lockdowns because there wasn’t a plan that accounted for them. New Jersey only recently passed legislation forcing districts to build disability-specific evacuation plans after families spoke out. The message we’re sending to Disabled kids here is that they’re on their own.

The Disability Justice Project's own reporting has already shown us what this looks like at our own border: a Deaf asylum-seeker was held for five months in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention without a sign language interpreter, ultimately unable to explain to anyone why he was afraid to go home. If disability access can vanish inside a US federal detention facility, we have no standing to act shocked that it vanishes during a flood or a fire.

This isn’t the kind of thing that’s unknowable, either. The data is out there, and the stories are plentiful. It’s simply not prioritized by those in power, and more often than not it’s unfunded. Disability still makes up just 2% of philanthropy, despite Disabled people comprising about 25% of the US population. Every dollar that goes toward disaster response, school safety, or immigration oversight without disability at the center is putting more Disabled folks in harm’s way. And even if that isn’t you, it could be your mother, father, child, friend, or neighbor. That’s why funding disability is more important than ever. We don't need another report to tell donors and policymakers that Disabled people die preventable deaths in emergencies.

Instead, we need them to stop treating that fact as new information every single time it happens. Funders, just like lawmakers and others in positions of power, need to wake up and see for themselves just what the disability community is up against.

If we can learn one thing from the security crisis in Nigeria, it’s that Disabled people deserve the same protections and safeguards that nondisabled people have in dangerous and precarious situations. It’s already too late, but in the US, in Nigeria, and in countless other countries, there’s still time to save many more Disabled lives.

Yes, it should be possible this November to elect enough Democrats to stop MAGA and undo some of the damage Trump et al have done. But without the support of the working class the progressive wish list will remain just that—a series of unfulfilled wishes.

Despite big hopes and a likely small majority, we won’t see Medicare for All, an increase in the federal minimum wage, a green New Deal, job security for working people, labor law reform to facilitate unionization, a billionaire’s tax, elimination of big money from politics, the break-up of mega-corporations, and affordable housing for all, to name just a few.

None of these ambitious and popular reforms will pass as long as the blue-red margins remain narrow, ensuring that there are never enough votes to enact major reforms even if the Democrats control all three branches after the 2028 elections.

Ask any labor leader and they will tell you the sad and maddening 50-year story of failed attempts to level the labor-management playing field, despite Democratic tri-fectas during Obama and Biden. And because of these slim margins one of the biggest recent Democratic victories, Obamacare, is a Rube Goldberg-like contraption relying on corporate subsidies, massive costs, and spotty coverage that has failed to deliver universal and affordable health care.

Bad stuff can be stopped and maybe some of the worst MAGA policies reversed, but there won’t be a progressive majority to win the big stuff even if the Democrats win the House, the Senate and the presidency in 2028.

So, instead of pushing toward a more just economy, we sail in the opposite direction and are increasingly dominated by what Bernie derides as the billionaire class.

We just assume these days that razor-thin blue-red margins are a fact of life, the result of increasing political polarization, money in politics, gerrymandering, and misinformation, etc. But not so long ago there were times, under FDR and LBJ, when progressive political majorities were massive. That’s when the Democratic Party included and could count on most working-class voters (roughly defined as those without college degrees). That is no longer the case.

The numbers are stark, especially among white working people.

• In 1976, Jimmy Carter received 53 percent of the white working-class vote. In 2024, only 33 percent voted for Kamala Harris.
• In a working-class county in the heart of coal country in West Virginia, like Mingo County with its fierce union tradition, Bill Clinton received 70 percent of the vote in 1996. After 3,000 of the county’s 3,300 coal jobs disappeared, Harris got a miniscule 12 percent in 2024.

If a sizable majority of those voters returned to the Democrats’ fold, one could imagine enough votes to enact major economic reforms. Could that happen?

How do Democrats win the working class back?

My comrades at the Center for Working Class Politics have spent years showing that working-class candidates, especially with union backgrounds running on a strong progressive economic program, can win in contested districts. Their arguments are persuasive. But the current handful of successes leave most of the working-class swimming on their own in red America, where the Democratic Party is dead and gone.

For example, of the roughly 1,211 state legislative seats in Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and Idaho, the Democrats don’t even run candidates in 40 percent of them.

The Democratic Party needs to be reformed dramatically if it is to adopt CWCP’s strategy. But we have just learned from the missing chapter in the Democratic Party’s autopsy report, released this week by its author, that the party’s functionaries have become “generationally wealthy off politics.” Sponging off the status quo, whether they win or lose, the party’s ecosystem of pollsters, consultants, ad agencies, and such has grown fat, rich, and happy. This is not a political culture open to radical reform.

DSA to the rescue?

The Democratic Socialists of America, arguably the most vibrant political organization in America today (though the bar isn’t high), have attempted to reform the Democrats by knocking off establishment Democrats in primaries and replacing them with DSA-backed candidates. They have succeeded this year in heavily Democratic urban areas, such as New York City, but will now be tested in Michigan, where Dr. Abdul El-Sayed gained a narrow victory in the Democratic Senate primary this past Tuesday. Similarly, Francesca Hong, another DSA candidate, is the favorite to win the upcoming Wisconsin gubernatorial Democratic primary in another state won in 2024 by Donald Trump. Can El-Sayed, not a DSA member but a very progressive candidate, and Hong win in purple states?

