The US labor movement, like the nation at large, stands at a crossroads. The next few years might well determine whether the United States fully descends into an era of electoral autocracy, where democracy has withered and authoritarianism becomes the political norm. This period is also likely to set the future trajectory of the union movement’s power and influence, as the state of democracy and organized labor have long been deeply intertwined.

For decades, the right-wing forces set on steadily eroding our democracy have worked in tandem with a pro-corporate movement that has increasingly marginalized organized labor, creating a ballooning crisis for the working class. Yet this politically hazardous moment also represents an opportunity to overcome deep-seated institutional inertia, drawing elements of a cautious labor movement out of their defensive crouch, and helping unions devise forms of struggle that might both revive the labor movement and renew American democracy.

President Donald Trump’s second term has, in a way, broken a spell. For years, the pre-Trump status quo kept labor locked in a pattern of slow decline even as democracy was increasingly stifled and abridged by voter suppression, gerrymandering, filibusters, and the overweening power of organized money. But the decades-old dysfunctional status quo that gave rise to Trumpism is now crumbling under the weight of the most lawless, antidemocratic, rights-trampling administration this country has seen since the 19th century.

History suggests that fighting to defend and revive democracy in its moment of maximum peril can create a window of opportunity for labor. Past experience—in the United States and other nations—teaches us that, when unions fight to defend democracy and win, they position themselves for periods of explosive growth and increased worker power. It is imperative that the US labor movement grasp this lesson and seize the window of opportunity before it’s too late.

Moving Beyond Magical Thinking

It’s clear that the crisis facing US democracy is deepening. Over the past year, immigrants and the neighbors and coworkers who stood in solidarity with them endured murderous paramilitary occupations in Minneapolis, Chicago, and other cities across the country. The nation has been plunged into war in Iran without prior input from Congress. The president has even suggested the federal government should seize control of the upcoming midterm elections from the states.

This all comes on top of the Supreme Court’s relentless assault on workers’ rights and a worsening affordability crisis that has undermined the stability of working-class families, leading them to wonder whether the system is irretrievably broken.

As important as the coming elections are, unions should firmly reject the comforting delusion that they can recover through the ballot box what power they’ve lost in the workplace.

While our democracy’s crisis deepens, the national labor movement has yet to play a leading role in the resistance against ascendant authoritarianism. By seizing the opportunity to play such a role in the year ahead, labor has the opportunity to reverse its decades-long slide toward irrelevancy by taking up an indispensable role in preserving, expanding, and deepening rights-based democracy.

By fighting to reconstruct our democracy in the face of the mortal threat it now faces, labor could transform itself from a fading force—whose structure and outlook still bear the imprint of the 19th- and 20th-century struggles that birthed it—into a rejuvenated movement ambitious enough to give workers the powerful voice they deserve in the 21st century.

That transformation is only possible, though, if the labor movement moves beyond the magical thinking that if unions can just survive the Trump era then they can help restore a kind of pre-Trump normalcy afterward. The prevailing sentiment among labor’s leaders seems to be that, if they can just help their allies regain control of Congress later this year, they will be able to contain the damage Trump has wrought and coalesce behind an alternative in 2028 that can roll back Trumpism.

As important as the coming elections are, unions should firmly reject the comforting delusion that they can recover through the ballot box what power they’ve lost in the workplace. For if such electoral victories are unaccompanied by a revived, reorganized labor movement, they will leave workers and unions in a situation no different from the one they faced prior to Trump’s rise.

If the labor movement is to have a viable future, unions must not merely survive but capitalize on Trump’s disruption of longstanding norms, assumptions, and institutions, many of which no longer operate to labor’s benefit—if they ever did. That is the path to advance a bold 21st-century vision of inclusive solidarity, equality, rights, and democracy.

Turning Crisis Into Opportunity

How labor might take advantage of Trumpism’s authoritarian excesses to advance such a vision was put on display in Minnesota this winter, where local labor organizations drew on years of experience to play a central role in the resistance to Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) invasion. Unions of janitors, teachers, healthcare workers, and others helped coalesce a resistance that included workers centers, faith communities and clergy, community organizations, immigrants’ rights groups, small businesses, and caring neighbors.

Protesters turned out by the tens of thousands in subzero temperatures, religious leaders endured arrest in acts of civil disobedience, and witnesses turned their cell phones into tools to document ICE malfeasance and protect their neighbors. That resistance was built on a shared common good analysis of power and a recognition of the increasingly baneful influence of billionaires over our political system and economy. Protesters targeted not only ICE but corporations such as Target and Hilton that have either remained silent or openly abetted and profited from Trump’s authoritarian power grab.

Make no mistake: The formal end of Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis scarcely indicates a waning of this administration’s authoritarian ambitions. Unresolved issues regarding the limits of ICE’s legal authority will likely continue to elicit protest and resistance in the streets. In the meantime, new fronts are already opening as the president disregards all restraints on his power to deploy military force abroad and pushes an effort to nationalize the midterm elections at home. As labor movement leaders contemplate the conflicts that might emerge, they should consider lessons from what happened in Minnesota as well as other cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, where local unions played important roles in mobilizing resistance. They should also learn from the experiences of unions in other nations that successfully resisted authoritarian regimes.

Defeating Trump and his allies at the polls will be a Pyrrhic victory if the corporations fueling the right-wing’s anti-worker agenda maintain their influence over our government.

The stories of Brazil, South Korea, and South Africa are cases in point. In these countries, labor movements joined and helped lead the struggles against dictatorship, authoritarianism, and apartheid. In each case, when democracy won out, unions saw massive increases in membership. During Brazil’s transition to democracy in the mid-1980s, work stoppages jumped tenfold, and Brazil’s labor federation, Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT), founded during this period, grew to represent more than 15 million people by 1990.

When South Korea’s dictatorship fell in 1987, a period of militant worker struggle ensued as the number of strikes jumped and union membership surged. In South Africa, the labor movement played a key role in the fight against apartheid, and trade union membership grew dramatically, up from 1.4 million workers and 18% density in 1985 to 3.8 million and 51% by 1998. What’s more, these growth spurts boosted worker power and helped erect union bulwarks to help prevent backsliding into authoritarianism in subsequent years.

In Brazil, labor rallied to defeat President Jair Bolsonaro at the polls in 2022, then opposed his post-defeat coup attempt and supported his successful prosecution. Similarly, South Korean unions played a vital role in defeating an attempted coup in 2024 by threatening a general strike.

As these examples suggest, and as scholars have long noted, labor movements—no matter their national context—tend to expand not in linear fashion but by quantum leaps. The British labor historian Eric J. Hobsbawm described these episodes as “discontinuous” and “explosive” bursts that occur when circumstances force “qualitative innovations in the movement.”

Resisting authoritarians has required such innovations in countries across the globe, which have in turn helped unions to grow. When worker-led movements aligned with pro-democracy forces and succeeded in undermining authoritarian regimes, their victories allowed workers to witness and feel their collective power. Confrontations with authoritarianism in the streets translated into militancy, collective action, and increased organization in the workplace.

The US labor movement’s history also bears out that pattern. While people in the United States have never witnessed a battle with authoritarianism quite like the ones that erupted in South Africa, Brazil, and South Korea, an analogous incubation of explosive growth took place during periods when the US labor movement aligned itself with struggles to defend democracy against what were perceived as existential threats.

The Civil War, waged to defeat the Confederacy and preserve the Union in the 1860s, triggered what W.E.B. Du Bois called a vast “general strike” in which the enslaved transferred their labor “from the Confederate planter to the Northern invader” even as that war fueled the expansion of the national trade unions that would later form the American Federation of Labor (AFL).

The effort to make the world “safe for democracy,” as President Woodrow Wilson pledged during World War I, likewise provided the setting for experimentation with industrial unionism that paved the way for the later formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). And the forging of a US “arsenal of democracy” against fascism during World War II helped lead to the high-water mark of US unionism in the 1950s.

Pivoting Toward Action

The kind of quantum leaps in union growth that have occurred when the US labor movement has linked its fortunes to the future of democracy can happen again. In the growing resistance to Trumpism, we are already seeing glimmers of how this could happen in our time. Unions and allied labor and community organizations provided the backbone of the resistance in Minnesota; employees in the largest and most influential technology labs are confronting bosses who are selling their technology to the government for domestic surveillance and global war; higher education unions are challenging attacks on free speech on university campuses.

Flashes of resistance like these are multiplying. Yet such sparks will not fuel a major breakthrough unless unions at every level—from locals to internationals—embrace the fight against Trump’s authoritarian, billionaire-serving regime and defend democracy by challenging the corporations and Silicon Valley technofascists that are shaping and profiting from Trump’s policies.

Such opposition must go beyond an electoral strategy for 2026 and 2028. Defeating Trump and his allies at the polls will be a Pyrrhic victory if the corporations fueling the right-wing’s anti-worker agenda maintain their influence over our government. Should Democrats regain control of Congress and the White House, the same corporations that have aligned with Trump will be working to sabotage pro-labor policies while doubling down on their AI-obsessed, job-threatening, antidemocratic campaign of economic destruction.

There is no doubt that democracy and workers’ rights are facing down an existential threat. Yet that very threat and the sense of urgency it has spawned have created an opportunity we could not have engineered on our own.

As the experience of other nations and the failure of our own post-Civil War Reconstruction remind us, elites and economic structures that benefit from authoritarian power don’t vanish when antidemocratic regimes crumble; they regroup. We cannot allow such a regrouping to occur post-Trump, for as we have seen over the past 50 years of labor decline under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, a return to the pre-Trump status quo offers no hope for workers or labor.

Naming and challenging the economic actors aligned with Trump is therefore critical if we are to weaken their post-Trump grip on power.

Although their critics have often suggested that US unions have tied their fortunes too closely to politics, in truth, US labor has been reluctant to take up the kind of big political issues that have historically helped push workers into the streets and built workers’ movements in other democracies. We should not be surprised if many national unions hesitate to act decisively. Nor should we expect their leaders to be at the forefront, for despite critics’ endless talk of labor bosses, the movement has never functioned effectively as a top-down, command-and-control institution.

Rather, the national union movement has tended to respond opportunistically to openings that it lacked the institutional will or unity of purpose to create. In the present crisis, local unions in cities around the country—through the common good alliances they’re building to fight ICE, support beleaguered federal workers, and demand billionaires begin paying their fair share—are beginning to create the kind of openings that could conceivably pull the larger movement into the fight.

Evidence on the ground in places like Minnesota already suggests that well-conceived actions by forward-leaning coalitions of the willing can open windows of opportunity and create permission structures capable of drawing more cautious mainstream organizations into the fight. The Minnesota AFL-CIO did not initiate the remarkable “Day of Truth & Freedom,” which triggered a virtual economic shutdown of Minneapolis on January 23, as tens of thousands of residents stayed away from work, school,and shopping. Yet the organizing and alignment-building that preceded that event won the state federation’s support in the days before the action, generating a much larger impact than its initial organizers had expected.

Forward-thinking unions and their allies can replicate this effect in other settings by constructing campaigns that unmask the corporations colluding with the Trump administration’s authoritarian push. Focusing on key sectors and geographies, and engaging in calculated acts of disruption and nonviolent resistance, can not only erect defenses against the administration’s aggression but set the stage for a post-Trump organizing surge.

As longtime veterans of the labor movement, we see three elements as crucial to this strategy. The first is defining our targets expansively and attacking the financial roots of their power. We need a shared analysis of who has power in our communities and nationally, including the key Big Tech titans who openly advocate rolling back democracy and expanding an all-seeing surveillance state.

Having identified these present-day “malefactors of great wealth,” as they were called in the Progressive Era, we need to demand that worker pension funds (state and local government workers’ pension assets alone top $6 trillion) cease investing in these corporations and their anti-worker, antidemocratic agenda. We also need to articulate a platform and visionary policy agenda that focuses on breaking up and limiting their economic and political power. We must find ways to tax their hoarded wealth, reinvesting the revenues in our struggling austerity-starved communities.

A second element involves moving the labor movement into a fighting posture. The past half-century has taken a debilitating toll on the movement’s willingness and capacity to engage in collective action. In 1955, the year the AFL-CIO was formed, the equivalent of 12.1% of union members engaged in a major work stoppage. That level of union militancy vanished long ago in the United States. During the past 25 years, the annual average of participants in major work stoppages has been equal to only 1% of US union members. (The high point of militancy in that period came during the 2018 #RedForEd teacher walkout upheaval, when the equivalent of 3.3% of union members went on strike, a mere fraction of 1950s-level militancy.)

