The war in Iran has forced many Americans to confront what their tax dollars make them party to. After the US has killed hundreds of Iranian children in school and bombed the country’s civilian infrastructure, more and more Americans are considering tax refusal. It’s a tradition older than the republic itself. Quakers resisted military taxes in the colonies, sometimes at the price of seized property. Thomas David Thoreau was jailed for refusing a poll tax in protest of slavery and the Mexican-American War. And hundreds of thousands resisted the telephone tax during the Vietnam War, when the National War Tax Resistance counted 192 centers in 45 states.

Call that “freedom.”

In an age of ascendant religious liberty, a fortunate class of Americans enjoys it in special measure. Employers, schools, religious institutions, and corporations have won exemption after exemption from ordinary legal duties they claim violate their religious faith. Creationist craft store chains no longer have to pay for contraceptive coverage for their employees. Public school football coaches may launch disruptive displays of prayer at midfield. For every belief, the court has seemed ready with a baroque exception.

Except one, of course: the pacifist’s objection to financing war. One of the oldest religious and conscience claims in American life has been a consistent loser in court. Even the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993, which helped make religious freedom claims an all-conquering force in American law, worked no change for war-tax resisters. In the late 1990s, Quaker objectors tried RFRA and First Amendment claims in federal court. Some offered to pay their full income-tax bill if the money could be directed to nonmilitary uses; others withheld the military portion and redirected it to life-sustaining organizations. All lost.

Once it’s war your conscience abhors, and not condoms, the show stops, and the killing must go on.

Mushrooms have fared better. In 2001, a mushroom company challenged a federal program that required it to help pay for generic mushroom advertising. The company argued that it could not be made to fund a message it did not believe: that mushrooms were mushrooms, and that its own were no better than anyone else’s. The Supreme Court agreed, finding the program violated the First Amendment. Free speech principles have thus protected the consciences of corporations from being wounded by mushroom advertising. But when pacifists, under a similar theory, have objected to financing war? Court after court has told them to get over it.

In this way, American law has built a vast sanctuary for conservative religious conscience and libertarian free speech sensibilities. That sanctuary ends at the gates of the only thing more powerful: the national-security state. Once it’s war your conscience abhors, and not condoms, the show stops, and the killing must go on.

Courts might be able to throw up their hands and say there’s nothing they can do, but Congress has no such excuse. It has let the most tepid solution to conscientious objection to war taxation languish for decades. The Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Act, most recently reintroduced in 2021, would deposit the income, estate, and gift tax payments of conscientious objectors and religious pacifists into a fund reserved for nonmilitary uses. Americans who object to war would no longer have to choose between violating the law and violating their conscience. Instead, the bill would offer them a third way: Pay in full, but not for war.

The Peace Tax Fund Act has been reintroduced for five decades, and a more embarrassingly modest intervention is hard to imagine. The bill reduces neither military spending nor objectors’ tax burden. It would offer accommodations less burdensome than those given to other religious-liberty claimants. And it’s been backed in different iterations over the years by giants like John Lewis, the “conscience of Congress”; Ron Dellums, the first Black chair of the House Armed Services Committee; and Mark Hatfield, an evangelical Republican, World War II veteran, and one of the first Americans to witness Hiroshima after the atomic bombing.

All of this raises the question: so why hasn’t it passed? If Congress cannot enact even this most minimal of bills—one that leaves the military budget untouched and still requires objectors to pay their full federal tax burden—then the objection cannot really be about administrative inconvenience or military necessity. Indeed, the Peace Tax Fund is far more dangerous than that. By making war taxation visible as a moral choice, the act would make Americans do what the national-security state is desperate to prevent them from doing: think.

That would begin on the otherwise dry tax form, where it would be hard to miss a new option to object to war. A taxpayer might wonder why it exists. She might begin to question how the military and intelligence agencies spend their combined trillion-dollar budget. She might wonder why the country goes to war and plucks foreign leaders from their beds without public debate. The national-security state has fought hard to keep those questions at bay by keeping citizens in the dark. Questions, after all, can quickly lead to demands for answers. The Peace Tax Fund would encourage them by inviting Americans to take a hard look at the killing done in their names, and that kind of public scrutiny is an existential threat to the military and intelligence agencies accustomed to immunity from it.

This is the only explanation for an otherwise odd situation. Congress appears more willing to lose money to scattered acts of illegal tax resistance than to provide conscientious objectors with a legal pathway to objection. That makes sense once one sees that legal objection is more dangerous to the national-security state than evasion. The Peace Tax Fund Act would legitimize opposition to the military-industrial complex and its casual violence by transforming that opposition into a recognized claim of conscience. Once the state recognizes those claims as the stuff of deep moral conviction rather than the anarchical fringe, it undermines the military-industrial complex’s favorite tactic: ridiculing opponents as traitors and stigmatizing their claims as beyond the pale.

The consciences of objectors and pacifists do not command the tender political theater reserved for the craft store chain, the football coach, or the mushroom company. But that should tell opponents of the American war machine something hopeful: The people who operate it do not believe it can survive public scrutiny. The task, then, is to drag more of that machinery into the light, where everyday Americans might begin to ask whether the country uses its power for good in the world—or for them.

Most discussion of artificial intelligence and work is about the future: which jobs may disappear, which skills may lose value, which workers may be replaced. But for millions of gig workers, who work for online platforms such as Uber, this future is already here.

Algorithms set their pay, assign their tasks, monitor their performance, and determine whether they can keep working at all. The issue is not just that technology may someday replace workers. It is that companies are already using it to control them while shirking the responsibilities that normally come with that kind of control. This leaves many workers with unstable pay, dangerous conditions, and little recourse when something goes wrong. But this could be about to change.

From June 1 to 12 in Geneva, governments will enter a final round of negotiations at the International Labour Organization (ILO), the United Nations agency dedicated to labor rights, over the first binding global standard for what is called platform work. This new treaty would regulate jobs managed through apps and websites, from taxis and delivery to home care, cleaning, and online piecework. Governments will decide whether companies that control this work should be required to treat workers as employees and comply with labor protections.

The stakes go well beyond the gig economy. Increasingly, workers report to an algorithmic boss in hospitals, care work, domestic labor, and beyond. The question is whether governments will set rules for how companies use these systems to manage work or let companies keep writing the terms themselves.

If a business model works only because it evades workers’ rights, that is an argument for regulation, not against it.

Gig work today offers a preview of what happens when they do. These companies promise flexibility and independence. For many workers, the reality is low and unstable pay; dangerous conditions; and no sick leave, unemployment insurance, or retirement benefits.

This isn’t a flaw in the system. It is the system. Companies use software to manage workers closely, then contracts to deny responsibility for them. The result is familiar cost-shifting in a new technological form: Workers absorb the risks while companies maintain control.

And it is scaling fast. DoorDash, which now operates in 30 countries, reported global revenue growth of 38% from the same period the previous year in the fourth quarter of 2025, and Uber, operational in about 70 countries, ranked ninth on Fortune’s 2025 list of the 100 fastest-growing public companies, with earnings per share growing 445% over three years. These companies create value by shifting costs off the company’s books and onto everyone else.

In recent months, Human Rights Watch spoke with workers in 10 countries. They described the same kinds of abuse everywhere.

In Beirut, we spoke with Apraham Orfalian, 74, who has worked for Uber since 2015. In October 2024, a passenger held a knife to his throat, forced him out of his car, and stole his vehicle and his phone. Without the car, he lost his income. Without sick leave, workers’ compensation, or support from Uber, he had to rely on his siblings to get by. “We are workers for Uber,” he said. “We generate income for them. At least they should show responsibility.”

In Gulf countries, delivery workers described cycling in extreme heat because they felt they could not afford to refuse orders, even when conditions were unsafe. In India, a worker injured on the job was left to cover his own medical costs. In the UK, another went months without income or injury compensation after being attacked while working.

Some governments have started to act. Mexico adopted legislation extending social security and labor protections to some full-time platform workers. In India, worker protests pushed the government to restrict 10-minute delivery promises that put dangerous pressure on delivery workers. Courts in the UK, France, Spain, and Italy have recognized rights that companies tried hard to avoid. But these gains are uneven and fragile. Without global standards, companies can keep exploiting gaps.

Strong ILO standards should start from a basic principle: If a company controls the worker, it should bear the responsibilities that come with that control. That means a presumption of employment in which companies exercise employer-like power; pay for all working time, which often includes waiting for assignments; safety protections; social security; protection from arbitrary deactivation; and a meaningful right to understand and challenge algorithmic decisions that shape pay, ratings, and access to work.

Some governments are trying to weaken those protections before they are written. They want standards that simply defer to weak national laws and define workers narrowly, and promise transparency without giving workers real power to challenge the decisions that shape their livelihoods.

Companies that depend on gig workers will say stronger rules would destroy flexibility. But that flexibility doesn’t really exist for many workers. Even if a worker can choose when to log on, they deserve protection from poverty wages, arbitrary dismissal, and uncompensated injury. If a business model works only because it evades workers’ rights, that is an argument for regulation, not against it.

This is about more than how companies that use gig workers operate. It is about whether labor law can keep pace with the way companies now organize labor. If workers cannot understand or challenge the systems that govern their work, software will become an efficient way to exercise control without accountability.

Governments meeting in Geneva can still set limits and protect workers’ rights. They should use that power before exploitation becomes the blueprint.

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:

• The US House of Representatives votes under the War Powers Act to stop halt Trump’s war on Iran as the conflict drags into a fourth month. The vote was a striking commentary on just how much Republicans are losing patience with Trump and his war. It was a sign that a small but significant number of them are less willing to give him more time to try and figure a way out.

• Israel and Lebanon agreed to a full ceasefire, contingent on Hezbollah halting attacks and withdrawing its operatives from the area south of the Litani River in Lebanon, according to a joint statement from the U.S., Israel and Lebanon.

• Protests have grown against plans by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, to develop luxury properties on an ecologically sensitive portion of the Albanian coast. The protests, in the capital and in coastal towns, have become a lightning rod for widespread discontent in Albania, long one of Europe’s poorest countries. For years, the plans — a $1.4 billion luxury hotel complex on an island off the coast and another development on a peninsula that is home to sensitive wetlands — have generated concerns about conservation and transparency.