Ironically, DSA members and the establishment Democrats generally come from the same class – the class of the college educated. El-Sayed reportedly ran “strongest in communities with young voters, college students and educated and wealthy white voters.”

DSA claims to be speaking on behalf of the working class, but according to its own 2021 survey, only four percent of its members are blue-collar workers, and another six percent work in retail, food service, or similar occupations. Roughly 40 percent are teachers, academics, white-collar professionals, tech workers, or students. Of those 25 years old and older, more than 80 percent have bachelor’s degrees, compared to only 39 percent nationally.

Working people did not disappear from the much redder parts of the Midwest and the Great Plains when their jobs moved to Mexico and China, but the Democrats did.

More importantly, what they put forth as their program did not grow out of a dialogue with non-college working-class folks or even union leaders. If they had had those discussions they would have learned that many of their positions, like abolishing “the police and prison system which protects the rich and jails the poor,” would be opposed by the working people they say they champion.

We will learn more this fall about how DSA candidates adapt and fare with working people in red areas. But as DSA is now structured, it is unlikely to recruit many people without college degrees.

The path to a progressive majority?

Clearly, it is essential that the Democrats win back enough working-class voters to disrupt the MAGA onslaught. Let’s hope and pray they do. But unless huge numbers of Trump voters stay home for the midterms, and the working class breaks heavily for the Democrats, the margin of victory is not likely to be nearly enough to produce the political majorities necessary to rework the economic order.

Bad stuff can be stopped and maybe some of the worst MAGA policies reversed, but there won’t be a progressive majority to win the big stuff even if the Democrats win the House, the Senate and the presidency in 2028.

The Democratic Party brand is just too tarnished among working people for them to readily join in significant numbers. Sure, go ahead and run more union candidates, and let’s see if the DSA can overturn the Democratic Party’s establishment and even spread into the working class. But it would be wise to have Plan B—a parallel, not substitute, strategy.

An Independent Workers Party of Their Own in Red America

Working people did not disappear from the much redder parts of the Midwest and the Great Plains when their jobs moved to Mexico and China, but the Democrats did. In red America there is no spoiler problem because in hundreds of state races and congressional districts the Democrats have abandoned ship. That has left an enormous vacuum and few political choices for working people. We can now see a very few working-class candidates trying to fill the void, but there is no organization that ties them together.

A new political organization of working people should be constructed where working people can gather and speak in their own voices about what they want to see changed in America—an organization that recaptures the voice and power they once had in the region.

Building that formation will be difficult, but maybe not as difficult as taking over the Democratic Party. For starters, it will require an anchor tenant, a large union or state labor federation, that realizes that most of its members have given up on the Democrats and want something new. So far there have been no takers, though clearly some labor leaders, like the UAW’s Shawn Fain, share at least some of our analysis of what’s necessary.

But that will change, I believe, as union leaders come to the recognition that they can no longer sell the Dems to their own members. And if one or two unions or state labor federations set up a new independent operation in red America, I think they will be pleasantly surprised by the enthusiasm it generates. Our polling suggests that working people just might come running.

If this organization takes off, it becomes much easier to imagine working-class political alliances with enough power to secure substantive economic change. Something working people are sure to need soon as AI and the billionaires take a wrecking ball to what’s left of their livelihoods.

Someone, somewhere, sometime must build something new so that working people can develop their own political voice, just as the Populists did 150 years ago.

Is this the only solution to our problems? Maybe not. I’m wide open to other strategies. I just haven’t heard any that don’t start and stop with reforming the Democrats, whose elites are not about to give up their power and access to riches.

And I don’t see how DSA gets deep enough into red America as long as it’s an organization of college grads talking to themselves about what’s best for the working-class. Even if El-Sayed and Hong win in the general election this year, the wealthy party fuctionairies will still be in power.

By all means, go for it. But someone, somewhere, sometime must build something new so that working people can develop their own political voice, just as the Populists did 150 years ago.

Am I howling in the wind? Maybe. I guess that’s what I do. My contribution is to get you to square up to the problem: We need a serious strategy that leads to serious progressive change.

Placing all of our chips on reforming the Dems is a bad bet, even if we deem it a necessary one in the near future. At the very least, I think, that bet needs to be hedged by building a new independent political organization of working people in red America, an organization that’s responsive to and expressive of their political needs. That’s far better than abandoning working-class families to the next round of Republican charlatans.

There are plenty of principled, humanitarian reasons for opposing US support for Israel’s current government. Multiple human right groups, United Nations bodies, international courts, Israeli politicians, and genocide organizations have accused Israel of engaging in war crimes, including genocide, in Gaza and the West Bank. The invasions of Lebanon and Iran are likewise criminal humanitarian disasters.