If it’s difficult to imagine a revival of organized labor without a revival of worker militancy, it’s even harder to envision an effective opposition to authoritarianism without it. Political scientist Erica Chenoweth, of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, has theorized that, to succeed, a civil resistance movement requires 3.5% of a population to actively join it. If we are to reach that threshold, then labor will need to massively overperform. Labor can play this role only if it begins to rebuild its badly atrophied capacity for collective action. Unions can begin to recover that capacity by aligning contract dates and strikes; crafting common good bargaining demands that enlist public support for those struggles; and planning national “no work, no school, no shopping” efforts like the one Minnesotans pulled off January 23, and as the May Day Strong campaign recently promoted.

Finally, we need community-labor organizing committees, like those that emerged in Minnesota, to lead large-scale drives in crucial sectors while linking these efforts to the goal of breaking up the big companies that are increasingly dominating our economy and politics alike. As we confront the most aggressive consolidation of capital and economic power this nation has ever seen, our goal cannot be only to unionize the behemoths that are reorganizing our society; we must demand their vast monopoly power be diminished and made accountable to the public good.

There is no doubt that democracy and workers’ rights are facing down an existential threat. Yet that very threat and the sense of urgency it has spawned have created an opportunity we could not have engineered on our own. It has roused growing numbers to the defense of democracy, glaringly exposed the dangers of unchecked corporate power, and catalyzed actions within pockets of the labor movement that have a potential to spread and become transformative.

In the years ahead, if more unions begin to follow the example set by organizers in Minnesota to seize this moment by embracing social movement unionism, they will not only play an indispensable role in defeating Trumpist authoritarianism.

They could also help trigger a 21st-century revival of the US labor movement.

The power politicians have over women’s bodies is one of the oldest tools of control in American history. Throughout that history, the promise of protecting women has been the longtime excuse for excluding women from civic life and limiting our freedom. That history isn’t over.

The Supreme Court will soon decide Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. BPJ—legal cases out of Idaho and West Virginia that will determine whether transgender athletes will be allowed to compete on women’s and girls’ school sports teams.

Idaho’s attorney general has argued that the bans ensure “women’s spaces and sports remain fair, safe, and dedicated to empowering female athletes.” Or, in other words, that we must allow politicians to pass these bans to “protect” women. Although the court’s decision is expected any day now, I have already made mine. Transgender sports bans are not and never have been about protecting women.

I have spent my career fighting to protect the bodily autonomy and legal protections of all women and girls. When people ask me, whether genuinely or in bad faith, why transgender women are unequivocally included in my organization’s work, I tell them the truth: Our fight is the same.

If you have been in the business of fighting for women’s rights and protections as long as I have, you know that women face many threats to their safety and autonomy, but not one of those threats includes transgender people.

The tactics being used to exclude transgender athletes are similar to those once used to keep women from casting a ballot, having a credit card, or getting the healthcare they need.

In 1776, a woman couldn’t own the clothes on her back, much less the home she built. Proponents of the practice said it was “intended for her protection.” One 100 years later, when women were shut out of the legal profession, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of such paternalism, even stating that “man is, or should be, woman’s protector.” And when women were later fighting for the right to abortion, we were told that our bodies are not our own.

It is no wonder, then, that the red herring of protecting women is being deployed in the Trump administration’s executive orders and in the Hecox and BPJ cases. It is the same excuse being used in a flurry of sports bans and anti-transgender bills that have been introduced and implemented around the country over the past six years. Ultimately, transgender sports bans fail to address the real threats women face in sports, like unfair pay and unequal access to training and facilities.

The great irony is that bans against transgender women in women’s sports, women’s bathrooms, and other areas of public life actually endanger all women. The Idaho law that the Hecox case is challenging, for example, requires women and girl student-athletes whose sex is disputed to undergo invasive sex testing, including physical examinations. Athletes in men’s sports are not subject to the same degradation.

For as long as women and girls have been allowed to participate in sports, their bodies have been scrutinized. From non-white women who do not conform to white beauty standards, to girls with short hair or baggy clothes, to those who are deemed too strong, women athletes who do not perform femininity as some deem correctly have been harassed, punished, and forced to face humiliating tests to prove their gender.

It is no accident that Project 2025 and its supporters are pushing both anti-transgender legislation and a rollback of women’s protections against sexual harassment and assault, their right to reproductive healthcare, and even their ability to vote. Today, as the defense teams in Hecox and BPJ seek to police the bodies of transgender women and girls, all women and girls who don’t adhere to society’s rigid standard of femininity will feel the impact.

If you have been in the business of fighting for women’s rights and protections as long as I have, you know that women face many threats to their safety and autonomy, but not one of those threats includes transgender people.

It remains to be seen if the Supreme Court’s decision in Hecox and BPJ will reaffirm what I already know to be true: We women, including transgender women, must be in the fight for liberation together.

Is war simply part of human nature? It’s been absurdly “ordinary” throughout my lifetime, and continually expanding its power and psychological reach.

And unless you’re in the middle of it—unless you’re digging for a dead child beneath a bombed building—war is just an abstract horror. It’s necessary. It’s what keeps us safe. Glory, glory hallelujah.

“You ask: What is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer with one word: Victory—victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.”

Hmmm...

We’ve spent multithousand years now turning war into the building block of civilization. You know: Create an empire. Defend, defend, defend.

This is Britain’s new prime minister, Winston Churchill, speaking in 1940, just as World War II has opened its jaws. In that context, yes, his words make sense, but the paradox hiding in those words—the speech titled “Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat”—is that with victory there may be no survival either. The Good War gave us, of course, the nuclear bomb. It gave us much of the military hell that’s happened in my lifetime. It also gave us, along with a multitrillion-dollar annual global military budget, a sense of eternal necessity to be ready for the next evil monster who wants to get us.

That’s it? We’re stuck with pending war, and actual war, from now on... until we blow up the planet? I don’t believe that at all, but I started digging back into history to get a fuller sense of what others thought. Who are we?

As Steve Taylor, writing some years ago in Psychology Today, noted:

Our view of human nature determines our view of the human race’s future. If we believe that human beings are innately warlike, then there is no reason for us to believe that our future holds anything else but more of the chaos and conflict that has filled our past. But if we believe that conflict is not innate to us and that our aggression is due to external factors rather than being "hard-wired" into us, then we’re entitled to have a different vision of the future.

There seems to be a consensus among historians that we didn’t start organizing for—and waging—war until about 10,000 years ago, during the Neolithic era, when agriculture began replacing hunter-gathering as humanity’s primary source of survival. A key component of agriculture was, and is, possession and development of land, which began sending waves of change through human consciousness: protect, protect, protect! Land turned into property. And thus, for thousands and thousands of years now, people have been collectively re-envisioning their relationship with each other.

Obviously, this is a quickie look at human history. My point is simply to push the idea that war isn’t inevitable, but rather a response to significant change. I now jump ahead to 1895, when New York Journal owner William Randolph Hearst sent a photographer to Cuba to cover the insurrection going on there against Spanish colonial rule. The photographer cabled Hearst that there was no war to cover, to which Hearst responded: “You furnish the pictures. I'll furnish the war.”

And Yellow Journalism was born! And war has remained media’s friend ever since. It’s headline news. There’s fighting, slaughter, and eventual victory—for someone. And the victor controls the narrative.

Well, actually, it’s the media that controls the larger narrative. That is to say, the media creates the context: War is real. It’s what we do. In essence, it’s the bookend of every historical period, the arbiter of social change and, therefore, human evolution. Any questions?

OK, here’s where I start losing my sanity. War may not be part of humanity’s DNA, but it certainly seems to be accepted as though it were. We’ve spent multithousand years now turning war into the building block of civilization. You know: Create an empire. Defend, defend, defend. And ultimately transcend, as a new empire emerges. And then another. Whatever we do in between our wars—live in peace, more or less—may have value, but it’s not all that interesting. It’s just the lull between glorious battle cries.

And thus war starts to seem like who we are. Obviously, it’s part of who we are, because we’ve made it so, but whatever serious value it has in the moment is minimal. Mostly it’s incredibly destructive. It’s an addiction. It’s the lavishly funded antithesis of human connection: with one another, with Planet Earth.

As Rupert Ross writes in his excellent book about Aboriginal wisdom, Returning to the Teachings: “The principle of wholeness thus requires looking for, and responding to, complex interconnections, not single acts of separate individuals. Anything short of that is seen as a naïve response destined to ultimate failure.”

Oh God. Wholeness. Connection. This is the opposite of war. The meaning and complexity of these concepts requires enormous exploration, but for the moment I end with a story about heart-ripping courage and connection—about the nature of peace – that I initially wrote about nine years ago.

This happened in 2017, on a commuter train in Portland, Oregon. A man started screaming racial slurs at—started waging war with—two teenage girls on the train, one of whom was wearing a hajib. He shouted, “Go back to Saudi Arabia!”

Several passengers intervened, standing between the girls and the screamer, pushing him away. The screamer had a knife; he started slashing. Two people were killed, a third was injured. The killer fled the train. He was later arrested. But, oh my God, another act of public horror had occurred. People did what they could. A woman knelt by one of the dying men—Taliesin Namkai-Meche—holding him, comforting him. He said to her, “Tell them, I want everybody to know, I want everybody on the train to know, I love them.”

Those were his last words.

As I hear them again, I realize that this is who we are, even if we don’t know what they mean. They sear the soul with doubt, with cynicism. How can we reclaim them? Do we have it in us to be so deeply loving? The only larger question is this: How do we reclaim—and start creating—our future?

For years, Congress and elected officials across the country have sidestepped one of the clearest economic problems facing working families: The minimum wage no longer keeps pace with the real cost of living.

Today, even full-time work at the federal minimum wage doesn’t pay enough to rent a market-rate two-bedroom apartment anywhere in the country. And too often, politicians have intervened to keep it that way.

For example, I live in Oklahoma, where the state minimum wage has been tied to the federal rate of $7.25 an hour since 2009. As a result, a full-time minimum-wage worker here earns about $15,000 a year before taxes—below the poverty line for an individual and wholly inadequate to survive.

This problem did not happen by accident.

An economy works best when working people can afford to participate in it.

In Oklahoma, some state lawmakers introduced bills to raise the minimum wage year after year—only to see those proposals die without a hearing or a vote. In 2014, the legislature went even further, passing a law that prevented cities and towns from raising local wages, even if local voters and community leaders supported the change.

That meant Oklahomans who wanted to see workers earn a fair wage were left with one remaining option: taking the issue directly to the people.

Again and again, voters in red, blue, and purple states alike have passed measures to raise their minimum wages. In the last decade or so, voters have approved minimum-wage increases in about a dozen states, including Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Maine, Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Washington, plus DC.

In early 2024, Oklahomans turned to the state’s initiative petition process as well. Over 150,00 voters signed a petition to place State Question 832 on the ballot. If approved, SQ 832 will gradually raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour over several years and then index future increases to the Consumer Price Index after 2030.

Yet even as Oklahomans moved toward a vote, politics intervened. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt delayed the election for SQ 832 nearly two years. The wait is about to come to an end on June 16—when voters will finally get their say.

In the meantime, the delay and political games have forced working families in Oklahoma to wait as costs continue to rise. While wages for our lowest-wage workers have been frozen for 17 years, housing, groceries, and utility bills have all become more expensive.

Today, a minimum-wage earner in Oklahoma would need to work about 93 hours a week—more than two full-time jobs—just to afford a modest one-bedroom apartment at fair market rent.

No one should have to work that much simply to survive. That fact is proof that the current economy is failing many of the people who keep our communities running.

Workers most affected by legislative inaction are the very people we rely on every day: home health aides caring for seniors, childcare workers helping parents stay employed, restaurant staff serving meals, retail workers keeping stores open, and hotel staff assisting travelers. Many of these essential workers still struggle to afford basic necessities.

Our working families have spent years shouldering the cost of federal and state inaction. They are paying the costs through financial stress, unstable housing, delayed healthcare, and less time with their families because they are constantly working to stay afloat.