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The post Congress to Trump: Stop the War! | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

While Washington’s war with Iran drags on, month after month, without any end in sight, the world is witnessing the very real limits of US global power. As President Donald Trump lurches repeatedly from threats of devastation to promises of peace, it’s becoming increasingly clear that US military might is no longer capable of subduing even a mid-sized power like Iran, much less holding the rest of the world in its thrall.

Amid all the drama of air raids, drone strikes, and naval blockades, there are deeper geopolitical forces at play that lend a lasting historical import to events in the Persian Gulf—dynamics best seen by comparing two newspaper editorials with revealing similarities despite the 80 years separating their publication.

Writing in 1942, during some of Britain’s darkest days in World War II, the editors of the venerable London Times looked far beyond the relentless German attacks on their forces in Egypt or the Nazi U-Boat sinkings of Royal Navy ships in the Atlantic to predict their empire’s future with an uncommon prescience. With its contradictory motto of “Imperium et Libertas” (Empire and Liberty), the vast British Empire, which still covered a quarter of the globe, had already become what those editors called “a self-liquidating concern.” Once the “temporary circumstances” that had allowed Britain’s ascent—naval dominance, industrial preeminence, and “the relative weakness of rival states”—faded, that empire’s “ultimate reliance on coercion” could no longer hold. Ready for self-governance, Britain’s many colonies, the editors suggested, would soon begin breaking away and so eclipse the empire. And that prediction couldn’t have been more accurate. Within five years of that editorial’s publication, the British Empire had already started to break apart.

Writing in a May 2026 edition of The New York Times, contributing editor Christopher Caldwell made a strikingly similar prediction about the future of US global hegemony. Under the provocative headline “America Is Officially an Empire in Decline,” Caldwell noted some unsettling parallels between the fate of America today and Great Britain 80 years ago. Back then, England was “deindustrializing, overcommitted, complacent,” and found itself “essentially bankrupt” by the end of World War II. Apart from its “ill-fated attempt” to seize the Suez Canal from Egypt in 1956, however, it managed to decolonize in a successful fashion by giving up “territories it could no longer afford.” As he points out, Britain even “wound up on reasonably good terms with its former colonial possessions.”

Probe deeper still for the causes of the ongoing all-American imperial decline and you’ll come to the most fundamental but generally least noted factor in the rise and fall of every world empire for the past 500 years: energy innovation.

At the start of his second term as president in 2025, Donald Trump, Caldwell continued, “had a chance of pulling off something similar” by withdrawing “to a less expansive sphere of influence” and “refocusing American attention on the Western Hemisphere.” Caldwell considered that strategy potentially “workable” since “imperial systems, whatever you call them, last only as long as their means are adequate to their ends.” Instead of keeping to that plan, however, Trump “has overextended the empire dangerously” by his intervention in Iran, which has now become nothing less than a “watershed in the decline of the American empire.”

To test the probability of Caldwell’s prediction coming true, we need to go beyond the immediacy of the Iran crisis to explore both the deeper causes of US global decline and its likely long-term consequences for both the United States and the rest of the world.

Explaining US Imperial Decline

Since most Americans came late (if at all) to the realization that their country was indeed an imperial power, and a stunningly powerful one at that, they have generally remained oblivious to its aging and the inevitable erosion of global power that accompanies such aging. Ever since, in the late 18th century, English scholar Edward Gibbon published his monumental, multi-volume study, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, succeeding imperial rulers have tended to assume that their imperial realms would last, like ancient Rome’s, half a millennium or more. Adolf Hitler, with his dream of “the Thousand-Year Reich,” was hardly the only one to share such an illusion.

But the modern age, with its rapid economic and technological change, has only accelerated imperial decline. Britain’s sprawling global empire lasted just 90 years (1857-1947) and France’s African empire, covering a quarter of that continent, was about the same, while the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe barely lasted 40 years (1945-1989). So, for the US global imperium to have survived for 80 years (1945-2026) should be considered the most anyone could realistically expect for a modern empire.

Since the US-led global order—exemplified by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO)—had indeed presided over 80 years of sustained global economic growth, there is a distinctly American twist to the British concept of the “self-liquidating concern.” As the rest of the world enjoyed a rapid economic recovery from the ravages of World War II, America’s share of the global economy declined from an overwhelmingly dominant 50% in 1945 to less than half that figure today. Using an index called PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) that measures the real value of economic growth, the IMF calculates that, in 2026, China is producing 20% of global economic output, the US just 15%, and the European Union (EU) 14%.

But the relative economic decline of the United States should by no means be the crucial measure of its failure. Quite the opposite, in fact. It should be considered a tribute to Washington’s success in leading the world economy to unprecedented prosperity. In those 80 years since the end of World War II, the US economy has grown fast, but many other nations have grown faster still. An economic giant that could structure the global economy as it wished in 1945, the US must now negotiate the terms of trade with a host of peer rivals—whether economic powers like China; major players like India and Japan; or a growing number of regional blocs like the European Union, South America’s Mercosur, and Asia’s ASEAN.

Probe deeper for the forces now driving America’s decline and you’ll notice an underlying geopolitical dimension. As I explained in my new book, Cold War on Five Continents, the US achieved its global hegemony after World War II by maintaining an unwavering geostrategic dominance over the Eurasian land mass. Through its military alliances at both axial ends of that vast continent—the multilateral North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the West and five bilateral defense pacts with countries ranging from Japan to Australia in the east—the US imposed an “Iron Curtain” of 5,000 miles of anti-communist containment across Eurasia. Using those axial ends as anchors, the US encircled the continent with three naval armadas, hundreds of military bases, and thousands of jet aircraft. With Moscow geopolitically isolated and Beijing still a developing power, Washington could simply sit back and wait for the Soviet Union’s increasingly stagnant socialist economy to collapse and its dozens of restive satellite states to break free—as they all did between 1989 and 1991.

In the 35 years since that great Cold War victory, Washington’s foreign policy elites have pursued policies that might all too accurately be branded “bipartisan mismanagement” of the US geopolitical position in Eurasia. As home to 70% of the world’s population and an even greater share of its productivity, that continent remains the epicenter of global power (as it has been for the past 500 years). No nation can contend for world leadership without competing for geopolitical influence there.

From 2001 to 2021, both Democratic and Republican administrations oversaw long-term military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq that cost thousands of American lives, millions of civilian deaths, and trillions of dollars in treasure. While Washington was wasting an estimated $5.8 trillion on those pointless, profitless wars, China’s foreign currency reserves surged from just $200 billion in 2001 to a massive $4 trillion by 2014. Drawing on such unprecedented reserves, President Xi Jinping launched his trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative that quickly laid down a grid of railroads, roads, pipelines, and ports across Eurasia from the Baltic to the South China Sea. By the time American troops finished their humiliating retreat from Afghanistan in August 2021, China had become the dominant power in Central Asia and the US position in Eurasia was starting to crumble.

In his second term, President Trump’s foreign policy has further weakened the US global position. At the western axial end of the Eurasian continent, he compromised NATO, the largest and longest-lasting alliance in modern military history, by pressing Denmark, a founding member of the alliance, to cede its sovereign territory of Greenland, creating a serious crisis and compelling the Europeans to begin acting autonomously when it came to both trade and defense issues.

At the eastern end of Eurasia, Trump’s intervention in Iran and the blocking of key oil supplies to Asia, thanks to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, weakened longstanding bilateral alliances with Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea. The thousands of missiles the US has fired at Iran have also reduced its ability to defend the island of Taiwan and forced Washington to begin withdrawing stocks of missiles from South Korea—exposing both the limits of its military power and Asia’s lowered priority.

As The New York Times editorial board put it after Donald Trump’s recent Beijing summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping (where the US president showed a “worrisome lack of interest” in Taiwan), “America’s inability to defeat Iran’s much smaller military has raised questions about whether it could help defend Taiwan from a mainland invasion.” If China ultimately takes that island, the US defensive perimeter in the Pacific would be pushed back from the “first island chain” (Japan-Taiwan-the Philippines) to the “second island chain” (Japan-Guam)—inflicting a major geopolitical blow on the US by crippling its capacity to aid its Asian allies.

More broadly, the Trump administration’s plans, as stated in its recent National Security Strategy, for “a readjustment of our global military presence” by shifting forces into the Western Hemisphere would be tantamount, if fully implemented, to a unilateral surrender in what foreign policy experts have come to call “the new Cold War” with Beijing and Moscow.

Imperial Energy

Probe deeper still for the causes of the ongoing all-American imperial decline and you’ll come to the most fundamental but generally least noted factor in the rise and fall of every world empire for the past 500 years: energy innovation.

In the 16th century, Spain and Portugal maximized the caloric output of the human body by developing the slave plantation, whose phenomenal profitability allowed a uniquely cruel form of commercial agriculture to spread from West Africa along the coast of Brazil to the Caribbean and then, of course, to the American South. A century later, the Dutch mastered wind power, using windmills to saw uniform planks to build efficient sailing ships that won them a commercial empire stretching from the Spice Islands of Indonesia to the island of Manhattan. In the 19th century, Britain’s industrial revolution developed coal-fired steam engines for factories, trains, and ships that facilitated its conquest of colonies covering a quarter of the globe. After 1945, America’s ascent to global hegemony would be synonymous with the rise of petroleum, quickly supplanting coal as the world’s primary form of energy and leading to repeated US interventions in the Middle East for the past 70 years.

Weighing all the changes likely to accompany Washington’s Trump-era retreat from global leadership, I suspect that, surprisingly enough, the world may have good reason to regret the passing of Washington’s world order in the years to come.

In recent years, however, Beijing has launched a revolution in green energy from the sun and wind whose accelerating pace, driven by its sheer economic efficiency, has the potential to transform much of the global economy, while simultaneously making China the world’s preeminent economic power. With surprising speed, solar-powered electrical generation has become 41% less expensive (and wind 53% cheaper) than the least expensive form of fossil fuel. In addition, engineering innovations in battery design for both driving and electrical storage are likely to make the cost of carbon-fueled power prohibitively expensive within a decade or less.

Under the Biden administration, Washington invested a trillion dollars to fund America’s baby steps toward a green-energy future. However, as soon as Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, he began working to smother that infant initiative in its cradle beneath a sheaf of executive orders—canceling coastal wind farms, voiding the tax credit for electric vehicles (EVs), and opening vast stretches of US offshore waters for yet more oil and natural gas drilling.