There are also practical foreign policy reasons for opposing the influence of Israel and the Israel lobby. Jeffrey Sachs and Sybil Fares argue convincingly, in "Stop Netanyahu Before He Gets Us All Killed," that Israel encouraged most of the US foreign policy disasters in the Middle East and Africa:

In 1996, [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and his American advisors devised a “Clean Break” strategy. They advocated that Israel would not withdraw from the Palestinian lands captured in the 1967 war in exchange for regional peace. Instead, Israel would reshape the Middle East to its liking. Crucially, the strategy envisioned the US as the main force to achieve these aims—waging wars in the region to dismantle governments opposed to Israel’s dominance over Palestine. The US was called upon to fight wars on Israel’s behalf.

The Clean Break strategy was effectively carried out by the US and Israel after 9/11. As NATO Supreme Commander General Wesley Clark revealed, soon after 9/11, the US planned to “attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years—starting with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.”

The US followed through with military actions against all those countries, which now lie in ruins, except for Iran, which Israel and the US are in the process of destroying. As Sachs and Fares wrote, “Netanyahu was a cheerleader of these wars of choice–either in public or behind the scenes–together with his neocon allies in the US.”

Israel has corrupted US foreign policy, causing the country to fight unnecessary wars and create unnecessary enemies.

Aside from the humanitarian and foreign policy reasons for opposing the influence of Israel and the Israel lobby on American politics, there are also political reasons. Foremost among them is that Israel and the Israel lobby have repeatedly lent their substantial financial and political influence toward helping elect Republicans, including President Donald Trump, and toward electing Democrats disliked by many Democratic voters.

Multiple US presidents, including Presidents Harry S. Truman, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, made efforts to break away from staunchly pro-Israel policies but eventually succumbed to pressure from pro-Israel lobbyists threatening them with electoral opposition.

During the Republican primary debates in 2016, Trump criticized the invasion of Iraq and said that US policy in the Middle East needed more balance: more support for Palestinian rights. But during the general election campaign, Trump had a meeting with Sharon and Miriam Adelson, who promised to help fund his campaign (source). From that point on, Trump has been staunchly pro-Israel.

Sheldon and Miriam Adelson donated approximately $100 million to pro-Trump super PACs during the 2020 election cycle.

You could call this a representation deficit: Democratic politicians become more responsive to a donor network than to Democratic voters.

The New York Times reported in 2021 that the Adelsons’ contributions to GOP campaigns and organizations had totaled around half a billion dollars since 2010.

In 2024 Miriam Adelson donated $100 million to help elect Trump and spent a further $500 million on other Republican causes. According to OpenSecrets, from 2023 to 2024, pro-Israel PACs gave $5.4 million to candidates, almost evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. The Republican Jewish Coalition spent over $14 million supporting Trump since 2020. The New Republic says that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) spent $45 million in the 2024 elections.

In 2024, Trump ran as the peace candidate, promising to stop the war in Gaza. Kamala Harris’ support for Israel was a significant cause of her election loss (source, source).

Polls (this and this) have shown that among Democratic voters, support for Israel has plummeted. In April 2026, Pew found that 80% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents viewed Israel unfavorably, up from 69% in 2025 and 53% in 2022. Gallup found in July 2025 that only 8% of Democrats approved of Israel’s military action in Gaza. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released August 4, 2026 found that only 16% of Democrats supported continuing military and economic aid to Israel, while more than 80% of liberal Democrats considered reducing aid important or essential.

The victories of socialist and pro-Palestinian candidates (e.g., Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Senate primary) during the 2026 primaries—despite tens of millions of dollars spent by the Israel lobby to defeat them—further illustrate the fact that the Democratic base is rejecting mainstream Democrats who support Israel.

Of course, AIPAC does not represent the views of all American Jews. Roughly 7 in 10 Jewish respondents in a March 2026 survey identified as Democrats, and younger Jewish voters have become significantly more critical of unconditional aid.

The Democratic Party’s congressional leadership has continued defending a position overwhelmingly rejected by its own voters. That creates several electoral injuries:

• Young voters conclude that Democratic leaders do not represent them.
• Arab American and Muslim voters feel deliberately disregarded.
• Anti-war progressives see the party as morally compromised.
• Other voters see wealthy donors overriding public opinion.
• Republicans can run as outsiders or supposed “peace candidates,” however dishonestly.

You could call this a representation deficit: Democratic politicians become more responsive to a donor network than to Democratic voters.

In 2024, the Israel lobby helped unseat Reps. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) and Jamaal Bowman (D-NY). Republican-aligned billionaires should not be able to determine which candidates Democrats are permitted to nominate. In 2026 the Israel lobby helped unseat Rep. Thomas Massie (Ky.), one of Trump’s biggest Republican critics.

Though the Israel lobby gives to Democratic candidates too, its political strategy is not simply bipartisan support for Israel. Its effect is asymmetrical: It helps Republicans win national power while policing the Democratic Party from within. It supports Republicans directly, then spends heavily in Democratic primaries to defeat candidates who challenge Republican-backed Israeli policies. Democrats therefore bear the electoral cost of unpopular policies while Republican candidates receive both financial support and an issue with which to divide the Democratic coalition.