Many other states have already raised the minimum wage above the federal level, recognizing a simple truth: An economy works best when working people can afford to participate in it.

SQ 832 gives Oklahoma voters the chance to move the state forward after years of legislative inaction. On June 16, Oklahoma voters can take an important step themselves.

But this issue should not rest solely on state ballot measures. Workers nationwide deserve wages that keep pace with the real cost of living—a goal that ultimately requires action from Congress, too.

Because hard work should mean stability, not poverty.

It’s easy for us land dwellers to forget that we live on a water planet, more than 70% of it covered by a vast ocean. But we are entering an age—or more accurately, have created an age—when that fact will be impossible to ignore. With global climate change, the seas are rising, yes, but they are also warming, slowly but steadily, and that warmth is now reaching levels that can drive profound changes here on land. Many of those changes have begun, many are on display this year, and some will have seismic consequences going forward.

Almost as shocking as the scale of these changes are the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the very scientific instruments that enable us to understand them. We’ll get there. But first, a little immersion into our water planet to better understand what it means to overheat it and force the ocean to compensate.

Earth, Despite the Name, Is a Water Planet

A more representative, less terra-centric view of our 70% water planet. (Photo by NOAA/NASA GOES via Smithsonian)

A quick refresher on Earth’s ocean. I mean, where did it even come from, all this water?

After Earth’s molten formation 4.6 billion years ago, the planet gradually cooled below the boiling point of water and, fueled by steam released from volcanoes, it rained for thousands of years, filling the low-lying surface of the planet. An era of bombardment by icy asteroids provided a huge additional volume of water. And voila, a water planet was born, almost entirely covered by one massive ocean. Tectonic activity eventually produced large land masses and, over time, both plate movement and global temperature fluctuations have greatly changed the shape of the ocean—and the land, our default perspective—e.g., tying more or less water up in ice. But with the exception of a couple of global ice ages, the liquid ocean has always dominated Earth’s surface. We’ve almost always been a “blue planet,” and always a water planet.

Water Manages Heat—and Thus Life—on Earth

This water was the birthplace of life on Earth. Indeed, water is considered the birthplace of carbon-based life anywhere, which is why scientists search for it in other solar systems. It took at least 500 million years for the first life to form in the ocean (~4.1 billion years ago), and once it did, life remained simple and aquatic for the vast majority of Earth’s history. It took fungi, plants, and especially animals big evolutionary leaps to venture out of the ocean (and much of it did not; today, nearly 80% of Earth’s animal life, measured in biomass, lives in the oceans), first to the tidal zone, then the coasts, and even today, with terrestrial life spanning most dry land, the ocean continues to exert tremendous influence on that life. It does this through a range of mechanisms. Chief among them, our ocean plays the dominant role in managing the Earth’s heat and making large regions of the planet habitable.

The ocean has spared us land dwellers from the true ~36°C consequences of our fossil-fuel burning actions. And we can’t tackle 1.5°C?

A core way the ocean does this is by absorbing solar radiation at tropical latitudes and distributing that heat via vast ocean currents to cooler parts of the world. These currents then distribute water that has cooled at the poles back toward the equator. Without this mechanism, the heat that makes life possible even in the otherwise frigid latitudes would remain concentrated around an intolerably hot equator. In this sense, the oceans are a great regulator of the global climate, tamping down extremes and supporting Goldilocks-style just-right regional climates around the world.

The oceans are also the primary source of moisture and precipitation—basically, weather—to land. As the sun heats ocean surface water, it evaporates, creating humid air that is transported by forces like winds and the Earth’s rotation, delivering precipitation, the water that makes terrestrial life possible.

So, if the role of the ocean in managing Earth’s temperature is fundamental to life on Earth, what happens when we overheat it?

The Ocean: an Unfathomably Huge Heat Buffer

A depiction of how the Earth has dealt with the energy imbalance created mainly by burning fossil fuels and adding heat-trapping molecules to the atmosphere. The oceans have spared us the true brunt of global warming, storing 91% of excess heat, up from 89% when this visual was created three years ago.(Graphic by Copernicus)

The ocean is estimated to have absorbed 91% of the excess heat, caused mainly by the burning of fossil fuels, that has been trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere. This heat storage is possible because of the ocean’s specific heat capacity—i.e., water takes a lot more energy to warm than land or air. Direct absorption of sunlight, the main way the ocean absorbs heat, depends on the level of albedo present, where darker surfaces, like the ocean surface, absorb more of the sun’s energy than light surfaces, like polar ice caps, which reflect it back to space. But other mechanisms, like heat exchange with the atmosphere, warm the ocean, too.

Without that excess-heat absorption and storage in recent decades, life on land would have been thrown into chaos (at best) by skyrocketing temperatures by now. According to one study, the heat taken up by the upper layer of the ocean between 1955 and 2010 was enough to warm the atmosphere by a jaw-dropping 36°C. This massive, climate-mediating role of the ocean puts our thus-far unsuccessful human efforts to keep warming to 1.5 or 2°C in sharp relief. That is, the ocean has spared us land dwellers from the true ~36°C consequences of our fossil-fuel burning actions. And we can’t tackle 1.5°C?

The Buffer Is Getting Thin

The vastness of the ocean means it requires tremendous inputs to respond. But the excess heat that carbon emissions have trapped since the start of the Industrial Revolution is one such tremendous input. Major recent research captures the scale in this way, according to one of a new study’s 50 authors, John Abraham: the heat absorbed by the ocean in 2025 alone is “like 12 Hiroshima bombs being detonated each second, for every minute, hour, and day for the entire year.”

The absorption of that heat means that the average temperature of the oceans has been steadily rising, and now those temperatures are reaching levels that fuel impacts, including on land, that we will be unable to ignore.

Overall, the ocean has broken average temperature records every year for the past nine years. Temperatures have increased most at the surface, where sea surface temperatures have warmed roughly 0.8°C between 1901 and 2020, and recently broke new monthly high records for thirteen consecutive months, starting in mid-2023. But deeper layers are warming, too. The chart below shows ocean heat content at different depths. And while slow ocean circulation constrains the movement of heat to great depths, ~20% of total warming is occurring below 700 meters.

(Credit: ECCO https://ecco-group.org/ohc.htm)

So, Where Are We Today?

The NOAA sea surface temperature (SST) data in the chart below shows 2026 SSTs rising to rival the record-breaking levels of 2024. This is influenced by the formation of a Super El Niño. Outlooks point toward new record high ocean temperatures this year, potentially creating the new hottest year on record for Earth in 2027.

2026 sea surface temperatures are now rivaling those of 2024, the warmest year on record. (Graphic by Copernicus)

Climate change is the clear driver here. Thanks to tools like Climate Central’s Climate Shift Index (CSI), we can now see the role of climate change in daily sea surface temperatures, and thus in marine heatwaves and other anomalies. According to the CSI, this week, both the notable heat in the Indian Ocean and that in the Equatorial Pacific (where the El Niño is forming) are made substantially more likely due to climate change.

The role of climate change in driving warm ocean surface temperatures. (Graphic by Climate Central)

Symptoms of the Ocean’s Fever

These temperatures are now manifesting in impacts around the world and pointing toward accelerating change. In follow up blogs, we will unpack these symptoms in some detail, but to name significant ones:

Warmer water hastens the melting of “ocean-terminating” ice sheets (i.e., land-based ice connected to the ocean), contributing to sea-level rise; creates a warming feedback loop by shrinking sea ice and increasing the ocean-warming albedo affect; enhances ocean stratification, where warmer surface and cooler deep waters fail to mix and redistribute heat; this in turn can drive hypoxic conditions, starving deeper waters of oxygen; can slow major ocean currents (thermohaline circulation), which are driven by changes in density, in turn driven by water temperature and salinity; and can super-charge storm systems, from tropical cyclones to Nor’easters, causing stronger and more rapidly accelerating storms.

We have created an era of ocean heat consequences and now we must figure out how to live in it, even as we work to correct it.

Then there is the acute heat that manifests in marine heatwaves, a condition that is now chronic and widespread in oceans around the world. In 2023, an estimated 96% of the ocean by area experienced a marine heatwave. The most significant heatwaves (all recent) have disrupted marine food webs and caused major ecological harm, resulting in widespread, prolonged coral reef bleaching, large-scale wildlife deaths, and damaged commercial fisheries.

Given the ocean’s significant role in driving or influencing vastly-consequential terrestrial climate patterns, like the Asian Monsoon, ocean overheating has implications for the human systems that are attuned to those patterns, from water supply, to agriculture and food security, energy production, and more. We’ll be tracking ocean temperatures, reporting on developments, and digging into these implications in subsequent blogs.

An Age of Consequence for Warming a Water Planet

The tremendous capacity of the ocean to store away heat meant that the consequences of warming our planet were slower to be made visible. It now means that an enormous amount of excess heat energy now exists in the oceans, to be gradually released to other Earth systems in forms like direct heat to the atmosphere (as we see in El Nino years), melting of ice, and the supply of sea-surface heat that fuels tropical cyclones, to name a few.

It also means that releasing of that heat, slowing ocean warming, and eventually cooling the ocean cannot be accomplished on practical human timescales, but rather in hundreds to thousands of years. We have created an era of ocean heat consequences and now we must figure out how to live in it, even as we work to correct it.

Our Need to Understand Our Changing Planet Meets the Trump Administration

An essential requirement for meeting the era of ocean heat is better understanding how our oceans and climate are changing, and for this, we have global ocean and climate monitoring infrastructure. Here in the US, the Trump administration is attempting—through staff cuts, budget cuts, eliminating data and information (e.g., datasets and websites taken down), and dismantling our monitoring infrastructure—to make ocean, land, and atmospheric change harder to see.

It’s hard to think of a more monumental failure than overheating an ocean planet and handing it off to younger generations.

Most recently, the administration ordered the “descoping” of the National Science Foundation’s Ocean Observing Infrastructure Project, a system of sensing and data gathering infrastructure distributed in the North Atlantic and Pacific. Information is still sparse about this dismantling; the process is not transparent. What’s clear is that, at a time when ocean heat, the slowing of the Gulf Stream, and other major changes are sending shock waves through scientific and decision-making circles, we need greater understanding of what we’re facing, not self-imposed blind spots. Sending taxpayer-funded ships on taxpayer-funded missions to essentially unplug functional taxpayer-funded ocean monitoring systems is baffling. Given the fossil fuel industry’s influence on the Trump agenda, it could look like a massive attempted cover up, except that the crime—warming the planet—is ongoing, and there’s really no covering up the changing climate, because we live here.

The ocean has become easy for the wealthier people of the world to ignore: a place to extract resources and dump waste. But this titan is now rumbling into a new kind of activation, more central character than backdrop. It’s hard to think of a more monumental failure than overheating an ocean planet and handing it off to younger generations. History won’t look kindly on the leaders of this time who ignore the science and the obvious signals. May it reflect that they were forced by their people, in time frames that made a difference, to phase out fossil fuels and invest in a safe and just climate future for all on this rare water planet.

If you’ve ever been to a concert or sporting event, you’ve probably dealt with Ticketmaster.

And if you have, you’ve probably overpaid.

Ticketmaster is the closest thing the live events industry has to a monopoly. It controls the ticketing market at most major American venues and has used that power to squeeze fans with higher prices and limit competition, ultimately making live entertainment more expensive for everyone.

That is why recent legal action against Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation, was so encouraging. A jury ruled in April that it is an operating illegal monopoly. Remedies will follow; the question is when.

Fans should not have to skip seeing their favorite band, team, or performer because a monopolistic corporation has found another way to extract money from them.

For millions of Americans who have watched ticket prices climb due to hidden fees, service charges, and processing costs, this ruling felt like long-overdue accountability.

But one court case alone will not fix a broken marketplace.

The larger problem is not just one company’s conduct in one courtroom. It is a business model built around control. Live Nation and Ticketmaster dominate ticketing, promotion, venues, and resale in ways that make it harder for competitors to enter the market and harder for consumers to find alternatives.

Fans see the results every day. A ticket advertised at one price suddenly costs far more at checkout. Consumers are pushed into one platform with few other options. Artists and venues face enormous pressure to work within the same closed system. The result is a marketplace where one corporation can act as gatekeeper for much of American live entertainment.

That is not how a competitive market is supposed to work.