Meanwhile, China increased its total power generation by 16% in 2025, with solar and wind energy accounting for half of its total capacity. And just as China already produces 80% of the global supply of solar panels, so its recent innovations in EV battery design have allowed it to rack up 70% of global electric vehicle production. While China’s auto industry surged in the last five years to capture 24% of global car production in 2025 (and is projected to reach 35% in just four more years), Detroit’s share has fallen to only 16%, driven in part by its costly retreat from EV production since Trump’s return to office.

Given rapid advances in battery range, charge time, and temperature range, it’s only a matter of years before the low-cost cars rolling out of China’s vast robotic factories supplant legacy brands and come to dominate the global auto market. With the Detroit vehicle industry, America’s largest manufacturing sector, now struggling to survive (along with other industries wedded to overpriced carbon-generated fuel), the future of much of US manufacturing looks increasingly dim.

The Consequences of America’s Decline

Yes, the world of a Pax Americana in the previous century (though imperial America never could fully avoid wars) is gone. And a world without active US international leadership will not necessarily be a better place. Without a single superpower or set of superpowers to backstop otherwise toothless resolutions from the United Nations, international relations in a post-American world order will likely be both more complex and possibly more conflict-ridden as well.

In the new multipolar world likely to emerge in the next decade (if not sooner), even major countries like the United States and China will undoubtedly find themselves exercising their asymmetric power ever closer to home. While some global areas will suffer from localized rivalries—Beijing versus Tokyo in East Asia, Ankara versus Cairo and Riyadh in the Middle East—regional associations like ASEAN, Mercosur, and the European Union are likely to play an increasingly important role in forging diplomatic consensus and mediating local conflicts.

Instead of the bipolar rivalry of the old Cold War era or American-led interventions in places like Afghanistan, Panama, or Kuwait during the more recent decades of its unipolar power, in the future regional rivals will likely wage bitter local wars in hot spots around the globe over boundaries, the control of minerals, water rights, or climate-change refugees. To take but one example, Ethiopia, an arid, landlocked, overcrowded nation of 140 million people in East Africa, faces potential conflicts with Egypt over the Nile’s headwaters, with Eritrea over port access, and with Somalia over the fate of the breakaway state of Somaliland.

Though their scope might be narrow, regional wars can potentially cause massive human carnage, as shown by the Second Congo War (1998-2003) that ravaged eastern Congo, as neighboring states like Rwanda and warlord armies like the murderous M-23 militia battled over mineral rights, killing an estimated 5.4 million people. That made it the world’s bloodiest (if least noticed) armed conflict since World War II. Even today, more than 20 years later, warlord armies are still battling for control of the eastern Congo, capturing cities and displacing more than a million refugees.

On the wider world stage, the international institutions that the US created at the peak of its power in the 1940s (the UN, the IMF, and the WTO) might survive. However, the liberal international principles that once inspired Washington’s world order—human rights, humanitarian aid, respect for refugees, women’s rights, and immutable national sovereignty—are likely to fade, even as aspirational ideals. (They already are, of course, in Donald Trump’s America.) And that will undoubtedly prove to be a genuine loss. After all, even under our current world order, a combination of Western foreign aid, Chinese economic growth, and World Bank loans led to a significant reduction in the percentage of the world’s population living under “extreme poverty” (less than $2.00 a day) from 44% in 1981 to just 9% in 2019.

Now, of course, while leading the West in shifting funds from foreign aid to military defense, the second Trump administration has already abolished the US Agency for International Development (USAID), cutting food and medication aid globally that could cause an extra 14 million deaths by 2030. Such humanitarian efforts and their supporting principles are already giving way to a far more transactional world order, exemplified by China’s current foreign policy, grounded in mutual self-interest and largely devoid of ethical concerns.

One of the major achievements of Washington’s old order, the avoidance of a world war among the superpowers for more than eight decades, could face increasing strain in the coming years. Instead of pooling scarce resources to cope with the challenge of climate change, the planet’s leading nations are continuing to raise their military budgets, producing a 13% increase in spending on nuclear weapons in 2023 alone. To keep pace with China and Russia in a great power rivalry that is clearly in danger of becoming a new Cold War, the US began revamping its nuclear triad in 2010 at a projected cost of $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years. And mindful that nuclear-armed North Korea remains safe while Iran has been ravaged, even medium-sized states will undoubtedly be seeking the security of nuclear arms, potentially producing a dangerous proliferation of such world-ending weaponry.

Weighing all the changes likely to accompany Washington’s Trump-era retreat from global leadership, I suspect that, surprisingly enough, the world may have good reason to regret the passing of Washington’s world order in the years to come. Maybe it was growing up on US Army bases where patriotism was pervasive; maybe it was the way I hero-worshipped my dad when he came back from fighting communism in the Korean War; or perhaps it was saluting the US flag every day in Mrs. Stabler’s 6th-grade class. Whether my view comes from those personal wellsprings or from my professional training as an historian of empires, I’m pretty sure that, within the narrow limits imperialism allows, America’s imperial era did give the world at least some chance for progress.

Despite its many excesses and a frequent failure to honor its own principles, imperial America did offer this planet more chances for change than the great powers that preceded it and possibly the ones likely to succeed it as well. For all those reasons, I say, “Requiescat in pace (rest in peace), Pax Americana, you will be missed.”

One of the secret strengths of right-wing propagandists is their ability to say a few words that are so wrong on so many levels that they take an essay to untwist. Case in point: a recent Fox News post on Facebook. Summarizing a longer article on contemporary political movements, the post reads in full:

Anti-Israel agitators. Climate activists. Communist groups.

Experts warn a growing activist network united by anti-American sentiment—and in some cases China-linked funding networks—is now targeting America’s AI infrastructure and industrial power.

Fox News Digital found many of the same movements protesting side-by-side across the country, including groups opposing new AI data centers over energy and environmental concerns.

“What all of these protests have in common… is that anti-American trend within them,” Hudson Institute fellow Zineb Riboua told Fox News Digital.

While disguised as serious findings from a scholarly exposé about subversive trends in America, the article mostly just lumps together all the usual enemies of corporate, far-right interests and labels them all “anti-American.” Even as pure propaganda, it’s unsubtle and uncreative.

But with the Trump administration’s recent issuance of National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7)—a sweeping memo that tries to connect beliefs like these to terrorism and calls upon law enforcement to treat them accordingly—such propaganda now carries more sinister implications.

What unites them is that they are enemies of one aspect or another of the fascist techno-petro-state the Trump administration is attempting to cement. And they all have very real, very valid reasons to hold their positions.

Taken together, the groups in question make up a significant majority of the American population. What unites them is not anti-American sentiment. What unites them is that they are enemies of one aspect or another of the fascist techno-petro-state the Trump administration is attempting to cement. And they all have very real, very valid reasons to hold their positions.

Anti-Israel Agitators

Labeling critics of US-Israeli policy “anti-Israel agitators” is meant to dismiss them as irrational, antisemitic extremists—and, according to Fox News, anti-American. While there’s no room in this article to litigate the issue of Israel-Palestine, suffice it to say the reality is far more complex.

Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza over the last two and a half years, combined with decades of abuse of Palestinians leading up to the terror attacks of October 7, has made them a global pariah. Making matters worse, the US government has given billions of dollars to fund that genocide and provided bipartisan diplomatic cover for it. In addition, many believe—because Trump administration officials have suggested as much—that Israel goaded President Donald Trump into our unpopular, costly, disastrous war with Iran.

All this adds up to a steadily worsening public perception of Israel, with 60% of US adults now having an unfavorable view, according to Pew. Which begs the question: Can 60% of Americans be anti-American?

Climate Activists and Communists

Perennial foes of the big business interests Fox News and the Republican Party represent, neither climate activists nor communists, sadly, have a significant presence in contemporary American politics. But Fox News would never miss an opportunity to put such scary words in front of their audience.

The idea here, to the extent that there is one, is that concern for the climate limits our energy and defensive options, weakening us as our biggest rival, China, is ascendent. Of course there are ulterior motives. One of the biggest goals of the right-wing project is to simply shut down all green energy, as President Trump essentially did in 2025, so that he and the oil tycoons who prop him up can benefit.

There’s nothing anti-American about wanting clean or renewable energy. The Constitution doesn’t mandate that we be a petrostate. It’s also largely agnostic on the question of economic organization. Labeling environmentalism or leftist economic beliefs anti-American is an attempt to shut down the debate before it can happen—lest the American people choose a path that inconveniences the mega rich who are harming the environment and hoarding all the money.

AI Data Center Opponents

Tech oligarchs and corporate pundits repeatedly insist that America needs to win the AI race against China, virtually no matter the cost. But the American people are not yet on board. According to Gallup, 70% of Americans oppose AI data center construction in their communities. And this is largely a bipartisan consensus, with Republicans being only slightly more supportive of data center construction.

Either way, sticking the anti-American label on data center opposition is a tough sell for Fox News. The environmental cost and resource drain of data centers is already impacting communities. At the same time, tech oligarchs like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are frighteningly candid about how AI, which compiles our accumulated knowledge and then sells it back to us in the form of slop, is intended to permanently displace the workforce. There is no serious plan in place to support the millions of people they’re threatening to make unemployed.

No surprise, then, that the massive push for this technology is meeting resistance all over the country. Even in conservative states like Utah, not widely known as a hotbed for political activism, residents are demanding that Big Tech be held accountable for their reckless AI ambitions.

The Chinese Anti-American Subversion Theory

The full article throws together more scary bad guys: “Agitators united by Chinese money, hate for America target data centers… linking environmental, Islamist, and far-left political movements… Climate activists, anti-Israel protesters, and other activist movements with very different agendas have become strange bedfellows united by a shared disdain for America and funding from China.”

The accusation that any of these causes are backed by “Chinese money” is loose and largely unsubstantiated. The article names one accused funder, as if supporting causes was a crime in and of itself: Neville Roy Singham, an American expat who now lives in China. And the only justification that any of this is “anti-American” comes from vague warnings about falling behind China (which, by many metrics, we did long ago) and the fact that China dominates much of the green energy market—all the more reason, one would think, to invest in our own.