In short, powerful pro-Israel organizations are harming the Democratic Party. This is not because support for Israel is inherently Republican, and not because Jewish voters are disloyal Democrats—many Democrats strongly oppose Israel’s policies—but because these organizations increasingly enforce a Republican-aligned foreign policy inside a Democratic electorate that rejects it. They finance Republicans, import Republican donor money into Democratic primaries, punish dissenting Democrats, divide the Democratic coalition, and bind Democratic leaders to policies that damage the party’s moral credibility and electoral prospects.

Democratic Party leaders and activists should stop allowing a pro-Republican, pro-war lobby to distort its policies and chooseits candidates.

The Israel lobby, for its own sake, should think hard about whether it wants to support a quasi-fascist movement. For more on this, see "Supporters of Israel Will Eventually Regret That They Allied With Fascist Trump."

Most politicians pledge to work for the working class, or sometimes for working families, a less Marxist-sounding label. Meanwhile, scholars struggle to define the category. I won’t assess the political posturing or adjudicate definitional disputes, but my work experience—spanning six decades and a wide variety of jobs—illustrates why the claims of working-class authenticity that are prized in today’s politics are so fraught.

Once upon a time, the working class was understood as people in capitalist economies who don’t own the means of production and must sell their labor to owners. But as economies grew more complex, anomalies piled up. What about managers who aren’t owners but make lots of money doing the bidding of owners? What about technical employees whose specialized skills give them bargaining power? What about small-business owners of modest means who hire employees? Turns out there are lots of “contradictory class locations.”

I’ve never been a manager, had any specialized technical skills, owned a business, or made big money, but my class status is rife with contradictions and conundrums.

Work History

My paternal grandfather, an immigrant from Denmark, was a blacksmith in a small town in North Dakota, but my father had no interest in the family trade. After a lackluster college career on the GI Bill, he got a job as an insurance adjuster—a white-collar working-class job for which he wore a shirt and tie to the office but got paid like a laborer. My mother, whose family had a similar trajectory, stayed at home with four kids until we were all in school and then took a series of low-paid office jobs.

No matter what my job or level of pay, I knew I was a worker who didn’t own or control capital. I also knew I had a pretty cushy life compared with most working people.

Although I didn’t realize it at the time, money was tight in our family. I didn’t get shiny new things, and family vacations were low-budget affairs that involved staying with relatives or in a borrowed camper. We always had a house and ate regularly, and I didn’t feel poor, but I knew the difference between myself and the affluent kids at school.

By the time I was in high school, my father had moved into a sales job and was making more money—enough that he could join the cheaper of the two country clubs in town. He quit bowling in a league (a working-class activity) and focused on golf (the appropriate middle-class game). In modest ways, he transcended his working-class roots, financially and socially.

Our family’s class status changed but not our working-class respect for hard work. As soon as we were old enough, my siblings and I earned money. In North Dakota before snow blowers were common, I had ample opportunities to shovel snow profitably. In the summer, I carried golf bags at the fancier country club in Fargo. Once I turned 16, I bagged groceries and worked in a building supply warehouse unloading trucks. To pay college tuition, I bused dishes and set up tables for hotel banquets.

After college, I worked as a journalist, starting at a small weekly newspaper that paid poorly. While covering a county government meeting at which the income levels for subsidized housing were set, I realized that on my “professional” journalist’s salary, I qualified. Eventually, I worked my way up to bigger newspapers and better pay, and after graduate school I settled into a comfortable middle-class life as a professor.

No matter what my job or level of pay, I knew I was a worker who didn’t own or control capital. I also knew I had a pretty cushy life compared with most working people. I was a working-class guy, sort of, but one with a Ph.D. and more autonomy than most.

Whatever my class status, I retained a sense of obligation to work as hard as I could at whatever job I had. During my 26 years as a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, I never took a sabbatical. UT didn’t offer the regular research leaves common at other universities, and I never chased the outside grants that allow professors to take time off. I taught a full load, sometimes with a voluntary overload class, without feeling oppressed. When other professors were shocked that I never had even one sabbatical semester, I pointed out that no one I knew outside of academia thought they had a right to be paid for time off. I liked teaching and had time to write books in the summers—a pretty sweet deal.

Class Culture

I retired at 60, even though I still loved teaching, because I wanted to get out before I burned out. Because I’ve always been frugal, at least in comparison with my middle-class peers, early retirement was financially feasible. That’s also part of my internal sense of class—I don’t have expensive habits and hobbies. Because I grew up not-poor but not-affluent, my expectations were modest. Reactions to childhood economic circumstances vary—some kids yearn for expensive things, and others make it a badge of honor to not need them. Backpacking through Europe on summer vacation was never on the agenda when I was young, and tourist travel doesn’t appeal to the elderly me. I covet not coveting much.

Today I live outside a small town in New Mexico, the kind of place realtors call “rural residential.” There are a few other retirees and professionals on our road, but most of my neighbors are without a doubt working class—tradespeople, laborers, small farmers, and ranchers. I met many of them through the acequia association, a communal irrigation system that is maintained through shared labor. I take pride in working as hard as anyone on ditch-cleaning days and joining every work detail, not just the one I’m obligated to show up for. Most people here don’t ask about what job I retired from, and if they do, I say that I had been a teacher. They probably assume I taught public school, which is viewed as an honorable job. I don’t admit that I had been a university professor unless pressed for details, because it feels uppity.