Of course, Ticketmaster and Live Nation are fighting to protect their monopolistic practices. Company executives have already made clear that they oppose a breakup and intend to challenge court efforts to unwind their power. In all likelihood, the monopoly’s legal challenges will lead to a lengthy appeals process that could lead to consumers not seeing remedies for years.

A breakup of Live Nation and Ticketmaster may ultimately be necessary, because one big player will ultimately squeeze out any competitors in the marketplace.

America has taken similar action before when monopolies became too powerful and too harmful to consumers. Two perfect examples are Standard Oil and the Bell Systems, and the lessons from each are clear: When a company gains too much control over an essential critical goods (like oil) and services (communications), the government has a responsibility to step in and restore competition.

But even before the courts finish their work, Congress can take action right now.

The most important step is to attack the exclusivity arrangements that keep Ticketmaster in control.

Today, venues and artists are locked into deals that leave fans with limited options. If you want to see a major concert or sporting event, Ticketmaster is frequently the only choice—even before the sale begins.

That gatekeeping power is the foundation of Ticketmaster’s monopoly.

Congress should require an open ticket marketplace. Fans should be able to buy tickets through the platform of their choice, not be forced into one company’s ecosystem.

Of course, much of the modern economy already functions this way. Consumers can compare flights, hotels, rental cars across competing platforms, just to name a few. The ticketing industry should work the same way.

Open distribution will give consumers more choice, put downward pressure on fees, and create room for competitors to challenge Ticketmaster’s dominance. It would not be a full breakup, but it would deliver the same benefits while courts continue to consider broader remedies.

Congress should also keep its promise to pass the bipartisan TICKET Act, which would require ticket sellers to display the full price upfront and guarantee refunds for canceled events. Consumers deserve transparency before they buy, not surprise charges after they have already committed.

Fans should not have to skip seeing their favorite band, team, or performer because a monopolistic corporation has found another way to extract money from them.

However, this issue is about more than Ticketmaster. Congress is willing to stand up to concentrated corporate power when it harms consumers.

The live events marketplace should reward competition, transparency, and choice. Right now, it rewards control.

Congress has an opportunity to change that and put fans first. It should take it.

The International Energy Agency has made its May report free to download, and the news is not good for the second and third quarters of this year, i.e. April-September. The IEA hopes things will look up in the fourth quarter, but premises that expectation on an early end to the US conflict with Iran and a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.

At the moment (June 5, 2026), there does not seem much movement on that front, and in fact the US and Iran are not only skirmishing with one another but Iran is making good its threat to hurt US allies like Bahrain and Kuwait every time the US hurts Iran.

One was killed and dozens injured in Kuwait on Wednesday by Iranian Shahed drone barrages that also damaged the airport. Kuwait Airlines shut down briefly but is now flying from a different terminal; it is the only carrier flying from Kuwait. Iran also targeted the HQ of the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain but CENTCOM says the missiles were intercepted. Iran says the attacks were in reaction to US strikes on Qeshm Island, which is a base for Iranian missiles and a radar installation.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Friday Iran time that no progress has been made in talks with the US, though contacts are ongoing.

Last week alone, US petroleum reserves fell by 10.6 million barrels, to the lowest level seen since 2004.

In the meantime, the IEA says that in Q2, ending June 30, world demand for petroleum will be down by 2.45 million barrels a day. This reduction is what economists call demand destruction, and it is a very bad sign. People are just using less petroleum because it is more expensive than it was before the US and Israel attacked Iran on February 28. In the US, gasoline is up by 35% to 50%. In Europe, diesel, which runs trucks, was the equivalent of $6.78 a gallon in February, and is now $8.02 per gallon (€1.82 per liter). If you are running a fleet of trucks over thousands of miles, that is a huge loss, and you might consolidate and cut out less remunerative routes.

Likewise, airlines have cancelled tens of thousands of flights and ticket prices have risen, so some passengers are cancelling or postponing trips. Trucks deliver goods to retail stores, so prices of commodities have gone up, and some customers have put off buying things they don’t desperately need right now. If the retailer doesn’t sell a product, it doesn’t order more, so the trucks don’t roll as often. And if the goods aren’t selling, the factories scale back production, so they use less petroleum, too.

The IEA statistics suggest that the pain is greater for the poorer countries, which makes sense. The wealthy countries’ consumers are paying more and cutting back a bit. Those in the developing world are just going without, as I pointed out on Monday.

The IEA expected the world to produce 106.1 million barrels a day in 2026. It won’t. That projection has been revised down to 102.2 million barrels a day, a reduction of 3.9 million barrels a day. That is severe. But here is the catch. That is the reduction if “flows through the Strait gradually resume from June.” As Qasim al-Ali points out, that is an iffy bet as things now stand. So the shortfall in production will be bigger. Which will slow the world economy even more.

The agency observes, “With Hormuz tanker traffic still restricted, cumulative supply losses from Gulf producers already exceed 1 billion barrels with more than 14 mb/d of oil now shut in, an unprecedented supply shock.”

The shock hasn’t been as bad as it could have been so far, for several reasons. We just saw that there is enormous demand destruction, with the economic slowdown it implies. Also, there was a glut in the oil market going into the crisis, which takes some of the pressure off. The US, Europe, and China are drawing down their Strategic Petroleum Reserves (SPRs) at an alarming rate. That move eases the pain in the short term. But low reserves imply a limited ability to deal with further supply shocks that may occur next year. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has signaled that he’d like to attack Iran again. So the big crisis may be next year this time, when there won’t be any SPR cushion.

Also, Strategic Petroleum Reserves are not infinite. China has enough for six months. At some point governments will become reluctant to draw them down any more, and then the interruption in supplies from the Gulf will hit all that much harder. The reserves held at oil hubs can’t go to zero, moreover. The inventory at Cushing, Oklahoma has fallen from 33 to 24.5 million barrels. But it can’t go lower than 20 million barrels without gumming up the pipelines and refineries.

Last week alone, US petroleum reserves fell by 10.6 million barrels, to the lowest level seen since 2004.

Global reserves of petroleum could fall so low by September, if the crisis is not resolved, that they will reach what analysts call “an operational floor.”

And when that happens, the shortages won’t be able to be finessed anymore, not by demand destruction and not by release of reserves.

And when we cross that threshold, oil shoots suddenly to $200 a barrel, which is an energy crisis apocalypse and spells deep gloom for the global and the US economy.

Our country’s massive weapons budget has directly enabled the US-Israeli led war on Iran that has caused thousands of deaths and is exacerbating the nation’s affordability crisis. Even if the war on Iran ends soon, it will have cost somewhere in the range of $50 billion to $72 billion, or more.

The US weapons and war budget already exceeds $1 trillion, and President Donald Trump and his cronies want even more.

Trump’s Pentagon budget request for FY 2027 includes $95 billion to buy more bombs and missiles, and specifically to restock munitions used in the US-Israel war of aggression on Iran and those fueling ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Palestine and Lebanon. The administration plans to continue to arm Israel, which the Trump National Defense Strategy identifies as “a model ally” that the United States has “an opportunity now to further empower.”

For context, this $95 billion in taxpayer dollars for munitions—if passed—will be 20% more than the US Department of Education’s entire discretionary budget for 2026 ($79 billion). Instead of investing in schools to help them fill the 400,000-plus national teacher shortage and address the nation’s plummeting math and reading scores, the Trump administration and their Republican allies in Congress are investing in missiles to kill more children in billionaire-backed foreign wars.

The human and financial costs of US military aggression will continue to grow unless Congress stops funding endless war.

Key munitions slated for increased production under this proposal include:

• Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM), a new type of short-range ballistic missile. The United States used PRSM in combat for the first time in its most recent illegal attack on Iran (Operation Epic Fury), launching them from US bases in neighboring Middle East countries.

• Tomahawk Guided Cruise Missiles, which are being launched at Iran from Navy warships and submarines stationed in the Persian Gulf, more than 7,000 miles away from the US mainland. An American Tomahawk missile was most likely used to target a girls' elementary school in Iran in March, killing 170 people—almost all children under the age of 12. This criminal attack is one of many that has killed thousands of Iranian civilians.

• Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system missiles, which use advanced radars to track and intercept incoming ballistic missiles. After attacking Iran, the US utilized THAAD and Patriot interceptor missiles to block Iran’s retaliatory strikes bound for Israel and regional US bases and warships the US had used to launch their attack. The enormous price tag of THAAD interceptors—$15.5 million per missile—contributed to the high cost of US munitions expenditure, estimated to exceed $11 billion dollars in the early weeks of the war. Had the US and Israel not initiated a war with Iran, there would be no need to use or replace these costly missile systems, which taxpayers are now being asked to pay for at the expense of basic needs.

Each of the missiles the Department of War wants to produce cost millions—sometimes tens of millions—of taxpayer dollars. And they want to build thousands more. Pentagon contractors, who are already cashing in on the carnage, are set to rake in even higher profits if this budget is approved.

To break down the enormity of these per-unit costs, below are examples of social programs we could have for the price of a single missile, sourced from the National Priorities Project’s trade-off calculator.

Munitions vs. Human Needs Trade-Offs

• A single PrSM missile ($1.6 million) could fund the following for a year:
  • 93 Head Start slots for children; or
  • 182 public housing units; or
  • 186 people receiving Medicaid services for a year; or
  • 704 people receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits; or
  • 3,019 households with solar electricity.

• A single Tomahawk missile ($2.6 million) could fund the following for a year:
  • 151 Head Start slots for children; or
  • 296 public housing units; or
  • 303 people receiving Medicaid services for a year; or
  • 1,144 people receiving SNAP benefits; or
  • 4,906 households with solar electricity.

• A single THAAD interceptor missile ($15.5 million) could fund the following for a year:
  • 901 Head Start slots for children; or
  • 1,770 public housing units; or
  • 1,809 people receiving Medicaid services for a year; or
  • 6,822 people receiving SNAP benefits; or
  • 29,251 households with solar electricity.

Instead of subsidizing war profiteers to kill children and destabilize countries around the world, our government could be delivering real security for our communities. The human and financial costs of US military aggression will continue to grow unless Congress stops funding endless war.

There is still time to fight back. Efforts to stop Trump’s record-setting war budget from growing even larger are currently underway, and need your support. Contact your representatives today and tell them to vote “no” on any increase to the Pentagon budget. Our tax dollars should be supporting families at home, not bombing them abroad.

Public support for the Impeachment of Donald J. Trump is growing by the day. A March 9, 2026 Task Force report by the New York City Bar – dominated by powerful corporate lawyers – was titled “The Crisis Deepens: Congress Must Act Now to Address Escalating Abuses of Executive Power.” The recommendation – Immediate Impeachment of Donald Trump. I don’t recall a division on such a serious domestic policy stand between citizen groups, allied with the Democratic Party on one side and the public and a major corporate bar association on the other side.

Several leaders of national progressive citizen groups are counseling delaying such a drive until after the election in anticipation of a Democratic Party victory in both the House and the Senate. This mirrors what the feeble Democratic Party leadership (Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer) are telling their increasingly restless rank and file in the House and Senate (see the April 11, 2026 article in the New York Times by Annie Karni, “Democrats Warm to Idea of Removing the President”).

Meanwhile, as Trump’s illegal and erratic daily behavior and executive dictates worsen the wrecking of our country, the present majority of Americans favor impeaching Trump and removing him from office is nearing 60 percent.

Consider the pluses for launching an Impeachment drive supported by the people focused on Capitol Hill and a Congress controlled by the Republicans, who are likely to block any vote or formal Committee hearings.

1. It is a great campaign issue – tying together in an authentic way – see Res.1155 – all of Trump’s vicious shredding of the people’s health, safety and economic benefits and constitutional freedoms. Majorities despise openly corrupt Trump, whose support in polls is slumping, but many voters also don’t trust or believe in the wavering Democratic Party, which can’t come up with a credible compact that addresses the needs of the people and a set of political commitments embodied in specific pending bills. A compact with voters should be convincingly advanced and emblazoned across the land.

H.Res.1155’s thirteen Impeachment Articles, introduced by Cong. John Larson (D-CT) and their connection to “kitchen-table necessities” must be highlighted in this year’s political campaigns.