Guilt by association can be an effective propaganda technique, though. If Fox can connect all these disparate causes under the banner of anti-Americanism and Chinese subversion, they can encourage their audience to reject any sympathies they may be tempted to feel with such movements—in case they don’t want a data center in their county, say, or they see what’s been done to Gaza.

The Danger of Being Labeled Anti-American Under NSPM-7

In declaring all these causes and the people who support them anti-American, Fox News is essentially designating the majority of Americans as official enemies under NSPM-7. According to NSPM-7, “anti-Americanism” is part of a cabal of threats, along with anti-capitalism; anti-Christianity; “extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” Each of these beliefs is now treated as an indicator of violent, terroristic inclinations. As such, falling under any such label carries with it the threat of surveillance, investigation, prosecution, and other potential law enforcement actions.

Exactly how, where, and when NSPM-7 has been or will be used is still tough to know. That’s part of what makes it so dangerous: The language is so sweeping that, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of New York, it could target “pretty much anyone who isn’t a MAGA faithful.” The purpose here is to clearly define what a proper American ought to believe, to chill any dissent with that agenda, and to lay the groundwork for criminal investigations of any American who’s uncooperative.

As things continue to break down in this country, and as Trump continues to become more emboldened even as his approval rating tanks, it’s not hard to imagine him weaponizing his corrupt FBI to go after, say, a data center protest organizer. Actually, this may already be happening: leaked reports, covered extensively by Wired, claim that multiple US agencies are already monitoring what they call “anti-tech extremism.” Such so-called extremism apparently includes activities as banal as photography and other constitutionally protected activities.

It’s awfully bold of Fox News to declare the majority of Americans anti-American. Such is the potency of right-wing propaganda’s complete disregard for nuance, truth, or morality. To untangle the minds of the people who consume this stuff on a regular basis, and actually believe it, is a thoroughly challenging project that will likely take generations.

With politics as heated as they are right now, and so close to getting even further out of hand with directives like NSPM-7, it’s important to reiterate the obvious: Not only are environmental protection, support for Palestine, and anti-AI activism legitimate and well-reasoned, they’re also all perfectly American.

Weeks have passed since Anthropic launched Claude Mythos Preview—artificial intelligence deemed too dangerous for public use. The alarm bells ring even louder today.

US banks are currently rushing to plug holes in their cybersecurity, and for good reason. Mythos Preview can autonomously find and exploit software vulnerabilities that would take human experts weeks or months to discover, leaving no security system safe. The new AI system even found a vulnerability in OpenBSD, which aims to be “the most secure operating system” in the world. This vulnerability went unnoticed by human experts for 27 years.

To quote JPMorganChase’s Jamie Dimon, Mythos Preview represents “very heightened risk”—risk that could affect billions of global consumers. Like most AI “breakthroughs,” this is just the latest and greatest in a series of rapid advances. CrowdStrike already noted an 89 percent increase in attacks by AI-enabled adversaries in 2025. AI is predictably bringing earth-shaking capabilities faster than society can adapt.

That is now. What happens in a few years time, when individual hackers and criminal entities have access to AI more powerful than Mythos Preview?

But AI hacking isn’t the scariest thing about Mythos Preview. Much more significant, and dangerous, is what Anthropic plans to do next: Use Mythos Preview to build the next iteration of AI, and the next, and the next. Anthropic and other frontier AI companies are increasingly using AI to automate research and development of new AI models.

AI may offer tremendous benefits, but how can it possibly be worth the one-in-six chance of doom the average researcher assigns?

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calls it the “feedback loop,” whereby “the current generation of AI autonomously builds the next.” Another name for it is recursive self-improvement (RSI). Back in the 1960s, English mathematician I. J. Good predicted that an “ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines.”

Already in 2025, Sam Altman was bragging about having “a larval version of recursive self-improvement” at OpenAI and declared “the takeoff has started.” This January, Jan Leike, former Head of Alignment at OpenAI announced “the recursive self-improvement process has begun” at Anthropic (his current employer), while cautioning, that “alignment is not solved.”

As crazy as it sounds, major developers really are handing over AI coding tasks to AI itself, and are serious about taking humans out of the loop entirely. Meanwhile, brand-new start-ups focused on RSI are reaching multi-billion dollar valuations.

We should of course treat industry claims with some degree of skepticism. But even OpenAI whistleblower Daniel Kokotajlo is expecting self-improvement by the middle of 2027. And academics at top AI conferences are organizing workshops on RSI, a topic that would’ve gotten you laughed out of the room a few years ago.

What comes next? According to Kokotajlo and other experts, RSI could take AI from human-level to vastly super-human within a few months. If you think AI that competes with top government hackers is scary, what about AI that can invent new deadly diseases, or even completely new fields of science?

Self-improvement could also lead to completely new paradigms in AI that render today’s (already limited) guardrails and safety tests obsolete. Remember: All of this would happen without humans in the loop. This is like taking our hands off the steering wheel at the same time as we’re slamming the accelerator. If this isn’t a recipe for disaster, what is?

Earlier this year, I co-authored a study where we interviewed some of the world’s top AI researchers from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI as well as nonprofits and academic institutions like Stanford University. Out of the 25 researchers we interviewed, 20 cited the automation of AI R&D (in other words, RSI) as one of the most severe and urgent risks from AI. And this is all set to unfold outside the public eye: 17 of the 25 said they expect AIs with such capabilities to be reserved for internal use. This was all before the launch of Mythos Preview.

Humanity must be able to control the pace and direction of AI.

AI accelerationists like to call people like me “doomers” for pointing out basic, publicly verifiable facts about the expectations and aspirations of the AI industry. But they are often the ones openly hoping for humanity’s demise. No, really. Last year, xAI fired an employee who called a commenter on social media “selfish” for saying “I would prefer my child to live” rather than be wiped out by AI.

It can be hard to believe that such deranged plans and ideologies are being openly pursued, while governments stand idly by. Behind closed doors, many policymakers and researchers hope for a “warning shot”: A catastrophe big enough to snap us out of this moment of temporary insanity.

Developments like Mythos Preview, and the statements of AI experts provide ample warning, if we give them the attention they deserve. AI may offer tremendous benefits, but how can it possibly be worth the one-in-six chance of doom the average researcher assigns?

The obvious solution is an indefinite, global pause on the creation of more powerful AI systems. This is possible, with national will and international cooperation. Governments could coordinate to systematically “get rid of the compute.” During the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union worked together to avoid nuclear disaster. Today, the US and China should cooperate to avoid AI disaster.

Humanity must be able to control the pace and direction of AI. Instead of taking our hands off the wheel and accelerating, let’s push the brakes, steer over to the side of the road, and take the time to figure out where we want to go and how to get there.

Not so long ago the Democrats wielded significant power in the Great Plains states. In 1990, 10 of the 18 Senators from Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and Idaho were Democrats. Today, none are.

In much of this area, the Democrats are no longer functioning as a competitive second party. They lose by 25 percent or more in 21 of the 30 congressional districts in these states. By my rough count, the Democrats did not even run candidates in about 40 percent of the region’s 1,400 state legislative races. Clearly, something has gone profoundly wrong.

What happened?

During the Reagan era (from his election in 1980 and up through the early 1990s) Great Plains Democrats resurrected the populist traditions of the late 19th-century People’s Party, the progressives of the early 20th century, and the Nonpartisan league a few years later. The core ideology of this tradition focused on protecting family farmers and workers from the rapaciousness of big corporations and banks. The political opponents of the Reagan Revolution followed in their path and enough of them were in Congress in 1983 to form the Congressional Populist Caucus.

"It is political malpractice to abdicate so much of America’s heartland."

These 14 congresspersons adopted the populist moniker and fought against corporatized free trade deals, the high Federal Reserve interest rates, plant closings, anti-union legislation, and farm foreclosures. And they did so in alliance with, and in support of, dozens of community groups including abortion and gay rights organizations.

But in 1990, a powerful segment of the Democratic establishment created the centrist Democratic Leadership Council and made a firm decision to embrace corporations, agribusiness, free trade, and Wall Street deregulation, while moving away from labor unions and family farmers. In the 1992 presidential primaries, Bill Clinton was the Democratic Leadership Council’s representative, while Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa represented the progressive populists. As we know, Clinton won.

In When the Democrats Lost the Heartland Corey Haala shows that this turn to neoliberalism was not the inevitable result of technological advances, nor was it predetermined by the iron laws of capitalism. Rather, it was a victory by one interest group within the Democratic Party over another, and the consequences were felt immediately.

After the centrists won, they starved the Great Plains Democrats of funds and legislative victories, leaving them with little to offer their constituents—the populist-oriented farmers and workers struggling to survive against corporate power.

Working-class voters and family farmers sensed that the party’s priorities were changing long before Chuck Schumer said the quiet part out loud:

“For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

The same logic could easily have been applied to the Great Plains.

Abandoned by the party they once considered their own, many Democrats turned to the Republicans to vent their anger at a system that was screwing them.

Rebuild the old or build something new?

Despite this fundamental ideological shift, it’s hard for progressives to move away from the Democratic Party, especially given the rise of MAGA. Don’t we have to do everything we can to support Democratic candidates in order to win back Congress and stop the fascist takeover of America?

Of course, defeating the MAGA Republicans is crucial. And the fortunes of the Democrats are a real concern in blue and marginal districts where new seats can be won and old seats can be held. Third-party candidates in those competitive districts would only serve as spoilers likely to help elect MAGA Republicans.

But that’s not the case in the ruby red states in which the Democrats have given up on 40 percent of the local races, and where they lose congressional seats by 25 percent or more.

In these areas there is nothing to spoil.

It is political malpractice to abdicate so much of America’s heartland. One strategy is for progressives to recapture the Democratic Party in the Great Plains and elsewhere, infuse it with new energy, change its neoliberal brand, and run new working-class candidates across the board.

But a new survey by the Center for Working Class Politics shows that many of those who have given up on Trump show little interest in voting for Democrats. And a recent New York Times/Siena survey reports 43 percent of registered voters nationally are dissatisfied with both parties. That’s a hell of a headwind to overcome, given how tarnished the Democratic Party brand has become.

Something new that isn’t blue?