The unfairness of capitalism doesn’t negate the importance of a strong work ethic.

I came out of the working class. I never aspired to be in the owning class but lived comfortably as an educated professional. Today, I can pass as working class when I show up in my 30-year-old pickup with a shovel and saw. I live on my Social Security check, but I have a retirement account to draw on for emergencies.

Have I ever been “authentically” working class? I don’t know what criteria to use to make that call. I continue to oppose an economic system that creates wealth inequality and undermines community life, a radical working-class politics. But I also advocate for the strong personal work ethic that I think is needed to enhance community life, a value often considered conservative. Both things are important to me.

A final story about that balance, from a friend who ran a nonprofit that employed teenagers from economically depressed neighborhoods to work on a small farm and also took on college-student interns. One year he was telling the interns that one of the goals of the organization was to foster a strong work ethic in those teenagers, and an intern cautioned him: “Telling people in poor communities they have to work hard is a tool of capitalism.” My friend was exasperated. Yes, rich people often accuse poor people of being lazy, lecturing them about working harder to get out of poverty. But the desire to work hard at productive tasks is healthy, no matter what the economic system. The unfairness of capitalism doesn’t negate the importance of a strong work ethic.

In my new book, This I Don’t Believe, I write that we all need opportunities to prove to ourselves that we are competent to run our own lives. One way I’ve done that is by taking work seriously, learning to do work well, and being proud of my work—all part of the core of a working-class identity, even if I’m not part of the working class. It’s my way of trying to live honestly in my contradictory class location.

You won’t find “Medicare for All” printed on any Michigan ballot from Tuesday’s primary. What you’ll find is a name: Abdul El-Sayed, the Ann Arbor physician who literally wrote the book on single-payer healthcare and then built his Senate campaign around it.

El-Sayed co-authored Medicare for All: A Citizen’s Guide, with a foreword from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), laying out how the country could guarantee healthcare as a right instead of rationing it by income. He wasn’t a candidate who discovered Medicare for All in a focus group. He ran because of it, and Tuesday night he routed the Democratic establishment’s chosen candidate, Haley Stevens. That’s as close to a referendum on single-payer healthcare as American politics gets, and voters delivered a verdict.

El-Sayed didn’t soften his message for the donor class. He paired “Medicare for All” with a blunt indictment of a country rich enough to end medical bankruptcy but too captured by insurance money to bother. Voters in Washtenaw and Kent counties answered.

What makes this remarkable is who El-Sayed beat and how. Stevens had every advantage institutional Democratic politics can hand a candidate: Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) early backing, a late endorsement from Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and roughly $30 million from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its affiliates, the largest single-race investment in that organization’s history. This was one of the most expensive Democratic primaries ever run, a fire hose of establishment cash aimed at burying a single-payer candidate. It wasn’t enough. Voters weren’t buying what millions in outside spending were selling.

As a practicing physician assistant who has spent years advocating for Medicare for All and working in electoral politics, I've heard the same warning over and over: Don't run on single-payer. Michigan suggests that conventional wisdom deserves another look.

That should terrify the consultant class that has spent a decade telling Democrats Medicare for All is political poison in a state like Michigan, that it scares away suburban moderates. El-Sayed’s night says otherwise: an unapologetic healthcare message is exactly what turns out voters a low-turnout August primary usually leaves behind. Reporting pointed to a young, energized base and a ground game that outperformed expectations where turnout can’t be bought with television ads.

The country is catching up to what El-Sayed put in writing years ago. Over 85 million working-age Americans are uninsured or underinsured, per Commonwealth Fund research, shut out of the system or paying premiums that still leave them exposed the moment they get sick. Millions are one diagnosis away from medical debt they’ll spend a decade paying off. Public patience with an industry that profits by denying claims has curdled into open contempt, visible in viral outrage over coverage denials and a for-profit sector that ranks among the least trusted in America. Strip away the euphemisms, and the arithmetic is obscene. Insurers post billions in profit by finding reasons to say no to sick people, skimming a cut off human suffering as a business model. The United States is the only wealthy industrialized democracy that treats healthcare as a product to be underwritten, means tested, and denied rather than a right owed to its citizens. El-Sayed didn’t invent that anger, and he didn’t just write a book about it. He built a winning campaign on the promise that Democrats don’t have to keep managing that anger on behalf of the industry that causes it.

There’s symbolic weight here too. El-Sayed lost a bruising primary for governor in 2018, written off as unelectable in a state supposedly too uneasy about a candidate named Abdul. Eight years later, running on the same conviction that no one should go bankrupt getting cancer treatment, he built a coalition big enough to beat back one of the most heavily financed efforts to defeat a progressive candidate in recent Democratic primary history. That’s proof of where the Democratic base stands on healthcare, no matter what the party’s risk-averse, industry-funded strategists have told candidates for two decades.