The people want fighters for them who care for them in Washington, D.C., using the citizens’ delegated powers and tax revenues in the interest of the people, the families, and the children. “Impeachment” is our founding fathers’ word for “YOU’RE FIRED,” a phrase used by Tyrant Trump against millions of civil servants, contractors, and other people working to help make a better country.

Regardless of their political labels, just about all families want fair play, justice, protections, and opportunities where they live, work, and raise their children. Articles of Impeachment are constitutional-level MANDATES for a political party and candidates to run on, replacing insincere throw-away lines and bloviating rhetoric so despised by a disgusted populace.

2. Making Impeachment front and center educates and inspires people about how central this Constitution of ours is to their daily lives. The mission of our government is to “promote the general welfare.” Only Congress can spend your money, not the president. Only Congress can take us from peace to war, not the president. Only Congress can define the authority entrenched in the executive branch, not the president or six “Injustices” on the Supreme Court for life. Only Congress can tax or not tax, not the president wielding arbitrary tariffs, charging fees, or riddling the tax code with loopholes and escapes for the super-rich and powerful.

Only “We the People,” not “We the Corporations,” nor “We the Congress,” is in the Preamble to our Constitution, making us the fundamental sovereign power in our country.

3. A grassroots Impeachment movement – already petitions are circulating (see impeachtrumpagain.org) – signals deterrence if Trump, with his rabid, dangerous personality, is thinking of more major disruptions of the November elections. Foreshadowing his invoking the Insurrection Act to take over the gears of the states’ election machinery, the fevered Trump said in January, “…we shouldn’t even have an election” in November. This is subversion of our Republic, and the Constitution for which it stands, beyond the wildest imaginations of our historic overseas enemies.

The most promising reform movements are often sparked and strengthened by the perpetrating outlaws providing continual, incriminating evidence of their own lawlessness. That is the essence of the foul-mouthed, lying, violent, corrupt, delusional, egomaniacal Trump. (See the April 30, 2026 statement from medical professionals in the Congressional Record – “Medical Concerns About President Donald J. Trump and His Fitness For Office.” Remember, with Trump the worst is yet to come as he continues to double down. Even a conservative columnist for the Washington Post, military historian Max Boot, is fearful of what might come abroad from the zigzag actions of an impulsive, fact-deprived Trump with his finger on the nuclear trigger.

All this is to say that what the Democratic Party leadership thinks is prudent to delay until after the election is in reality a very risky position. They are barely in contention to recover the Senate, even with the advantage of having far fewer seats (12) up for election than do the Republicans (20).

The Democrats, who are comfortable taking big bucks from giant corporate PACs, should run WITH and FOR the people. The time for political posturing is over. If their “loser leaders” don’t step aside, they should at least free the rank and file, including the progressive primary winners, to show the way to landslide, by far, the worst GOP in history. That means, for starters, let a willing Rep. Jamie Raskin, ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, have “shadow hearings” on Trump’s many ongoing impeachable offenses. Such a hearing would draw prominent witnesses and great media attention to further galvanize the people.

Since all Democrats on Capitol Hill, if asked, would say “Yes,” Trump should be impeached, but the Party’s upper echelons say taking it to a vote can’t go anywhere so long as the GOP runs Congress. The push for Impeachment doesn’t have to reach a vote. As wild and crazy Trump becomes more of a political disaster for the GOP in November, Republicans will want to save their own political skins over Trump’s.

That’s what happened with defiant Nixon in 1974, after the one-time Watergate scandal, when the GOP jumped ship and forced his resignation. Trump’s crimes are far worse than Nixon’s and intensifying every day. As in 1974, it is before the elections when the GOP feels more insecure. Today Republican members of Congress know their majority is at risk.

In raw politics, sometimes it doesn’t take a vote. It just takes pressure from a President’s Congressional base and, for Tiring Trump, the public humiliation that comes with abandonment.

In addition to all its collateral benefits, an impeachment drive is a road to Trump’s resignation.

By Ralph Nader June 5, 2026 Public support for the Impeachment of Donald J. Trump is growing by the day. A March 9, 2026 Task Force report by the New York City Bar – dominated by powerful corporate lawyers – was titled “The Crisis Deepens: Congress Must Act Now to Address Escalating Abuses of Executive…

Gaza flotilla boats have become like Palestinians. They, like Palestinians, have been attacked, beaten, partially destroyed, and thrown to the four winds by a brutal, violent Israeli government.

Some of the 2026 Gaza flotilla boats were purposefully damaged so severely by Israeli military forces that they sank, like Palestinians who are under the genocidal rubble of endless criminal Israeli bombings.

After two brutal interceptions in international waters in April and May 2026, many resilient Gaza flotilla boats have been found floating in a variety of places around the Mediterranean, just as Palestinians as refugees are found all over the world.

Flotilla boats been found adrift off the Turkish coast, some have been found off Crete, two have been found off Lebanon, one in Egypt, and several have been found near Cyprus.

Palestinians Welcome a Flotilla Boat to Gaza View this post on Instagram A post shared by !Àyhàm

It is terrible to see Bari Weiss, under orders from Trumper owner David Ellison, dismantle "60 Minutes" and the rest of CBS News. CBS was never close to being a paragon of unbiased reporting; the rich always had a disproportionate voice, but the network, and especially "60 Minutes," did much excellent investigative reporting.

The Weiss-Ellison team is explicitly saying that this will no longer be the case under their leadership. Any investigative reporting this crew does will most likely be on President Donald Trump’s political opponents. And the material they present will likely be as distorted as the lies that Trump spouts on a daily basis.

The problem goes well beyond CBS. The Ellison family is also planning to take over CNN through its acquisition of Warner Bros., the parent company. The Trumper trio of Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk own TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, and X, respectively. They do not hide their efforts to use their control of these social media platforms to push their political agenda.

And it goes beyond just outright control. Trump and Brendan Carr, his chair of the Federal Communications Commission, have said that they would use the federal government’s regulatory powers to punish outlets that broadcast material they don’t like. Trump used this threat to extract tribute from both ABC News and CBS News (pre-Weiss) over absurd lawsuits.

The media matter hugely for democracy, much more than campaign financing.

All in all, this is a really bad story. But there are things that can be done other than whine. First, the Ellison’s takeover of Warner is not a done deal. People can protest this monopolization of both movie production and news. Even Trumper politicians can be forced to respond to public pressure. Note the seeming retreat from Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund for his criminal friends. Giving tax dollars to Trump’s chosen criminals was too much for people to stomach, and the Republicans in Congress were forced to nix it.

There are also a large number of independent outlets that continue to do solid reporting. I would put ProPublica at the top of that list, but there are many others. I would also include The New York Times and NPR, despite my many criticisms of both outlets over the years. And there are dozens of smaller publications, way too many for me to list, that people should look to support. Instead of buying something you see advertised on CBS or any other corrupt media outlet, send the money you would have spent to The Nation, In These Times, Payday Report, or any of a number of other independent outlets.

But we really need to go beyond what people cough up out of goodwill. The billionaires have endless money to push their Trumpian nonsense. The nickels and dimes that ordinary people can afford is not a match. We really need to have government support for independent media, and I’m not talking about going back to the old days with the federal government coughing up $500 million a year (0.007% of the budget) for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

We need an individual tax credit or voucher, modeled on the charitable contribution tax deduction. The difference is that this money would be designated for news outlets, and that it would be a credit (say $100), available to everyone, not a deduction from taxes. This way the money would go to the outlets that people find valuable, not the ones the government has chosen. (There is a question of eligibility, but this has generally not been a major problem in qualifying for tax-exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service.)

This route can make a huge amount of money available to support independent reporting. If it was set up nationally and 150 million people took advantage of a $100 credit, that would make $15 billion available to support independent media. That is roughly 300 times ProPublica’s annual budget.

Needless to say, not everyone will use their credit to support media progressives will like. Some may support tabloid-type reporting on Hollywood figures. Some of it will go to support right-wing Fox News- type propaganda. But if even 20% went to support real news, it would be an enormous boon for independent reporting.

And the great thing about this credit is that it can be done at the state and local level, so we don’t have to wait for the forces of good to retake Washington. There have already been some efforts in this direction around the country. In this respect, it’s worth noting that Katie Wilson, Seattle’s new progressive mayor, is a big proponent. If Seattle or some other progressive city or state led the way, it could set an example for others to follow.

To many, this sort of media tax credit will be a new idea. We all know the old line about intellectuals having a hard time with new ideas. But it is really important that people overcome their difficulties. The media matter hugely for democracy, much more than campaign financing. (Sorry, but it’s a bit nuts to think that campaign ads affect voting, but not what people see between the ads.)

I’ve pushed this scheme for a long time, and maybe it’s not the best plan. But if people have better ideas, put them on the table. Whining over the right’s takeover of the media is not a political strategy.

I started in radio news as a teenage reporter at WITL-AM/FM in Lansing, Michigan, then the number one station in the capitol city. I began reporting from the Capitol and City Hall, and was writing and reading the morning newscasts within a year.

The station owner was a hardcore Goldwater Republican, our news director was a liberal but Libertarian-curious Democrat, and I was a long-haired anti-war hippie member of Michigan State University Students for a Democratic Society.

I did the news there for years, and nobody ever told me how to spin it or what to insert or delete. I knew that I couldn’t bias it to reflect my own opinions: the news—accurate, factual, honest information—was sacred.

It was also the cost of our broadcast license, and we all knew it. The widely misunderstood Fairness Doctrine’s main demand was that radio and TV stations “program in the public interest” and that was widely understood to mean straightforward, reliable, faithful-to-reality news at the top and bottom of every hour on radio and an hour-long news block in prime time on TV.

As anti-democracy billionaires continue their march across the American media landscape and pour billions into elections, it falls to us to resist.

We did this—and embraced the Fairness Doctrine—because we knew it was part of the price of freedom, of democracy in our republic. When Thomas Jefferson said he’d rather live in a country with newspapers and no government than in one with a government but no newspapers, he wasn’t knocking government; he’d help create ours and was its president for eight years. He was talking about the vital importance of an honest and free press.

Part of that honesty came from the competition; there were multiple stations in Lansing and most had an in-house news operation like ours, and the ones that didn’t ran the CBS or AP radio newscast twice an hour. Honesty and clarity were essential to get and maintain an audience, as well as hanging onto our license.

Then-President Ronald Reagan ended the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, and now President Donald Trump and his oligarch enablers are trying to bury the entire concept of honest, straightforward news.

Over the past year and a half we’ve watched Brendan Carr, Trump’s hitman at the Federal Communications Commission, go to Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) conferences and brag about how he’s going to assault stations that say things he and Trump dislike. He’s trying to intimidate ABC affiliates into muzzling Jimmy Kimmel—again. And he succeeded in taking down Stephen Colbert.

And a Trump-adjacent billionaire nepo baby has acquired CBS and is systematically stripping it of its journalistic integrity, starting with the evening news and now gutting the nation’s No. 1 news magazine show, "60 Minutes."

Storied journalist and "60 Minutes" reporter Scott Pelley isn’t taking it lying down, even though it’s a virtual certainty that he has the standard non-disparagement clause that most media operations now require for talent, which forbid them to ever speak ill of their former employer should they leave for any reason. He’ll probably get sued for it, but he’s a man committed to the truth.

Trump, David Ellison, Bari Weiss, the billionaire owners of Sinclair, the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News,” the 1,000+ billionaire-owned radio stations across the country, the billionaire-subsidized podcasters, and billionaire-owned social media sites like Facebook and X that have apparently been algorithmically slanted toward Trump’s neofascist movement are all following an ancient script.

Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Hideki Tojo, and Francisco Franco all seized control of the news in their countries in their first year in power. It took both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán two or so years, because they wrote a new script for the takeover: Sue the news outlets and reporters into bankruptcy for “defamation” or “slander,” then have friendly oligarchs take over the outlets.

Orbán even came to CPAC in Dallas to tell Republicans that they should do the same thing as he had done by turning America’s media over to right-wing billionaires. He also told the American CPAC conference in Budapest four years ago, during the Biden administration, that they should do the same in America when Republicans next seized control of the US government.

“Have your own media,” he said. “It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left. The problem is that the Western media is adjusted to the leftist viewpoint. Those who taught reporters in universities already had progressive leftist principles.”