Dan Osborn’s race for the US Senate in Nebraska points in another direction. This former local labor leader is running against both parties, what he calls “the two-party doom loop,” in an unabashed progressive populist campaign—the Nebraska Fairness Plan. As he says “It’s not a party’s platform or written by consultants. It’s written for the people who punch a clock and wonder why nobody in Washington is fighting for them.”

Osborn is appealing to independents, disaffected Democrats, and even disgruntled Republicans. So far, the race is a toss-up in a state where Republicans outnumber Democrats by nearly two to one. The Democratic nominee, Cindy Burbank, has said she will avoid playing the spoiler by dropping out before ballots are printed if she doesn’t see a path to victory.

Osborn’s effort (and the polling we report on in The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need a Party of Our Own) strongly suggests that the best path forward in the Great Plains districts largely abanoned by the Democrats is to create a new organization by and for working people to run independent candidates.

That requires a break from the Democrats. Osborn says he will not caucus with either major party, and attacks both billionaire parties that have left so many working people high and dry. Independent working-class candidates will need to take strong progressive populist positions that protect jobs, create new ones, and save what’s left of family farming—positions with strong support across the Great Plains.

Working people can build independent political power even in places where the Democratic Party has ceased to function as a competitive second party.

And progressive political activists will need to get comfortable with turning neoliberalism on its head—putting people instead of capital in the center of our economy. That means promoting real job creation, not public-private partnerships that enrich corporations and rarely produce new jobs.

We will need to promote strong policies like “the right to a job at a living wage, provided by the public sector if the private sector fails to do so.”

As radical as this policy seems, polling shows again and again that it is very popular. People want stable, secure jobs even if the government has to step in to provide them.

Rebuilding progressive populism in the Great Plains requires the kind of boldness that challenged corporate power from the 1880s onward. Those populists were able to grow their appeal nationally, and their efforts led to progressive reforms like the graduated income tax, anti-monopoly moves against the robber barons, the formation of public universities and colleges, and even a public bank in North Dakota, among other successes.

We must escape the corporatist framework that governs today’s Democratic Party, which appeals to wealthy donors, admires the billionaire class, and has given up on the working class it considers socially backward.

Can it be done? Not quickly. Not easily. But the Great Plains once produced some of the most powerful populist movements in American history that challenged concentrated wealth, built durable institutions, and won reforms that reshaped the country. We won’t know what is possible until we try again.

We need to leave our blue bubbles, talk face-to-face with alienated working people, and rebuild an independent politics rooted in work, community, and economic security.

And really, where better to spread populism than in America’s heartland, “where the wind comes sweeping down the plain.”

If we dare to act boldly, perhaps we can once again become the wind.

*****

The questions raised in this essay are explored in much greater depth in my new book, The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need One of Our Own: How Working People Can Build Independent Political Power.

The book examines why so many working people have abandoned the Democratic Party, why independents are now the largest political bloc in many states, what voters in the heartland actually want from politics, and whether a new working-class political organization can be built without acting as a spoiler.

Drawing on new polling and historical research, it argues that working people can build independent political power even in places where the Democratic Party has ceased to function as a competitive second party.

If these arguments resonate with you, I hope you’ll take a look at the book.

All book proceeds support our Reversing Runaway Inequality educational programs for working people.

The race to obtain critical minerals and the war in Iran have not only exposed a dangerous dependence on fossil fuels and mining, but they have also uncovered something more surprising—Republicans in Congress actually understand progressive agriculture policy. They just don’t want to admit it.

In February, Vice President JD Vance announced at the State Department that the administration must institute a price floor to protect the US critical mineral market. “This morning, the Trump administration is proposing a concrete mechanism to return the global critical minerals market to a healthier, more competitive state: a preferential trade zone for critical minerals protected from external disruptions through enforceable price floors,” Vance explained. Meanwhile, the US—and other countries around the world—are deploying oil reserves to buffer price shocks caused by the Israel-US attacks on Iran. Price floors and supply management programs seem common sense to these policymakers when it comes to oil and minerals, but what about US farmers and our overall food system?

Like oil and critical minerals, food and agriculture supply chains, such as corn, soy, and dairy, are vulnerable to global shocks, including extreme weather events, wars, and other supply disruptions. The public also needs to understand that without inflation-adjusted price floors, agricultural commodity prices may sink to disastrously low levels, leaving farmers no choice but to increase production with more chemicals and GMO seeds at the expense of our land and water. Congress and the US Department of Agriculture can avoid low prices by creating reserves accumulated during large harvests and, just like the federal petroleum reserve, bringing them back on the market to stabilize prices in times of shortage. We can all agree that food shortages would be disastrous, so guaranteeing its citizens food security should be imperative for any democratic government.

So while Republicans can recognize the importance of price floors and supply management during this administration, Democrats should look at history to understand how the same instruments were developed for agriculture during the Great Depression under the Democratic Party’s New Deal. The twin crises of farm bankruptcies and the Dust Bowl spurred militant farm organizations to demand a response from the federal government. The response was parity farm bills that stopped farm bankruptcies and stabilized the farm economy so that conservation measures and preservation of diversified farming could lead to food security and a balanced economy. Federal leadership in the White House and Congress recognized that price and supply management benefited both farmers and society as a whole. The policy was simple and transparent: The farm bill would ensure that during years of good harvests, public grain reserves would purchase the surplus at the parity rate (price floor adjusted for inflation) and store it to protect consumers in future times of shortage.

A productive agricultural economy that conserves our resources, challenges agricultural consolidation, and offers economic opportunity in rural communities should be a top priority for all our citizens.

However, both parties abandoned this common-sense approach to farm policy in the early 1950s, so that costs of farming have totally outpaced commodity prices. Subsequently, headlines warning of a farm crisis in 2026, like during the Great Depression and the 1980s, are not uncommon. The prices paid to farmers for commodities such as corn, soybeans, wheat, and dairy have dropped to record lows in real dollars. Over the years, this imbalance has led to the loss of family farms, the consolidation of agribusiness and food processing monopolies, along with their profits benefiting handsomely. Stabilizing the ratio of farm prices to farm costs (the correct goal of any Farm Bill) is the key to a sustainable agriculture that avoids soil loss, water pollution, and the decline of rural communities.

A supply management program would not only help revive family operations and rural economies but would also be essential to combat the expansion of confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and lower costs for taxpayers. As reported by Food & Water Watch, CAFOs are a disaster for our climate, air, and water, especially for nearby communities. CAFOs are among the most egregious features of today’s low-price, commodity-based industrial agriculture. Thousands of livestock (owned or vertically integrated with large food processors) are confined in small facilities without fresh air or sunlight and fed cheap corn and soy.

CAFOs have been replacing conscientious family farmers who are stewards of the soil and their animals. When family farmers are forced out of livestock production, they face the dilemma of “get big or get out” and often have no farming alternatives other than to tear up their pastures to grow corn and soybeans that will end up feeding animals in CAFOs.

The Trump administration is applying often-forgotten policy instruments to sustain our fossil fuel dependence and our high-tech future, rather than prioritizing a resilient, sustainable economy. Managing a price floor and creating federal food reserves in the agriculture sector are necessary to combat the adverse effects of food processor monopolization, farm consolidation, soil and water degradation, and external shocks, such as wars.

A productive agricultural economy that conserves our resources, challenges agricultural consolidation, and offers economic opportunity in rural communities should be a top priority for all our citizens. “We love farmers” and “We put America’s farmers first” are just political slogans to get votes with no substance behind them. These slogans lead to the usual sleight of hand to send taxpayer dollars to get some farmers through the next planting season. This policy leaves the disastrous cheap commodity regime in place—encouraging CAFO production and exporting commodities at a loss.

The administration’s discovery of the logical policy of price floors and reserves for oil and minerals must open new doors to applying these logical and transparent mechanisms to agriculture to restore the security of family farmers and conservation of our precious resources—after all, we can’t eat petroleum or precious minerals.

I’ve written that corruption is the sleeper issue of 2026. Well, it’s awake. And the issue may be bigger than I realized.

That’s the implication of a new national poll released Tuesday by the Brennan Center. The survey was conducted in late April and early May, just before the president’s attempt to create a $1.8 billion slush fund to funnel taxpayer money to his political allies.

The results are striking. More than 9 in 10 voters believe corruption is a big problem across politics and government. Large majorities view corruption as endemic and deeply embedded in government institutions, from the Supreme Court to Congress to the presidency. They are dejected about the fact that scandals continuously go without consequences and shocking revelations fail to produce reform.

Margins are overwhelming among Democrats, Republicans, and independents.

Vast majorities believe this corruption is part of why government doesn’t respond to major issues, including concerns like affordability and housing.

Most importantly, voters back bold reform. Eighty-three percent want a law that bars presidents from having conflicts of interest and holds them to stronger ethical standards. Eighty-one percent want a new federal ethics enforcer. Seventy-nine percent want a constitutional amendment that restores limits on money in elections, and other anti-corruption measures received similar levels of support.

It’s hard to find a set of proposals with a wider bipartisan appeal.

Yet there are notes here that should jar complacency. Listen carefully to voters. They define corruption broadly. Vast majorities see the spectacle of politicians catering to the interests of billionaires and big corporations as corrupt, not surprisingly. But to most Americans, wasting taxpayer dollars and even failing to respond to constituent needs are also forms of corruption.

Vast majorities believe this corruption is part of why government doesn’t respond to major issues, including concerns like affordability and housing. How do we connect these arcane government rules to people’s economic well-being? Voters are already doing so.

There are warning signs aplenty for politicians from both parties. Other polls have shown that voters think neither Democratic nor Republican politicians are better than the other on the issue.

Policymakers should understand that the public’s conception of what has gone wrong goes far deeper than super PACs or White House ballrooms or even slush funds. To them, it is a system that is fundamentally misfiring. A government that is not performing. And there is a willingness to name names and assign blame.

In some ways, these results are ominous. We often note that the 2024 election was the first time since the 1800s where the incumbent party lost the White House three times in a row (2016, 2020, 2024). This survey shows a deeply disquieted electorate, scornful of the political system and furious at its flaws. That environment created the conditions for President Donald Trump’s populist nationalism to emerge in 2016. It hasn’t gone away.