As a practicing physician assistant who has spent years advocating for Medicare for All and working in electoral politics, I've heard the same warning over and over: Don't run on single-payer. Michigan suggests that conventional wisdom deserves another look.

Michigan shows the old fear, that Medicare for All is too risky to run on out loud, was always a story told by people who never tried telling voters the truth about their premiums. Michigan is a battleground state, not a safely progressive one, and El-Sayed won by refusing to hide the ball. He put guaranteed healthcare at the center of a statewide campaign and let voters decide. They decided. That’s not a fluke. It’s a preview of what happens when a candidate treats single-payer healthcare like the popular, morally obvious policy it has always been. AIPAC and the insurance lobby’s allies spent a fortune trying to prove otherwise and lost.

Party insiders will insist this was about mechanics, not Medicare for All. They said the same after every progressive upset this cycle, right up until they had to explain the next one. For one night, the closest thing Michigan had to a ballot question on national healthcare got its answer, and it wasn’t close.

Tuesday, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, or IACHR, at the Organization of American States, a body historically committed to investigating crimes against humanity committed by governments in the Americas, held a hearing in Washington, DC against the Trump administration for its treatment of protests held against Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, crackdowns in the US.

The delegation, represented by Thomas Becker and Nicholas Rodelo, for the University Network for Human Rights, presented evidence of attacks of rights to free assembly and free expression by the Trump administration.

Becker has previously successfully prosecuted a civil lawsuit against former Bolivian President and US ally, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, over 2003 crackdowns and extrajudicial killings of protesters.

This is the first challenge against the Trump administration on protest crackdowns by an international court, and one of the first legal challenges generally. Speakers included Antonio Romanucci, the attorney representing the family of Renee Good, and former counsel of George Floyd; Reverend David Black, who was struck in the head by federal agents at the Broadview Detention Facility; and Naureen Shah, the director of government affairs at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Speakers and observers at the hearing argued that the commission must be empowered to investigate fully and act decisively, warning that the region is entering a new era of authoritarianism even as many of its democracies remain young and fragile.

During the hearing, video evidence and testimony were presented documenting the alleged abuses, prompting a response from State Department lawyers who argued that the incidents represented isolated cases still under investigation, that the United States has rights the commission should respect, and that the IACHR ought to focus its attention elsewhere in the hemisphere, a suggestion that drew scrutiny given that the US has faced far fewer cases before the commission than many other member states.

State Department representatives further contended that federal agents operating under significant stress could not be expected to act "perfectly," and maintained that any agents found to have violated standards would face penalties, though they were unable to answer specific questions from commissioners about ongoing cases or offer evidence of any such penalties actually being imposed, saying only that they would "write down" the questions and respond later.

The commission and the civil society delegation renewed a request—thus far denied by Washington—for an IACHR delegation to visit the United States, likely Chicago, to assess conditions on the ground.

Petitioners also singled out National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) as a central mechanism of the crackdown, arguing it chills freedom of expression by recasting protesters and dissidents, including anti-capitalist, "anti-Christian," and anti-fascist activists, as "terrorists." Blacklists of prominent leftist actors have also been compiled, with state resources used to prosecute them. "This is the new McCarthyism," the delegation added.

They pointed out that resources once dedicated to investigating internal abuse by immigration enforcement agents have instead been slashed, citing an internal FBI memo halting investigations into Department of Homeland Security officers, and that officials tasked with oversight are now regarded within the agencies as "internal adversaries" rather than watchdogs.

"These are the exact same tactics used by Latin American dictatorships from the 1970s," said Becker. "These tactics have been propped up by the US for decades, and are now coming back here, to be used against Americans," he added. The commission was created in the wake of the rise of military dictatorships in Latin America, backed by the US during the Cold War, including Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Rafael Videla in Argentina, and Hugo Banzer in Bolivia.

Becker also argued, "This is not the first time that agents backed by the US government target priests," alluding to the past abuses and killings of religious opposition leaders in Central America.

Speaking to Drop Site News, Dr. James Cavallaro, former president of IACHR and law faculty at Columbia, Stanford, and Harvard, added that "there is a conviction from those in power that they can suppress dissent" and rule through power and violence to "impose their ideology," where "opposition must be crushed."

This is the first time the commission has held any hearing of this type concerning domestic repression against the US government, which was the main force behind the founding and funding of the IACHR and the Organization of American States (OAS). “For years, the commission has heard testimony about attacks on protesters carried out by some of the region’s most repressive dictatorships. Now, it is the United States that will be called to answer for these abuses,” said Cavallaro.

The US government, including figures in the current administration like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has historically been supportive of the IACHR and the OAS, but may see the IACHR as a new target, as it continues its campaign against international legal organizations including the International Criminal Court.

Locke Bowman, attorney for Reverend David Black, shared, "What happened to Rev. Black was emblematic of the physical abuse that ICE and CBP [Customs and Border Patrol] officers directed at conscientious folks in Chicago, Minneapolis, Portland, and elsewhere around the country who bore witness to the Trump administration's cruel immigration policies with their voices, their prayers, and their cellphone cameras."