He added:

Of course, the GOP has its media allies but they can’t compete with the mainstream liberal media. My friend Tucker Carlson is the only one who puts himself out there. His show is the most popular. What does it mean? It means programs like his should be broadcasted day and night. Or, as you say, 24/7.

Thus, this is now the Putin-Orbán-Trump formula:

• Manufacture a crisis.
• Declare an “emergency.”
• Seize powers the Constitution doesn’t grant.
• Bypass Congress.
• Bully or ignore the courts.
• Use masked, secret police and the military against your own residents.
• Send people to foreign concentration camps.
• Build concentration camps within the United States.
• Prosecute lawyers and judges.
• Assert control over universities.
• Merge corporate and state interests.
• Cow the media into silence about your corruption and crimes.
• Then call it all “law and order.”

Trump is 18 months into his project, and he’s already taken down the Voice of America, defunded PBS and NPR, seen the Washington Post and LA Times acquired by sycophantic billionaires, and turned CBS over to a nepo-baby billionaire who’s going after CNN next. As Jefferson pointed out, this is how democracies are fatally corrupted, which is apparently Trump and his billionaire enablers’ goal.

Combine that with a capture of the police and prosecutorial agencies of the government so, like in Putin’s Russia, they can harass and prosecute anybody who dares speak up against their destruction of our way of life and you have the classic formula for turning a democratic republic into an oligarchic dictatorship.

The classic symbol of authoritarian governance dating back to ancient Rome and Caligula—violence as entertainment—will come to the White House as musclebound men will beat each other bloody and senseless for spectacle and the amusement of our 80-year-old “president” on our nation’s birthday.

Masked thugs snatching people off the street without warrants and putting them into concentration camps in violation of the Fouth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendments also plays well for the fascist Klan-remnant Republican base, so long as the people they beat, pepper spray, or murder are either dark-skinned or “liberal agitators.”

We’re now way down the road to the complete destruction of America, all in less than two years, as I wrote and warned of in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy in 2020.

The courts are packed with Trump toadies; thousands of lawyers have been purged from government; the FBI is now weaponized against Americans; Blacks and women are being pushed out of senior military commands by an openly white supremacist defense secretary; our history is being whitewashed in national parks, museums, and every federal property; and Trump’s face hangs, 60 feet tall, on multiple federal buildings.

And now they’re coming for the news. If it falls, recovering our republic will be possible—the examples are Hungary with Peter Magyar and Volodymyr Zelenskyy being elected in Ukraine—but very, very difficult. It will take years and cost a fortune both in work, cash, and probably blood, as it did in those two countries.

But we can gain courage from our heroes of this moment. Scott Pelley is unintimidated, telling us bluntly that the new owner and management of CBS tried to force him to lie to us on the air and spin stories so they could please wannabe-Emperor Trump. When they tried to lie their way out of the PR mess Pelley created for them, he immediately called out their falsehoods.

This crisis isn’t limited to CBS: the same nepo-baby billionaire who’s taken over that network also, according to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), now owns, controls, or soon will control:

TikTok, Warner Bros., Paramount, DC Studios, The Discovery Channel, CNN, CBS, HBO, BET, Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, Nickelodeon, MTV, Cartoon Network, Food Network, Travel Channel, Investigation Discovery, Animal Planet, Comedy Central, Showtime, TBS, TLC, HGTV, and more.

Oligarchy and monopoly are two sides of the same anti-democratic fascist coin. They’re always tied together.

As anti-democracy billionaires continue their march across the American media landscape and pour billions into elections, it falls to us to resist.

To register our discontent with those outlets. To boycott them. To demand that our politicians start breaking up the monopolies that Reagan legalized when in 1983 he ordered the Securities and Exchange Commission, FCC, and Federal Trade Commission to stop enforcing the antitrust laws that went all the way back to the 1890s (leading to three decades of “merger mania”).

Monopolies are destructive, but media monopolies are pure Putin-style poison.

We all must become truth tellers, regardless of whether our platforms are, like mine, on radio, TV, and Substack, or if the place we can make our mark and speak our voice is on social media, the local newspaper’s letters to the editor, financial or volunteer support for a fighting progressive politician, or the town square with a protest sign.

We are all Scott Pelley.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

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

Today we discuss:

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky proposes a face-to-face meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and a full ceasefire in a rare open letter. The Kremlin said Putin had not yet seen the letter but welcomed a potential meeting in Moscow.

• More than a dozen GOP lawmakers defy their own leadership — and Trump — by voting with Democrats to approve a major bill to deliver billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine while imposing steep sanctions on Russia. Speaker Mike Johnson had urged his members to oppose the measure, arguing that they should give Trump space to negotiate with Russia.

• Democrats are at each other’s throats about Graham Platner after his latest scandal, after the New York Times released a report with disturbing accounts from several of Platner’s ex-girlfriends, just days before he is set to win the Democratic nomination to face GOP Sen. Susan Collins in Maine, a critical Senate battleground. One woman described Platner grabbing her in ways that left marks and once locking her in a room. She also claimed he knew that his tattoo resembled a Nazi symbol when he got it.

• Italy calls for the creation of a new European defense alliance amid a rising reluctance by the United States to guarantee Europe’s security. The proposal, made by Italy’s defense minister, Guido Crosetto, calls on the EU’s 27 members to form an alliance with 13 other like-minded European nations that are not part of the bloc, including Britain, Norway, Turkey and Ukraine.

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

https://x.com/tedrall

https://x.com/JamarlThomas

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The post Kyiv Calling | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Parents have a lot on their minds. I am a mom of a 3-year-old and a 7-year old and a pediatric pulmonologist. Like many other parents, I am constantly juggling the logistics of family life, school, and work. Keeping my children healthy and safe is a priority.

Food is one example. I try to ensure my children eat healthy, nutritious food that won’t make them sick or contribute to the formation of chronic disease, like some ultra-processed foods can. As the parent of a picky eater, finding healthy foods my children will actually eat can be challenging.

I know that parents do not need another thing to be concerned about. They certainly shouldn’t have to worry about the air their children breathe. But the American Lung Association’s recent “State of the Air” report found that nearly half of kids in the US are breathing unhealthy air. More specifically, the report found that 33.5 million children, or 46% of people under 18 years old in the US, live in an area that received a failing grade for at least one measure of air pollution. More than 7 million children in the United States (10% of all kids) live in a community with failing grades for all three measures studied in the report.

This is unacceptable, especially because studies show that infants, children, and teens as a group are more susceptible to the health impacts of air pollution, and that some of these harms can be lifelong. Compared with adults, infants and children breathe more air relative to their body size and they are frequently playing outside where they are exposed to outdoor air. The fact that the lungs continue to develop throughout childhood plays a role.

Children should not have to pay the price with their health so that polluting industries can maximize their profits.

In the past year, there has been an increasing amount of attention paid to preventing chronic disease in children—for good reason. We all want to set our children up for the healthiest lives possible. But the conversation about chronic disease prevention must include cleaning up air pollution. Air pollution exposure in childhood can cause long-term harm by impeding lung growth, contributing to new asthma cases, causing flareups in people with asthma and other lung conditions, increasing risk of respiratory infections and more.

Air pollution can even harm children before they are born. Air pollution is linked to preterm birth, low birth weight, lower lung capacity, and other adverse birth outcomes. That means that exposure to air pollution during pregnancy and childhood could even set a child up for a lifetime of poor lung health. As children grow into adulthood, breathing air pollution can cause respiratory and cardiovascular harm, asthma attacks, lung cancer, heart attacks, stroke, even early death.

So what is driving the ground-level ozone pollution and particle pollution reported on in “State of the Air?” There are many sources, but the main ones include diesel- and gasoline-powered vehicles, power plants and other industrial sources, emissions from the oil and gas industry, and wildfires. Higher temperatures can exacerbate this, as heat accelerates the production of ozone. While the US has made incredible progress in cleaning up air pollution over the past 50 years, the changing climate is making air pollution more likely to form and more difficult to clean up.

Here is more bad news: While half of the children in the US are breathing unhealthy air, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is working to roll back and repeal safeguards designed to reduce air pollution. In recent months, EPA announced a rule to weaken limits to protect children from mercury and other toxic pollutants from power plants, eliminated the standards to regulate emissions from vehicles, and delayed implementation of a rule to reduce pollution from oil and gas wells. On top of that, EPA recently decided to eliminate health-related data from its analyses of clean air measures, meaning that the costs of pollution to our kids, families, and communities will not be counted as policies are rolled back.

This is particularly upsetting, as I see what an impact air pollution can have on children and families in my day-to-day work as a pediatric pulmonologist. For decades, EPA has calculated the costs of air pollution to the health and livelihood of people, including asthma attacks and premature deaths. EPA is still including the cost to industry in their economic analyses, which means it will be easier to achieve further rollbacks of regulations while omitting the devastating costs to children and communities. Children should not have to pay the price with their health so that polluting industries can maximize their profits.

The good news is that federal clean air protections work when they are enforced. The Clean Air Act is regarded as one of the most successful public health laws in US history. For 55 years, it has protected children, families, and communities from harmful pollution and driven innovation toward a cleaner, healthier future. The Clean Air Act gives EPA the authority and responsibility to assess and clean up air pollution from vehicles, power plants, and industries across the nation. We rely on EPA to protect our lungs. I urge EPA to return to its lifesaving mission of protecting human health by reducing deadly air pollution instead of allowing more of it, and value people’s lives and the health costs of pollution in their rulemaking processes.

As I read the labels on foods, buckle my sons into their car seats, and put their helmets on before they jump onto scooters and bikes, I also check the air quality on my phone. I teach my patients and their parents to do the same. But there is only so much I—or any parent—can do to protect my kids from air pollution.

EPA must protect our air and value our kids’ health. All lungs, especially little lungs, are counting on it.

More than 15 years ago, the Supreme Court removed limits on corporate political spending in its notorious Citizens United decision, ushering in an era of unprecedented influence by moneyed interests.

As a result, a small group of ultra-wealthy donors have skewed the political system to their advantage—and today, social scientists link the growing gap between rich and poor to that seminal 2010 decision.

Federal attempts to overturn the ruling by amending the US Constitution or legislating against corporate spending have repeatedly failed. But now several states are experimenting with new ways to get this flood of corporate money out of politics.

The state of Hawaii just passed a first-of-its-kind law redefining corporations as entities that aren’t allowed to spend money in elections anywhere within the state. The effort could kick off a powerful state-by-state pushback that succeeds where federal efforts failed.

Curtailing corporate influence on the political system is essential at a time when corporations are thriving while ordinary Americans struggle to make ends meet.

This simple idea is the brainchild of Tom Moore, senior fellow for democracy policy at the Center for American Progress. “It’s not regulation; it’s redefinition,” Moore told me. “States create corporations, and they give powers to all the corporations that operate within their states.”

So if the federal government and the Supreme Court enable corporations to influence elections, states can counter that merely by changing the definition of a corporation. And that’s precisely what Hawaii did. Effective starting July 2027, corporations doing business in the state are redefined to “not include the power to spend money or contribute anything of value to influence elections or ballot measures.”

The novel approach is well-protected against legal challenges. Moore explained, “The Supreme Court has said consistently for 200 years that [the power to define corporations] is a matter of state law, that the federal courts don’t have anything to do with that.”

The impact of this on Hawaii’s politics are likely to be monumental. “Basically, in Hawaii politics, local, state, and federal, every dollar that’s spent will be from an individual human being,” said Moore. “It’ll be disclosed, it’ll be voluntary. And that is a gigantic difference from what we have right now.”

Hawaii’s law doesn’t overturn Citizens United—it makes the 2010 ruling meaningless within its borders.

Residents of Montana are pushing a similar effort. Activists there are gathering signatures to place a measure on the November ballot to similarly redefine corporations so they can’t spend money in elections. If the measure passes, it will go into effect in January 2027, six months before Hawaii’s law takes effect.

In fact, according to Moore, Hawaii’s legislators borrowed the language for their bill from Montana’s ballot measure and sped it through their legislative process, pleasantly surprising advocates. Moore is confident the Montana effort will succeed. “They’re in very, very good shape, they’re incredibly well-organized,” he said.

At least 14 states, including New York and California, are currently considering similar bills, and Hawaii’s new law prompted interested lawmakers from two other states to contact Moore. “We’ve had outreach from folks in almost every state,” he said. Given the fact that it’s been less than a year since Moore first published his idea, the speed at which it’s caught on has been remarkable.