Yet this is also the kindling that can fuel new approaches, sharper critiques, and stronger solutions. If polls are to be believed, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) has turned his political fortunes through a relentless and often stirring stump-speech focus on corruption.

The breadth of public unhappiness suggests a deeper moral critique. Even now, amid wrenching technological change and evaporating standards, people seem focused on an underlying core of personal responsibility.

My old boss, President Bill Clinton, often talked this way, especially when he was running for president in 1992. “The American dream that we were all raised on is a simple but powerful one,” he would say. “If you work hard and play by the rules, you should be given a chance to go as far as your God-given ability will take you.”

More recently, that ethos was given voice in Hungary by its new president, Péter Magyar. Running against the authoritarian kleptocrat Viktor Orbán, Magyar vowed that Hungary would no longer be “a country without consequences.” He pledged to oversee not just new policies but a thorough effort to clean house and to hold accountable those who had stolen from the people.

The new Brennan Center research suggests that voters here, too, are ready for a country with consequences. That will help shape the next political era—if we are ready to make it happen.

In a single week, the Pentagon spent $11 billion destroying Iran's nuclear capabilities—the same capabilities the administration had declared "completely obliterated" just months earlier.

On Easter Sunday, President Donald Trump explained his priorities. "It's not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things," he said. "We have to take care of one thing: military protection."

He's right that a choice is being made. But in a democracy, we the people are the ones who are supposed to have that choice.

My neighbors didn't get one. Until recently, our children went to the same daycare, at least until prices went up by 10%. They provided several weeks notice, then phased the increase over a few weeks. For us, the raise meant $200 more per month. Our neighbors, on the other hand, had three kids in daycare.

For the Pentagon, it's bomb first, figure out the money later. For parents, the bills are due today.

The increase added up to $600 a month more than they'd been paying, so they pulled out. Two kids went to a super cheap option—more like group babysitting, really—because they were about to age out and attend free pre-K. Their youngest daughter switched to a place they didn't love, with food they didn't trust.

Overall, they were disappointed. It meant more logistics for pickup and dropoff. They felt more pressure to teach and cook healthy food for their kids. But ultimately, they didn't have a choice. Financially, this was the only way to make it work.

Millions of American families make calculations like this every day—cutting corners on childcare, food, healthcare—just to keep the math working. They do it quietly, without a press conference, without a vote.

The daycare crisis was already breaking families before the Iran war started.

The average American family pays over $13,000 a year per child—more than the average cost of in-state college tuition in many states. Waitlists stretch for months. In some counties, there are more children who need care than licensed spots available. For working parents, especially single parents, affordable daycare isn't a luxury. It's the difference between holding a job and not. And after an election fought on affordability, it was getting harder, not easier.

Economic shockwaves from the war hit immediately. Gas prices surged, adding an average of $175 (and counting) to every American driver's bill. Food prices followed. And in May, Spirit Airlines shut down entirely, citing Iran War fuel costs as the final straw—grounding a low-cost carrier that millions of working families depended on.

There are about 10.8 million US children enrolled in daycare at a national average of $13,128 per year. Collectively, parents spend roughly $390 million per day making sure their children are cared for.

The Pentagon's official tally for the war is $29 billion—almost certainly an undercount. Administration sources told CBS the real figure is closer to $50 billion. Even at their own number, that covers daycare for 2.5 months for every enrolled American child.

But the Pentagon's figure leaves out Midnight Hammer, Southern Spear, and the ongoing ceasefire costs. Harvard professor Linda Bilmes, who has spent two decades tracking the true costs of American wars, estimates the full bill could swell to over $1 trillion within a decade.

And then there's what no spreadsheet can measure. Thirteen service members killed. More than 400 wounded. Military families lend their loved ones to this country on the promise that their sacrifice means something—that the people sending them into harm's way are making choices worthy of that trust.

The daycare math suggests otherwise.

The combined price tag of Trump's wars, plus over $40 billion in extra gas costs borne by American drivers since the war began, brings the total north of $79 billion—enough to fund more than seven months of daycare for all 10.8 million enrolled children.

For the Pentagon, it's bomb first, figure out the money later. For parents, the bills are due today.

Simply put, you cannot make a meaningful choice—at the ballot box or anywhere else—when the numbers in front of you are at best incomplete and at worst deliberately misleading. And every day this war continues, Trump is deciding what your family can and can't afford.

Relief won't come in time for my neighbors. Their kids will age out of daycare before Washington does anything about it. They made the best choice they could with what they had. Most American families don't get any other kind.

Demand a vote on this war. Demand the real price tag. And in November, remember who made this choice for you.

Democrats are eager to recapture the House, and perhaps even the Senate, in this November’s elections. They are banking in part on the customary midterm pendulum swing and in part on backlash against President Donald Trump’s unhinged, cult-like governing style (despite the ineffectiveness of this strategy throughout several election cycles). They also hope to reclaim their reputation as the party of the working class.

As a lifelong labor activist, I am gratified whenever people in electoral politics say they want to uplift the American worker. But I admit some skepticism—particularly since both major parties spent a generation or more embracing the neoliberal consensus that the government should surrender to giant multinational corporations and their wealthy executives and investors. Working people are not stupid; they know most prominent Democrats and all pre-MAGA Republicans advanced an agenda that eviscerated worker interests at home and sent tens of millions of jobs abroad. (Many unions, especially those in manufacturing, opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement when George H.W. Bush negotiated it and when William J. Clinton signed it.) Public frustration and outrage have shaken politicians’ commitment to neoliberalism (rhetorically, at least), but will it be replaced by a program that advances the real interests of the people who rely on their own labor to make ends meet?

Now that he is back in office, Trump has abandoned any pretense of being pro-worker. He has stripped a million federal employees of the right to bargain collectively, gutted overtime rules and other workplace protections, crippled the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and deprived millions of working people of health and food benefits. He is proud and loud about protecting artificial intelligence from effective regulation just as employers start using it to mow down thousands—and ultimately millions—of jobs. Will the Democrats offer a real alternative for working people?

Some Democrats seem to be focused on the performative—searching for candidates who project non-elite “authenticity.” You know, candidates who know how to operate power tools and who drink beer from plastic cups. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great to run candidates who actually work for a living, but that’s not a comprehensive strategy. Working people want—and demand—actual change in how our leaders govern, not just how they look on TV (or TikTok). If the Democrats fail to articulate and deliver a legitimately pro-worker agenda, working people will continue to look elsewhere—perhaps voting for “none of the above.” (Note that, although the 2024 presidential election was proclaimed to be about the survival of our nation and its sacred values, more eligible voters stayed home than voted for either Trump or former Vice President Kamala Harris.)

Congress has failed to adopt legislation to enable workers to build their own power because workers do not have enough power to force Congress to do so.

Just as slick candidate packaging is not enough, the same is true of hollow “messaging.” Working people—like most voters—are tired of promises that bloom just before Election Day and wither right after. To represent workers effectively, elected officials will have to take political risks and challenge the power of the corporate elite, fighting for measures that tackle unaffordable healthcare, the housing crisis, and the vast (and growing) inequalities of wealth and income.

This seems so obvious it raises the question of why elected officials have ignored working voters’ real interests for so long. Here’s the key: Politicians will only stand up to corporate interests and press for meaningful pro-worker change if working people have enough leverage to force them to do so. For the past several decades our elected leaders chose a neoliberal path because the giant multinational companies and the ultra wealthy had the power to demand it—and working people did not have the countervailing power to resist it and to advance their own interests. It is no coincidence that the pro-corporate political consensus arose at precisely the same time that union membership plummeted in the United States. Although public approval of unions is as high as it has been in decades, the percentage of working people who are actually represented by unions is near an all-time low: about 10% of all workers and less than 6% in the private sector.

As the great United Auto Workers union leader Walter Reuther said, no one gives you anything you’re not strong enough to take for yourself. Working people need to build, or rebuild, the power to insist that politicians act in their interests, not just those of the corporate elite. Here’s a concrete example at the heart of building worker power: One of the reasons unions are so small now is that federal labor law has failed to protect workers’ right to organize and to engage in collective bargaining. There are plenty of great ideas for reforming US labor law. The Employee Free Choice Act, first introduced in 2006, would have streamlined the way the NLRB governs union organizing efforts. Opposition from pro-business senators (including some Democrats), together with the threat of a GOP filibuster, doomed it—even when Barack Obama was in the White House and the Democrats controlled both chambers. The Protect the Right to Organize Act, or “PRO Act,” would have addressed a whole range of structural and substantive problems with US labor law. It did not make it to full floor votes even when the Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate in 2021.

Why did Congress fail to adopt either of these essential bills, even when Democrats were in power? Because elected leaders—including Democrats—did not feel political pressure or fear political fallout. It’s like a Zen koan: Congress has failed to adopt legislation to enable workers to build their own power because workers do not have enough power to force Congress to do so.

Bottom line: If we want the Democrats, or the Republicans, or any political party to enact a political agenda that effectively addresses the real concerns of working Americans, we must build a movement that enhances and applies the power of working Americans. Unless and until we create a larger, stronger labor movement, politicians will not feel enough pressure to do the right thing for working people. Leverage is how politics work, and we should act accordingly. We should roll up our sleeves and get busy organizing in the workplace so we can assert real influence in the halls of government.

President Trump is facing backlash, even within his own party, for his plan to establish a $1.8 billion slush fund funded by U.S. taxpayers to compensate his political allies, including January 6 Capitol rioters. Government largesse and welfare are OK when you’re the beneficiary!

The post Sin It To Win It appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

This should not be a news flash to anyone, but the Trump Administration is out of control when it comes to war (and many other things, like ruining the economy, our judicial and electoral systems, as well as the landscape of the nation’s capital). Congress needs to do its job and reign in the executive branch. In the next few days, the House of Representatives needs to, ahem, represent the interests of the American people and vote in favor of two War Powers Resolutions, on Iran and Lebanon.

The first should be a no brainer. Congress has come close, several times now, to passing an Iran War Powers Resolution, and it was poised to pass in the House two weeks ago, before Republican “leadership” twice postponed the vote. They can’t keep kicking the can down the road forever, with even some of Trump’s loyalists on Capitol Hill expressing increasing frustration with the illegal, deeply unpopular US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran. A vote on US Rep. Gregory Meeks’ House Concurrent Resolution 86 is expected Wednesday, and it should pass, putting the House on record as opposing Trump’s and Netanyahu’s war. It would also send a strong signal of opposition to any supplemental funding bill to pay for the war.