He added: "There has been no accountability whatsoever for the officers responsible for the pervasive violations of free speech and human dignity. We turn to the Inter-American Commission to ask that the commission join us in demanding accountability."

At the hearing, the University Network for Human Rights also published a detailed report, submitted as part of its formal petition to the commission, laying out documented instances of excessive force, free expression violations, and lack of accountability tied to the crackdown on ICE protests.

The commission is now expected to weigh whether the evidence and testimony presented warrant further inquiry, including a possible on-the-ground visit to the United States, before issuing findings or referring the matter further within the inter-American human rights system.

The last hearing against the US government, sponsored by the ACLU, was held in the context of dozens of extrajudicial killings by US forces in the Caribbean and Pacific, against "drug boats," which experts say violate US and international law, violate local sovereignty, and kill civilians without due process, all without helping to solve the drug crisis. Previously, the IACHR had held proceedings in the context of detainee treatment at Guantánamo Bay, among other cases.

Speakers and observers at the hearing argued that the commission must be empowered to investigate fully and act decisively, warning that the region is entering a new era of authoritarianism even as many of its democracies remain young and fragile. Crime and migration are increasingly being used as pretexts to suspend democratic norms, enabling interference in elections; extrajudicial killings; bans on opposition parties; declared states of exception; suspended protest rights; the jailing of dissidents; militarized policing; and the dismantling of checks on military, intelligence, and presidential power.

This is the most serious test facing democracy in Latin America since the Cold War, with echoes of the Reagan-era doctrine that once propped up authoritarian allies across the region. Now, the United States is again playing that role, installing, arming, backing, and protecting governments that suppress dissent, and reaching for sanctions, tariffs, and even support for coups to keep them in power.

If I told you that Big Tech billionaires have accomplished something rare in our incredibly divided country, you might laugh and assume I’m joking. But I couldn’t be more serious.

Through the data center buildout boom, Big Tech has done the impossible—they’ve united people from across the political spectrum around a singular issue: against data centers and AI. More than 70% of Americans oppose a data center being built near them.

There was a right way to roll out data center expansion and build support locally and nationally with a few basic but essential ingredients: transparency; local benefit; clean energy; and respect for peoples’ wishes to not be subjected to pollution, noise, added expenses, and wasteful water use. Like the best recipes, this would have been a little slower, deliberate, and less prone to burning.

But this sector—run by the mega rich, unconcerned with the struggles of everyday Americans—has instead delivered a masterclass on how to manufacture dissent.

Our communities, waterways, parks, and kids’ futures are not for sale.

How did they build such intense opposition so quickly?

Let’s start with secrecy. Tech companies—including the giants Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI, and Google—have forced local elected officials across the country to sign non-disclosure agreements while they pursue data centers. The first time local residents hear about a data center being built in their hometown is often after it is already a done deal.

Communities get no say, but they do get higher utility bills. That is the next move in Big Tech’s playbook: increasing costs for communities when life is already unaffordable, so billionaires can become trillionaires.

Next comes round-the-clock noise from cooling fans that emit a constant low hum. When diesel backup generators are being tested or used continuously, it’s like living beside a helicopter taking off. And it’s not just the noise—communities suffer from air pollution impacts too. While many Big Tech companies were formerly champions of clean renewable energy, the Trump era has seen them embrace fossil fuels and power their data centers mostly with coal and methane gas. A Caltech and University of California Riverside study projects that data centers could contribute to 1,300 premature deaths and 600,000 asthma cases across the US in 2028.

Case in point: Microsoft, which just released its 2026 “environmental sustainability report”—quite the Orwellian title given the company’s ballooning pollution. Microsoft’s real-world emissions from powering its data centers have grown 178% from the start of the AI boom in 2020 to 2025, with a 2 million ton increase in carbon dioxide since just last year. That doesn’t include the estimated 15.5 million tons of carbon pollution expected to be emitted by just three mega data center projects announced this year. Microsoft’s voracious appetite for energy reached 37 million megawatt hours (MWh) in 2025—equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of Ireland. That’s what partnering with Chevron gets you.

Trying to spin these numbers into a climate-friendly narrative just adds fuel to the fire—as Microsoft’s chief sustainability officer Melanie Nakagawa saw firsthand recently at a PNW Climate Week event at Seattle City Hall. Audience members posed question after question challenging Nakagawa on the company’s talking points, while protesters chanted, “Microsoft, you can’t hide. We can see your dirty side.”

As if all this was not enough to fuel public backlash, it is clear that our children’s future job prospects are also in jeopardy. Collectively, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have already laid off tens of thousands of employees thanks to AI. It is no wonder that executives delivering commencement speeches about the wonders of AI have been booed off the stage.

“But why stop there?” tech barons seem to ask. How about a data center that threatens the actual river from A River Runs Through It? Yes. Native American land? Sure. National Parks? Certainly. The Great Salt Lake in Utah, a refuge to 12 million migrating birds? Of course. Each overstep brings legions more into the big tent of data center resistance.

Finally, when protest reaches a fever pitch, criminalize it. The US Department of Justice seems to be targeting people who oppose data centers. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella have all embraced President Donald Trump, making this deeply unpopular sector even more despised.