Curtailing corporate influence on the political system is essential at a time when corporations are thriving while ordinary Americans struggle to make ends meet. “At the end of the day, corporations don’t actually work for their shareholders, they work for us because we create them through our legislatures, through our laws,” said Moore.

“And if corporations are doing something in our state that we don’t like, we have the power as citizens and working through our legislators to do something about that."

Between March 2023 and December 2024, Todd Blanche earned millions of dollars as Donald Trump’s personal defense lawyer in the Stormy Daniel hush-money case, the Mar-a-Lago documents case, and the election interference case. As Acting Attorney General of the United States, he’s wading through another Trump mess.

And he’s drowning.

The Fund is Dead; Long Live the Fund

On May 18, Trump’s lawyers and the Department of Justice (DOJ) created an “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to settle President Trump’s frivolous lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Even Senate Republicans rebelled against the prospect of using $1.776 billion in taxpayer money as Trump’s slush fund to pay January 6 insurrectionists.

To quell the uprising that was threatening Trump’s legislative agenda, Blanche met with Republicans on Capitol Hill. He made things worse as the weeklong Memorial Day break began.

Todd Blanche—who still operates as if he were Trump’s personal attorney—now has stunning legal problems of his own.

Faced with mounting pressure—from the public, congressional Republicans, and two judges who were questioning the fund’s legality—Blanche told a House committee on June 2 that the fund was not moving forward.

Some senators found comfort in Blanche’s assurances. But the same day, Trump was asked by the New York Post in a podcast interview whether he had dropped the Fund.

Trump said, “No, a court ruled against” it.

Asked again about the fund on June 3, Trump answered: “I love it. I think it’s so important.”

But the controversy over the fund’s status is diverting attention from an issue that is much more important to Trump—and a much bigger problem for Blanche: his signature on a document releasing Trump’s potential tax liabilities.

A Phony Lawsuit Leads to a Collusive Settlement

January 29, 2026: Trump filed a lawsuit against the IRS seeking $10 billion. He claimed that a former IRS contractor had illegally obtained access to and disclosed Trump’s tax returns to media outlets.

In the past, the IRS mounted aggressive defenses to similar claims. Following normal procedure, IRS attorneys prepared a 25-page memorandum outlining the flaws in Trump’s lawsuit and recommending a motion to dismiss it. But the Justice Department didn’t even enter an appearance in the case, much less seek dismissal.

Presiding US District Court Judge Kathleen Williams was concerned that there was no “actual adversity” between the parties because Trump was on both sides of the lawsuit: The president (plaintiff) controlled the IRS (defendant). She ordered Trump’s lawyers and the Justice Department to address the obvious conflict of interest by May 20.

May 18: With the court deadline approaching and Blanche’s DOJ struggling internally over a response to Judge Williams’ order, Trump’s lawyers filed a notice of voluntary dismissal. Believing that she had no choice, Judge Williams entered an order dismissing the case. The court observed that “the Notice [of dismissal] does not reference any settlement or include a stipulation of settlement,” and therefore “there is no settlement of record.”

But unbeknownst to Judge Williams, there was a settlement agreement—also dated May 18. In exchange for dismissing his frivolous case, Trump’s Justice Department would create a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”

May 19: Another element of the settlement agreement emerged. It gained less attention but was far more important to Trump. Without fanfare, the Justice Department revealed an addendum that contained an extraordinary release in favor of Trump and “related or affiliated individuals or parties…” from any matters “currently pending or that could be pending..." before the IRS or other federal government agencies or departments.

The IRS has been a recurring thorn in Trump’s side. In 2022, two of his organizations were found guilty of tax fraud and falsifying business records. The New York Times estimated that the addendum's release covered audits that could have cost Trump more than $100 million on just one of his properties.

When asked who came up with the terms for the settlement, Blanche denied that he had a role: “The president has outside counsel, and their counsel, the Department of Justice, not me.”

Except Blanche—and only Blanche—signed the addendum sealing the deal.

May 29: Judge Williams reacted to a bipartisan group of 35 former federal judges urging her to reopen Trump’s previously dismissed case. The court concluded that it had been presented with “grievous allegations that Plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed this litigation solely to avoid judicial scrutiny of a lawsuit that ‘was collusive from the start’ and was only filed to provide the imprimatur of legality for an unlawful settlement.” She cited allegations that the IRS did not “‘even try[] to defend against Plaintiffs’ claims’ despite their active opposition to nearly identical claims in other litigation” and that “Plaintiffs’ claims were ‘clearly untimely’ and therefore untenable.”

Judge Williams ordered Trump’s lawyers and the Justice Department to address allegations that they had: 1) filed a collusive suit; 2) premised the earlier dismissal notice on deception; and 3) made the court a victim of fraud.

Footnote two of the court's order focused on Blanche:

This addendum, as the non-party movants point out, may be in conflict with internal Department of Justice policies that require the Department to only enter into compromises that are "specifically limited to the immediate subject matter of the claim which was in fact compromised." The addendum was signed only by the Acting Attorney General [Todd Blanche]. (Emphasis supplied)Blanche’s Problems Grow

Apart from Blanche’s conflict of interest problem, under DOJ policy dating to 1934, the attorney general doesn’t even have the legal authority to stop civil tax audits. And after the revelations of President Richard Nixon’s abuse of the IRS, it has been “unlawful for the President and any employee of the Executive Office of the President, among other officials, to directly or indirectly request that the IRS terminate any ongoing audit or investigation of any particular taxpayer.” (Emphasis in original)

If Judge Williams concludes that Trump’s lawyers or Justice Department attorneys deceived her in connection with the original dismissal of the case, even voiding the settlement in its entirety won’t end the matter. The consequences of a lawyer misleading the court survive the case in which it occurs, and those consequences can be profound.

The addendum gives Trump a stunning victory. And Todd Blanche—who still operates as if he were Trump’s personal attorney—now has stunning legal problems of his own.

It’s a classic Trump outcome: Trump wins; his loyalist loses.

One of the biggest threats to the planet is humans’ tendency to think of warm (hot) sunny days as “good” weather. As the planet warms, it is dying—and we will die with it, feeling great the whole time.

The post This Perfect Day appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Okay, here’s what this old man remembers nearly a quarter of a century later.

I was living in New York City (as I still am) when, on September 11, 2001, two hijacked planes full of passengers hit the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, killing almost 3,000 innocent people. Until that moment, of course, such a thing would have been beyond inconceivable, no less watchable on TV, in the United States of America. Had someone written up such a plot with Osama bin Laden and crew in the cast of characters, it would have been treated as the worst kind of unpublishable science fiction.

But, of course, it did indeed happen and, in some strange sense, in its wake (an all-too-appropriate word under the circumstances), our world did indeed seem to flip upside down. That was, of course, after President George W. Bush responded early that October by — god save us! — invading Afghanistan (which, at least to me, was a shock and a half in its own right) and launching his disastrous “Global War on Terror.” Sometime in the weeks that followed, my memory (not exactly trustworthy at almost 82 years of age) is that I saw an article deep inside the print New York Times (which, by the way, I still read daily on actual paper) noting that U.S. soldiers were by then fighting in parts of Afghanistan where the troops of the Soviet Union had struggled endlessly (and lost badly) during that imperial power’s disastrous Afghan war of the previous century, which did indeed help take it down. And that, too, in some grim fashion, stunned me. Talk about mistakes that history had all too clearly signaled should never happen again (and again and again)!

I was at the time (even if barely) online and so I copied that piece into an email and sent it out with a note to a small set of friends. And somehow that began the process that led to TomDispatch.

In a sense, it might even be possible to think of Donald Trump as the possible final chapter in this country’s global war on terror. Think of him, in fact, as the way that war came home.

I soon realized that, thanks to the online world, I could actually read around the globe — the British Guardian, Le Monde Diplomatique, etc. — and that out there in the rest of the universe, there were other ways this ever-stranger world of ours was being looked at than the ones that largely dominated attention here in the U.S., post-9/11. And so, as I began stumbling across ever more pieces that seemed to offer different perspectives on our increasingly eerie world, I started emailing them to a growing list of friends and acquaintances. And after a time — to my complete surprise — people I hardly knew or didn’t know at all emailed me that they wanted to be added to my list. And with those send-outs, I began including little introductory explanatory notes or sets of comments (which launched the future TomDispatch form with my eternal little introductions — literally thousands of them over these nearly 25 years — to every piece I posted at TD except my own).

And I remember exactly the moment when I suddenly realized that something out of the ordinary was happening not just in the ever-stranger world out there, but to me, too. Susan Sontag, a writer I had long admired but didn’t know from a hole in the wall, suddenly emailed me out of the blue and asked to be added to what would become the TomDispatch email list (though it wasn’t yet called that). I was stunned. And soon, I was sending out to — I no longer remember exactly how many — but certainly several hundred people (with more being added every week). And that was the moment when someone I hardly knew (though he, too, was on my mailing list), Hamilton Fish of the Nation Institute, called me out of the blue and asked if I might, in the future, be interested in turning those emails of mine into a website that he then did indeed set up for me and that he — not I — called “TomDispatch.”

Initially, at the new site, I simply did what I had been doing in my emails. I continued to find interesting pieces published elsewhere about our ever stranger and more disturbing world, wrote little introductions of my own, and then put in their headlines and first paragraphs with a link to the full piece wherever it had first appeared. At some point, however, I started writing longer commentaries of my own on a world that seemed to grow stranger by the week. Then it suddenly occurred to me that I knew a surprising number of writers whose voices, I thought, were distinctly needed in the strange post-9/11 world we were already living through.

After all, among other things, I had been an editor, first at Pantheon Books for 15 years in the previous century and later, in this one, at Metropolitan Books, the publishing house my old friend (and Pantheon coeditor) Sara Bershtel had set up. I had, for instance, published Chalmers Johnson’s remarkable book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire at Metropolitan in 2000 to essentially no attention, minimal (and not particularly good) reviews, and few sales. Osama bin Laden’s assault on New York City and Washington, D.C., however, turned that book into a nationwide bestseller and put that title word of his into the language in a big-time fashion (and he would indeed write for TomDispatch memorably in the War on Terror years that followed).

The War on Terror Comes Home, A Terrible Science Fiction Novel

And yes, Osama bin Laden’s 9/11 attacks were indeed a nightmare, but this country responded to them almost unimaginably badly by creating a full-scale, seemingly never-ending set of further nightmares in Afghanistan and Iraq (and, of course, over the years from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to Somalia in Africa, not to speak of all those global CIA “black sites” meant for the torture of Global War on Terror prisoners). And out of all those nightmares and so much more (none of which I ever would have imagined possible once upon a time) came the presidencies (and who would have believed that there could be two of them!) of Donald (the mad duck) Trump.

From the start, TomDispatch was witnessing and reporting on America’s distinctly imperial fate. I was watching with both horror and fascination as the greatest power (perhaps ever) on planet Earth (once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991) was somehow going down, down, down, without even a helping hand from an opposing imperial power. After all, early in this century, China had yet truly to rise and now that it has, it’s not acting like a typical imperial power of history. It has (at least as yet) not launched its own version of a Global War on Terror and its leaders seem remarkably intent not on colonizing the rest of Asia in some unexpected fashion, but on making a fortune producing the world’s green energy machinery (including, at the moment, 80% of global solar energy panels), even if they’re also still outdoing every other country on this planet — despite Donald Trump’s efforts — in burning fossil fuels and pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere).

In some strange fashion, I watched and recorded at TomDispatch just how my country was playing out its grim version of the predictable decline of all imperial powers, historically speaking, in a distinctly up-close-and-personal fashion. And of course, in 2016, this country gave decline a remarkable new meaning on an increasingly strange and disturbed planet by electing Donald J. Trump as president.

As my version of TomDispatch ends (and Nick Turse’s launches), I find myself at my advanced age (with my friends beginning to die around me) in a world I simply could never have imagined. Don’t even get me started on artificial intelligence, which, as Bernie Sanders has pointed out, could someday “replace humans in controlling the planet”! Unreligious as I may be, I’m with the Pope on AI — though perhaps even more so. My own feeling is that no genuine intelligence could have been senseless enough to create such an obvious nightmare to come.