Two weeks ago the Senate advanced its version of an Iran War Powers Resolution, Senate Joint Resolution 185, on a procedural vote, and it may proceed to a final vote this week, and if not, it should soon. Both the House and Senate votes will likely be close, and mostly along partisan lines. Assuming they do pass, Trump would probably veto the measures, and there likely would not be anywhere near the two-thirds votes required in both chambers to override the veto. Still, Congress would be on record opposing a war it did not authorize, and representing the will of its constituents rather than weapons contractors making a killing, literally and figuratively, off these wars.

In Trump’s first term, Congress passed War Powers Resolutions to stop US involvement in the Saudi Arabia-United Arab Emirates war in Yemen. While Trump vetoed those resolutions, both the Saudi and UAE governments understood they could no longer count on the US to continue its support in refueling, intelligence and targeting information, leading to a ceasefire, a sharp drop in hostilities, and an improvement in the dire humanitarian crisis in Yemen.

Meanwhile, US Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Delia Ramirez (D-IL) have introduced a Lebanon War Powers Resolution, House Concurrent Resolution 84, which is expected to be voted on Thursday.

Since March 2nd, Israel has killed nearly 3,500 people and wounded over 10,000 in its air campaign and invasion of Lebanon. The United States has engaged in the command and coordination of Israel's offensive without authorization from Congress — a violation of Section 8(c) of the War Powers Act of 1973 — including Trump directly "green lighting" or "prohibiting" Israel's actions at different junctures. The US and Israel are also deeply operationally integrated and share intelligence regarding Israel's Lebanon campaign, raising further questions about unauthorized US participation in the war.

PLEASE TAKE ACTION—make one phone call via the Congressional switchboard at 202.224.3121 to your USRepresentative, with these two asks:

• Support H. Con. Res. 86, the Iran War Powers Resolution
• Support H. Con. Res. 84, the Lebanon War Powers Resolution

Lastly, regarding Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s lust to overthrow the government of Cuba, there will be War Powers Resolutions in both Houses of Congress to prevent what would be another catastrophic, illegal war of choice.

In all of these cases, Congress would merely be asserting its Constitutional authority, assigned to the legislature, not the executive branch, over the grave decision to send US troops to war. So this should be easy, but it never is, and without pressure from voters, the war machine runs more or less on auto-pilot. We cannot let that continue.

"You’re fucking crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.”

According to Axios, this is what Donald Trump said to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in “an expletive-laden call” earlier today.

Trump also accused Netanyahu of ingratitude since Trump had helped keep Netanyahu out of jail. At the heart of the matter was Trump’s frustration with Netanyahu not caving to his demands to cease bombing Lebanon, as Israel’s aggression risked jeopardizing Trump’s diplomacy with Iran.

The story has understandably been met with considerable skepticism. After all, there is a long and well-documented pattern of American presidents privately expressing anger and frustration with Israeli prime ministers while publicly standing shoulder-to-shoulder with them and continuing to support their policies.

Take Joe Biden as an example. In late December 2023, Axios reported that Biden’s frustration with Benjamin Netanyahu had become so intense that he abruptly ended a phone call with the Israeli leader, reportedly concluding the exchange with the terse remark: “This conversation is over.” Yet in practice, Biden remained firmly aligned with Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza.

Two months later, NBC News reported that Biden had repeatedly referred to Netanyahu as an “asshole” in private conversations with aides and donors. But even as he vented his exasperation behind closed doors, Biden continued to arm Israel lavishly and shield it from mounting diplomatic and political pressure at the United Nations. The gap between private frustration and public policy could hardly have been more striking.

According to Bob Woodward’s 2024 book War, Biden’s frustrations became intensely personal during the Rafah dispute and Biden told an associate: “That son of a bitch, Bibi Netanyahu, he’s a bad guy. He’s a bad f***ing guy.” No policy change followed.

There are plenty of other examples.

There are, however, a few important counterexamples—particularly from Trump’s second term—that suggest the Axios story is not entirely implausible. (Indeed, the report would have been far more difficult to believe had Axios claimed that Trump told Netanyahu, “Everybody loves you.”)

On June 24, 2025, after Israel and Iran had agreed to a ceasefire following their twelve-day war, Israel almost immediately violated the agreement, infuriating Trump. Before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House, Trump delivered an unusually blunt and public rebuke, declaring that Israel and Iran “don’t know what the f*** they’re doing” and adding that he was “really unhappy with Israel.”

The outburst was not merely rhetorical. Trump reportedly intervened directly with Netanyahu, after which Israel halted its planned escalation and the ceasefire held for several months. Ironically, however, Trump himself would restart the conflict in February 2026, after sustained pressure from Israel and its supporters in Washington.

Another notable episode came after Israel bombed the Qatari capital, Doha, killing a Qatari security guard and jeopardizing Qatar’s role as a key mediator in the Gaza negotiations. In an extraordinary and arguably unprecedented move, Trump arranged a phone call from the Oval Office and had Netanyahu apologize directly to the Qatari Emir.

When Netanyahu later denied that he had apologized, the White House responded by releasing a photograph from the Oval Office showing Trump holding the phone while Netanyahu appeared to be reading from a prepared script. A Qatari diplomat was also present in the room, observing the apology as it unfolded.

The only comparable example that comes to mind is from 2013, when Barack Obama pressed Netanyahu to apologize to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan over the Mavi Marmara flotilla raid. Even then, however, the apology took place privately. By contrast, the Qatar episode was so unusually public that the White House itself effectively documented Netanyahu’s compliance.

None of this, of course, proves that the Axios story is true, but it suggests that it may not be as implausible as some may otherwise believe. What is also plausible, however, is that Trump will once again fail to sustain the pressure and, by that, allow for Netanyahu’s potential retreat to prove temporary.

This post originally appeared at Parsi's substack page.

California voters are clearly hungry for change. The real question now is whether Democrats are willing to confront the corporate interests and entrenched systems standing in the way of it.

That is one reason a growing number of progressives, labor organizers, climate activists, and anti-corporate advocates are rallying behind Tom Steyer despite longstanding discomfort with billionaire politics.

At first glance, that coalition can feel contradictory. Progressives have spent years warning, correctly, about the dangers of concentrated wealth and billionaire influence in American politics. Many still believe that billionaires should not exist in a healthy democracy.

So why are so many anti-corporate organizers increasingly rallying behind one now?

The question is not whether candidates are perfect vessels for progressive ideals. The question is whether they are willing to pick the right fights.

Because politics is ultimately about conflict. It is about who is willing to challenge concentrated power, which interests candidates are willing to confront, and whether they are prepared to pursue structural change instead of simply managing decline.

The question is not whether someone benefited from broken systems. The question is whether they are willing to confront the systems that produced their own power in the first place.

And increasingly, Tom Steyer appears to be the only major candidate in California's governor race openly escalating conflict with the monopolies, corporate interests, and institutional failures driving the state's affordability crisis.

That matters because California is not entering a traditional election environment.

Recent polling suggests Xavier Becerra is increasingly likely to secure one of the two spots in California's top-two primary. Whether voters like it or not, that reality changes the strategic conversation.

At a moment when voters are demanding structural change, Becerra increasingly represents continuity politics. He has struggled to articulate a meaningful critique of the status quo or explain what he would fundamentally do differently than Gavin Newsom.

The question facing many progressive voters is no longer simply which candidate they prefer. It is whether a candidate willing to challenge concentrated power, monopoly interests, and entrenched systems will make it into the general election at all.

That matters because Steve Hilton is running aggressively as an anti-establishment change candidate. If Democrats allow this race to become a contest between a candidate associated with continuity and a Republican claiming the mantle of disruption, they risk ceding the language of change to the right.

You cannot defeat a change candidate with a status quo candidate.

You need a competing change agent.

Steyer is increasingly positioning himself as one.

What makes this politically significant is not simply that he uses progressive rhetoric. Plenty of candidates do that. What matters is that he is embracing policies that directly confront concentrated wealth and monopoly power, including support for single-payer healthcare, a billionaire tax, breaking up utility monopolies, lowering energy costs, expanding public education, and building affordable housing at scale.

Those are not symbolic positions. They are direct challenges to entrenched systems of political and economic power.

And increasingly, many progressives believe the clearest indicator of that conflict is not who Steyer is. It is who is lining up against him.

When utility monopolies, fossil fuel interests, anti-tax billionaires, and major corporations begin mobilizing against the same candidate, voters should pay attention.

That does not mean progressives suddenly agree with everything about Tom Steyer or billionaire politics generally. It means many recognize that political alignment matters more than biography alone.

The question is not whether candidates are perfect vessels for progressive ideals. The question is whether they are willing to pick the right fights.

For many progressives, supporting Steyer is not about abandoning skepticism toward wealth or power. It is about recognizing that in moments of deep public frustration, the most important political question becomes who is actually willing to confront the forces making life increasingly unaffordable, unstable, and unequal.

That is the uncomfortable reality reshaping this race.

The question facing California voters is no longer whether the state needs change.

It is whether a candidate willing to fight for that change will still be standing when the general election begins.

As the American Israel Public Affairs Committee confronts a changing political landscape, one in which support for Israel has become a liability, powerful voices are coming to the defense of AIPAC and its hold on American democracy.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is one such voice. He addressed the issue in an interview with Politico. Questioned whether the pro-Israel lobby had become a dividing line in the Democratic Party, Shapiro lamented what he described as the "weaponization" of criticism directed at AIPAC, saying it was being "used cynically by some to try and silence certain voices." Pressed on whether he meant critics were erasing the distinction between opposition to AIPAC and opposition to Jewish donors, he said yes. Shapiro is recasting the lobby's scorched-earth tactics against politicians who do not toe the line on Israel as an attack on Jews and their right to political participation. That framing makes criticism of AIPAC appear suspect before the substance of the criticism is addressed.

He is not alone. Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), confronted at a town hall over $4.5 million she had taken from "pro-Israel lobbies," objected that the figure lumped ordinary Jewish donors in with the lobby. This was problematic, she said, "Not just as an elected official," but "as a Jew." In The Washington Post, the columnist Matthew Schmitz gathered statements like these into a thesis: that criticism of Israel has curdled into hostility toward Jews themselves, and that the Democratic Party is turning on a community that has been part of its coalition for a century.