If the tech sector wants these built, they need to do the opposite of everything they’ve done so far. Data centers must be done right, or not at all. Otherwise, community opposition will continue to grow and local politicians will fall in line with public opinion—as we’ve seen in hundreds of jurisdictions across the United States. And if AI’s purpose is to steal our kids’ jobs, create new demand for fossil fuels, and make the rich even richer, there is little hope for a recovery.

Our communities, waterways, parks, and kids’ futures are not for sale. The tech sector has demonstrated incalculable greed and adopted radically antidemocratic practices. It needs to now, somehow, convince people that it cares even a little about communities and our country. If they don’t change course fast, the dissent they manufactured will crush them and their data centers.

Kirkpatrick Sale has it half right in his lament over today’s Democratic Socialists of America, “Michael Harrington is Spinning in His Grave.” The imagined spinning stems from post-mortem distress at what its founding leader would make of the organization today. Sale—best remembered for SDS, his history of Students for a Democratic Society, the seminal 1960s “New Left” organization—calls himself Harrington’s “close friend and traveling companion,” and feels that today’s DSA “has stood on its head the principles that Mike and his colleagues stood for.”

While I cannot claim to have been Harrington’s friend, I did know him and arguably qualify as one of his colleagues, in that I was a member of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, his prior organization whose 1982 merger with the New American Movement created DSA. I remain a member of the organization to this day, and when serving in the Massachusetts House of Representatives was once one of DSOC/DSA’s handful of public elected officials. From my vantage point, while I understand Sale’s real–and Harrington’s imagined–distress at some of what he sees in today’s DSA, not only does he ignore developments that would have made Harrington proud, but I also think his take on Harrington’s politics is not quite right.

As a flat statement, Sale’s contention that DSA “is no longer anything that could be called democratic or socialist” is wrong, but he is not wrong in identifying parts of 2026 DSA that would seem unlikely to have appealed to Harrington. Sale clearly recognizes that the roots of the organization’s dramatic changes—its 20-fold inflation from the 6,000 member group of the 90's—lie in Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. He errs, though, in calling Sanders “a leading DSA figure and its only representative in Congress.” Sanders actually was not then, is not now, and so far as I know has never been an actual member of DSA—counterintuitive as that may seem.

After Sanders introduced “democratic socialism” to millions of American living rooms in his debates with Hillary Clinton and politically “lived to talk about it,” a whole lot of people who’d also been thinking about the idea googled the term and found DSA; some joined. They were then followed by some who indeed did not identify with the democratic socialist tradition but recognized that this was now where the action was—the hazard of success.

The result is generally understood as a “big tent” organization—a tent thus far large enough to contain both US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Democratic New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani—figures for whom I cannot imagine Harrington having anything but admiration—along with caucuses by no means committed to that approach, groups that Harrington would consider bizarre and out of place (as does this writer.) It contains serious divergences between local chapters and a tenuous national organization. How long this tent holds up is anyone’s guess. As for Sale, if he would actually consider the entirety of organization (the best description of which I’ve seen was recently published in a German Left Party newspaper—"Von Degrowth bis ML" Jungle World, July 30, 2026) he might well see similarities with the late years of SDS (an organization Harrington subsequently regretted having failed to productively engage with.)

Among those similarities is a certain not-ready-for-prime-time quality common in organizations trying to cope with the increased glare of the public attention spotlight. Foibles and foolish statements surface from the past. My personal nomination for the dumbest left slogan of recent years is “Defund the police”—its rational kernel of re-evaluating government’s approach to certain types of public safety situations smothered in a seemingly naive call for an end to law enforcement. And yet, even someone like Mamdani who is generally considered to possess masterful political skills—correctly, I think—has had to walk that one back.

On some points of his critique of current DSA, Sale seems perhaps frozen in time, such as his noting that “Mike was an outspoken champion of the new Israel.” That “new Israel” has changed quite a bit in the thirty-seven years since Harrington has been gone. Would he remain a champion of a nation now planning a prison for Palestinians that includes a moat stocked with crocodiles – a proposal temporarily stalled by consideration of the animals’ subsequently repealed protected status? Sure hope not.

But where I really think Sale is just wrong is in essentially arguing that Harrington was not actually a socialist. Yes, Harrington did talk of being “the left wing of the possible,” and that “generally meant working within the Democratic Party”—as do most current DSAers running campaigns to do something for the American working class in the here-and-now. And while Sale is accurate in saying that the DSA of Harrington’s day “put forth a vision of a democratically elected government that would be like those of the Scandinavian countries, providing state services in health, education, housing and the like,” his contention that back then there was “Nowhere stuff about ending capitalism” makes it sound like Sale missed a lot of meetings—and maybe didn’t keep up on his reading so well either. Even the small DSA had differing strands of thinking. One major one was all about imagining how to reach a genuinely democratically controlled economy beyond the “welfare state” and capitalism, something you will find reflected in Harrington’s writing.

So would the imagined Harrington be troubled by some of what he’d see in today’s DSA? Yes, I’m sure he would. And would he be positively thrilled by some of what he found in today’s DSA? Yes, I’m sure he would.