And the War on Terror Comes Home Yet Again in the Form of Donald Trump

In a sense, it might even be possible to think of Donald Trump as the possible final chapter in this country’s global war on terror. Think of him, in fact, as the way that war came home, big time! In his own fashion, he could hardly have been more of a terror and, to make matters so much worse, in 2026, a year expected to be the second hottest in recorded history, he seems remarkably intent on making war not just on Iran, or any other random country like Somalia or Nigeria, but on this very planet itself. Even his anti-immigrant agenda is, as the Guardian recently reported, ensuring that ever more fossil fuels go into the atmosphere via the stunning number of planes deporting those immigrants, helping make ever more areas of the planet ever hotter, and — of course! — ensuring that ever more people will end up as — yes! — migrants.

In short, whether it’s climate change, Iran, or you name it, Donald Trump (the second time around) is already giving heat new meaning.

And none of this (not a bit!) would I have believed in November 2001 when all of it began for me. Had you tried to show me such a future then, I would have simply laughed you out of the room and gone about my business.

In a sense, you might say that the war on terror simply never ended, since my country has never stopped bombing other countries around the world, the latest (but undoubtedly not the last), of course, being Iran. And I suspect that, without that “war,” Donald Trump would have been inconceivable.

Yes, all in all, we humans are truly a strange (and strangely unnerving) crew and, worse yet, over the decades from atomic warfare to full-scale war on the planet itself, we seem eerily driven to develop the means to be ever more destructive.

I’m at an age where my friends are indeed beginning to die and it pains me that, when I go, I’ll be leaving such a mess of an all-American planet to my poor grandchildren. They truly deserve better. And once upon a time (if I even imagined them coming into this world of ours), I might have hoped that someday in the then-distant future I would have signed off TomDispatch by claiming that I was indeed leaving them on at least a modestly better planet than when I began so long ago.

No such luck, of course, and that makes me sad indeed. I mean, we already knew that we were truly on the planet from hell when, on his third try, Donald Trump actually managed to garner 49.8% of the popular vote and win another four unbelievable years as president of the anything but United States.

Yes, anyone (even I) certainly could have hoped for better. In fact, I certainly did — even if such hopes proved unrealistic indeed. Of course, one can (and should) still hope that the next great imperial power, obviously China (if, in fact, there are to be more great powers on this ever less great planet of ours), might indeed prove more reasonable and less Trumpian. At least, that country’s leadership plans to make a fortune off the decarbonization of Planet Earth by producing the equipment, from electric vehicles to solar panels, needed to green this world of ours (even while continuing to pour record amounts of fossil fuels into the atmosphere).

Let’s also not forget that other former great power, Russia, which continues fighting its miserable war in Ukraine into its fifth year, while, of course, pouring ever more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (as all wars now do), while only recently launching actual nuclear missiles (though with dummy warheads instead of nuclear payloads) against Ukraine. (Just what we need on this planet of ours, of course — the threat of actual nuclear warfare!)

Yes, all in all, we humans are truly a strange (and strangely unnerving) crew and, worse yet, over the decades from atomic warfare to full-scale war on the planet itself, we seem eerily driven to develop the means to be ever more destructive. And with that grimly in mind and only wishing things were better, let me sign off on almost 25 years at TomDispatch. Sigh…

Last week, the Cuban Center for Molecular Immunology, or CIM, announced a major health breakthrough with VAXIRA, a vaccine treatment for lung cancer. This is a remarkable achievement, made only more impressive by the fact that this is Cuba’s second lung cancer vaccine.

The vaccine stops the progression of cancer by developing the patient’s immune system to fight off cancer cells. This has proven to significantly prolong people’s survival. Since 2013, the vaccine has been monitored, trialed, and tested on more than 1,300 patients. Over a 10-year period, patients survived a median of 76.6 months, with 20% of all patients who were given VAXIRA experiencing unexpected long-term survival. Last year, VAXIRA was awarded the Technological Innovation Prize in Cuba for its contribution to healthcare in Cuba. This is an incredible feat for humanity and the battle against cancer—and it is being done by a country facing the longest and most severe blockade in history.

In 2011, Cuba developed CIMAvax, which remains the world’s only approved lung cancer vaccine. This vaccine works to induce the immune system to stop the growth of cancer cells and slow the progression of tumors. This vaccine has already treated more than 5,000 people across the world and many more thousands in Cuba itself. Given the immense significance of the vaccine, the United States agreed to a special arrangement to trial the vaccine in the US. The Roswell Park Cancer Institute in New York has been running clinical trials with CIM since 2018. They have run the first clinical trials of CIMAvax in the United States. The very same nation that is imposing a genocidal blockade on Cuba is also benefiting from the historic breakthroughs in healthcare.

These major developments in medicine to treat cancer are not Cuba’s only awe-inspiring health achievements.

The truth is that even with this genocidal blockade, Cuba maintains the principles of its revolution and the motivation to better the world.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Cuba produced five vaccines: Ablada, Soberana 01, Soberana 02, Soberana Plus, and Mambisa. Cuba had one of the lowest Covid-19 deaths in the Western Hemisphere—and by 2021, Cuba’s fatality rate was just 0.59% compared with the 2.2% worldwide average. The vaccines were produced without the need for specialist refrigeration, which meant they could be easily transported and also distributed across the world to places where accessing such infrastructure would be impossible. Quickly, Venezuela, Iran, Vietnam, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Mexico all picked up the vaccine to protect their population.

By 2023, Cuba had the third-highest rate of vaccinations per 100,000 people. Despite the fact that the US banned the country from importing the syringes necessary to immunize its own population. In this context, Cuba was the first country in the world to vaccinate toddlers and children, as part of their push to reopen schools safely.

Cuba, like the United States, offered its Covid-19 vaccines to the world. While Cuba donated vaccines to St. Vincent and the Grenadines and sold them as cheaply as they could, the US bullied countries into putting up their assets, like embassy buildings and military bases, in order to access vaccines. This was to “protect” against future legal challenges that vaccine recipients might file against the manufacturer of the vaccine. This profit motive was a major cause for the vaccine apartheid in the distribution of Covid-19 protection across the world. As of August 2024, in high-income countries, more than 222 doses had been distributed per 100 people. While in low-income countries, this was less than 46. In 2021, US pharmaceutical companies that produced Covid-19 vaccines (Moderna, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson) collected an eye-watering revenue of $31 billion. The concept that companies and shareholders should make money from a pandemic should be utterly outrageous.

Biotechnology

Cuba leads the world in its vaccine breakthroughs. But, how is this all possible? It is not by accident that Cuba is able to develop world-leading health breakthroughs in medicine. Cuba has developed a world-class biotechnological sector that is state-owned and operates in the interests of the people, not profit. There are no profit motives to producing vaccines; research and development are for the collective benefit, and resources are shared to better the process of scientific development. This is quite the opposite situation in capitalist countries, where biotechnology is a major competition dominated by pharmaceutical companies motivated entirely by profits, which often means that when there are major developments in health, they are not accessible to people.

In 1981, Cuba opened the Biological Research Center, despite the blockade stopping the entry of equipment, materials, access to research journals, and medicines. In the first 9 years, the center produced three products. Between 1990 and 2000, it produced 18, and between 2001 and 2010, it produced more than 40. Today, that figure continues to grow. The center flourished into a world-class biotechnological sector that has made major health breakthroughs. Cuba produced the world’s first human vaccine to contain a synthetic antigen for Haemophilus influenzae type B.

In 1989, Cuba produced the world’s first Meningitis B vaccine during a severe outbreak of the disease in the country. This was the first ever vaccine produced to protect against Meningitis B and was exported to protect people in countries across Latin America. The US approved its first vaccine for Meningitis B in 2014.

Cuba once had among the lowest rates of infant mortality in the world. But since 2019, with the increase of more than 250 additional sanctions on Cuba, the rates of infant mortality have risen by 148%.

The following year, Cuba produced a vaccine for Hepatitis B. They joined just five other countries as a manufacturer of Hep B vaccines: France, South Korea, the United States, Indonesia, and Britain. As the US blockade made it virtually impossible and far too expensive to import the vaccine, Cuba produced their own and eliminated Hepatitis B in under 15 years.

In 2006, Cuba developed Heberprot-P, the only medicine in the world to reduce the amputation rate of patients with diabetic foot ulcers by 75%. Within 10 years, it was used in 23 countries. It has treated more than 400,000 people with foot ulcers. In 2024, the United States even broke its own blockade and approved it for trials and use. The very thought that Americans who suffer from diabetes might be treated by Cuban medicine while being fed propaganda against Cuba and funding a war against the very Cuban researchers and scientists helping them reveals how inhumane this blockade is.

By 2015, Cuba became the first country in the world to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis. Cuba managed this because of its socialist model, which is the same reason why it is not celebrated in mainstream media and looked to as a center for health advances in the US. This world historical achievement came as a result of Cuba’s universal health system that integrated maternal and child health programs with HIV and STI treatment. Cuba has one of the lowest rates of AIDS in the world and the lowest in the Americas, thanks to the free provision of antiretroviral treatment it has been distributing since 2001. Its vaccination programs have eradicated diseases that continue to cause death and suffering around the world, including diphtheria in 1979, measles in 1993, whooping cough in 1994, and rubella in 1995. Cuba has also developed the highest control of blood pressure in the world.

The same principles that led Cuba to produce world-leading medical breakthroughs are similar to its success in eliminating diseases. Cuba’s vaccination model is motivated by protecting its people. The National Immunization Program, which began in 1962, has saved the lives of at least 560,000 children who would have otherwise contracted diseases if it weren’t for the program. This is motivated by four directives: equity of vaccine distribution; integration of vaccination in primary healthcare; the inclusion of active community participation; and providing vaccines free of charge. These guiding principles indicate how central the health of all society is, not corporate interests or greed.

Cuba’s approach to providing healthcare is indicative of the nature of the revolution: to serve Cubans and the oppressed across the world. Before the revolution in 1959, 300 children were paralyzed by polio each year. One of the first measures by the revolutionary government was immunization for Cuban society. In 1962, the polio campaign launched through mobilizing 100,000 members of newly founded revolutionary committees to conduct a population census and vaccinate all children. Within months, polio was eradicated in Cuba, making it one of the first countries in the world to do so. Polio is still a leading cause of paralysis and death across the world.

These health achievements have massively benefited people across the world through access to new treatments and cures, affordable and accessible vaccines and medicines, and models for healthcare. But another awe-inspiring element of Cuba’s healthcare is its international solidarity.

Cuba has restored the eyesight for more than 4 million people with its joint program with Venezuela, Operation Miracle. They have sent more than 600,000 health workers on medical missions to 160 countries in response to pandemics, epidemics, natural disasters, and other crises where no other country would act. They have and continue to train doctors from the Global South for free so they go back to their home countries to practice medicine.

Cuba makes these miraculous achievements for humanity while facing a blockade that causes shortages of medicines in pharmacies across Cuba; blocks researchers from accessing health journals; and prevents the entry of equipment, spare parts, and laboratory materials that could make it easier and faster to conduct research. The US blockade should be seen as an attack on humanity itself. This is a genocidal act of war against a population that exports doctors across the world by an empire that exports bombs, fighter jets, and invading soldiers.

Cuba once had among the lowest rates of infant mortality in the world. But since 2019, with the increase of more than 250 additional sanctions on Cuba, the rates of infant mortality have risen by 148%. It is estimated that this has cost 1,800 lives of infants. This is the material result of a blockade that intends to kill, punish, and destroy a country for asserting its own sovereignty. Yet, even still, Cuba’s infant mortality rate is lower than that in the United States. The US enforces its blockade on Cuba so that it can try to claim Cuba is a “failed state,” which also means its universal, free healthcare system “fails”; all so it can maintain its abysmal healthcare system that operates purely for profit, despite the level of death, bankruptcy, and suffering it causes to poor Americans.

The truth is that even with this genocidal blockade, Cuba maintains the principles of its revolution and the motivation to better the world.

Like Fidel Castro said in 2003: “Our country does not drop bombs on other peoples, nor does it send thousands of planes to bomb cities; our country does not possess nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, or biological weapons. Our country’s tens of thousands of scientists and doctors have been educated in the idea of saving lives. It would absolutely contradict this concept to put a scientist or a doctor to work to produce substances, bacteria, or viruses to kill other human beings.”