Although a problematic charge, it is deserving of a serious answer. The charge conflates criticizing a political lobby with attacking the Jewish people. This conflation is convenient for the defenders of AIPAC. To see why, start with what AIPAC does.

The existence of antisemitism does not make AIPAC immune from criticism, any more than the existence of anti-Muslim bigotry would make Saudi lobbying immune from scrutiny.

AIPAC does not have to single-handedly decide an election to shape its outcome. Its power lies in changing the conditions under which the election is fought. The organization describes itself as working to "help elect Democrats and Republicans" who support the US-Israel relationship and to "defeat detractors" of that relationship. Its formal PAC gives directly to candidates, while its affiliated super PAC, United Democracy Project, can raise and spend unlimited sums through independent expenditures. In the 2024 cycle, AIPAC and United Democracy Project spent $95.1 million, more than double their 2022 spending. United Democracy Project spent almost $9.9 million to defeat Jamaal Bowman and nearly $4.8 million to install George Latimer in his place, a level of outside money The New York Times called unprecedented for a single House race. It spent more than $5.2 million against Cori Bush and another $3.3 million for Wesley Bell, who beat her.

By 2026 the same machinery had crossed party lines, and this time it left no doubt about what it was for. In May, Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie, a seven-term incumbent, lost his primary after pro-Israel groups spent roughly $9 million to defeat him, part of more than $32 million that made it the most expensive House primary in American history, surpassing the record set against Bowman two years before. AIPAC did not hide its hand. It congratulated the winner for "defeating anti-Israel incumbent Thomas Massie" and declared that "being pro-Israel is good policy and good politics." An organization whose stated mission is to silence dissent over Israel policy took a victory lap after defeating a dissenter. This is not representation but political enforcement.

That is the record the conflation obscures, because it points to a distinction Shapiro and Slotkin would rather we not draw. There is a difference between a lobby that advances an industry or community's interests and a lobby whose signature work is to destroy the people who dissent from it. The first is ordinary democracy; every group does it, and every group should be free to. The second is something else. A lobby that asks for its community to have a voice is making a claim every American can make. A lobby that vows to end any candidacy which crosses its red line on Israel is not asking for a voice—it is enforcing obedience and silence. AIPAC is the second kind, and no amount of talk about Jewish participation changes what its money does.

Here Slotkin's objection deserves a fair hearing, and then a harder look. She is right about one thing, and it matters: The $4.5 million figure she was confronted with came from a group that counts individual Jewish donors as lobby money. That is a crude metric, and her instinct to reject it is correct. Treating every Jewish donor as AIPAC is exactly the conflation worth refusing. However, she used the softness of that one number to wave away the entire subject, and the subject does not depend on that number. United Democracy Project's independent expenditures are not estimates pulled from a donor tally. They are filed with the Federal Election Commission. Nearly $10 million to defeat a single congressman is not a Jewish donor being smeared. It is a documented political operation, and in a democracy, it is fair game.

Slotkin then offered her own analogy, and it is more revealing than she intended. Plenty of groups do the same thing, she said—"a Pakistani-American group, or whatever group." Exactly so. And if a Pakistani-American group spent $95 million in a single cycle to end the careers of politicians who crossed it, that spending would be criticized too, loudly and by name—and no one would call the criticism anti-Pakistani bigotry. That is the tell. The objection to AIPAC was never that Jews organize, donate, or advocate; Americans of every background do, and should. The objection is to what this particular organization spends its money to accomplish. AIPAC is not being challenged because it is Jewish. It is being challenged because it uses organized money to enforce a narrow pro-Israel line in American politics. Strip away the identity framing and you are left with a plain question about political power—which is the question its defenders are working so hard to avoid.

The conflation cuts both ways, and the second cut is the dangerous one. Slotkin is right that lumping every Jewish donor into "the pro-Israel lobby" is crude and potentially ugly; Jewish donors are not AIPAC by definition. But the reverse move is just as serious, and it is the one AIPAC defenders rely on: treating any criticism of AIPAC's political spending as though it were an attack on Jewish identity itself. The first error mistakes ordinary Jews for the lobby. The second dresses the lobby up as ordinary Jews. That second move gives AIPAC an exemption no other lobby receives—it lets a bare-knuckle political operation spend like a political operation and then, the moment it is criticized, takes cover as a vulnerable civic organization.

The pro-AIPAC defense generally leans on ugly examples—candidates who have made reckless comments, activists who slide from criticism of Israel into something darker, a political culture where antisemitism plainly exists. None of that should be denied, and a thesis about an entire party should not be built on a handful of fringe figures either. But none of it answers the central question. The existence of antisemitism does not make AIPAC immune from criticism, any more than the existence of anti-Muslim bigotry would make Saudi lobbying immune from scrutiny.

Bigotry is real. So is political power. A serious argument must be able to recognize both at once. AIPAC is not merely participating in democracy; it is using concentrated money to discipline the boundaries of acceptable speech on Israel, while its defenders try to collapse that political critique into ethnic or religious hostility.

After a new scientific paper advanced a climate modeling framework that replaced an old extreme climate scenario with a less severe one, President Donald Trump posted to social media that climate scientists had admitted to being “WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” But it wasn’t a science mistake. It was a communication one.

Climate scenarios are not predictions. They are tools to understand how the climate would respond to different human actions, from rapid emissions cuts to current policies to backsliding into more fossil fuels. The most extreme widely-used pathway, called RCP8.5, studied a world with no climate policy and exceptionally high fossil fuel use through the rest of the century. Though always meant as an unlikely outlier, RCP8.5 has become far less plausible after a decade of accelerated clean energy deployment, to the point that this new paper proposed replacing it in future research. That should have been a climate win: Humans avoided the worst pathway and scientists revised models accordingly.

That this story could be so easily recast as scientific failure should be a wake-up call for science communicators. For years, journalists have favored alarm over nuance and problems over solutions, leaving the public poorly equipped to understand how uncertainty works or how climate action has improved future prospects. Without that context, every averted disaster can be mistaken for proof that the danger was made up at the outset.

Contrary to the president’s post, this pathway revision did not originate at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It came from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), which convened an international group of scientists to devise an updated set of climate scenarios for future study. The group didn’t just toss RCP8.5. It published a new framework that removes implausible outliers at both extremes, includes more pathways where the world uses carbon removal technologies, and centers human emissions decisions more explicitly. In a news release, the IPCC clarified that CMIP is not under their umbrella, though the research will likely appear among the tens of thousands of studies analyzed for the IPCC’s next major report.

RCP8.5 is not wrong science. Rather, science provided a map of perilous futures, people changed course, and the map refreshed accordingly.

Yet in addition to Trump, the New York Post and Daily Caller falsely presented this shift as an IPCC scandal. The New York Times and Washington Post also implied in their headlines that scientists got something wrong. These framings defy the logic of climate scenarios. Scenarios are not future predictions. Rather, they consider several possible human actions and study how the climate system would respond to each.

The uncertainty in these scenarios is a feature, not a bug. To scientists, uncertainty does not mean knowing or not knowing, but rather how well something is known. In the case of a climate model, scientists know pumping more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will warm the planet, but they cannot know exactly how much humans will emit; how strongly clouds, water vapor, surface reflectivity, and other feedbacks will amplify or dampen additional warming; or how oceans, forests, permafrost, and other natural systems will absorb or release carbon as the planet changes. Knowing this, scientists use ranges, error bars, assumptions, and confidence levels to communicate what a model can and can’t assert.

Like scientists, journalists seek the truth. However, journalists must hit far shorter word counts with far tighter deadlines. As such, they prefer hard facts and snappy quotes from authorities to convey information. They may see “uncertainty” as describing something unknown and thus irrelevant, not realizing how this thought process diverges from scientists'. Editors even less familiar with the topic may use the most conflict-charged framing or the scariest number in a range when they write headlines, favoring clicks over accuracy.

Typically, these issues are not nefarious. But when articles imply a scientific model was wrong when it was merely updated to reflect new data, they sow unfounded distrust in science and create space for climate disinformation.

In this case, changed human behavior is the new data point. When the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, the world was projected to warm by nearly 4°C, not much better than the RCP8.5 nightmare scenario. Today, based only on current policies, that projection is down to 2.6°C. While that trajectory still presents major cause for concern, these improvements are substantial, drastically reducing the risk of reaching several tipping points this century including East Antarctic glacier collapse, northern permafrost collapse, and a West African monsoon shift.

If journalists want audiences to trust science, they must tell the whole story: the danger, the uncertainty, the progress, and the paths forward.

That progress comes largely from the fact that solar costs have fallen about 90%, onshore wind about 70%, and batteries by more than 90% in the last decade, now routinely besting fossil fuels on price. Several other clean technologies have emerged and scaled, many businesses have adopted more sustainable practices, and thousands of climate policies have been enacted globally. With these achievements, what was once a plausible outlier in RCP8.5 no longer makes sense as the upper bound for climate scenarios.

Had Americans encountered frequent climate solutions reporting over the past decade, scientists setting aside RCP8.5 would have made complete sense. Yet solutions journalism remains a growing but still niche practice. Many editors worry solutions stories could look like advocacy, garner less readership, or fail to qualify as news. Evidence demonstrates the opposite: Audiences view, share, and trust solutions stories more than problem stories, and climate solutions stories specifically increase readers’ self-efficacy relative to problem-oriented alternatives.

Journalists play an essential role in showing which solutions are driving progress, where they fall short, and how best practices can be replicated. Without that news, audiences are more likely to believe climate deniers were right than understand that substantial climate progress has been happening for years, just without the sustained attention it merited.

None of this reduces the urgency of climate change. A 2.6°C world would still be incredibly costly, unjust, and catastrophic. But urgency without context leaves communities unable to assess risk and recognize which actions work. RCP8.5 is not wrong science. Rather, science provided a map of perilous futures, people changed course, and the map refreshed accordingly.

If journalists want audiences to trust science, they must tell the whole story: the danger, the uncertainty, the progress, and the paths forward. Otherwise, every hard-earned climate win risks being twisted into a scandal.

Within national mythology, California is understood to be a progressive haven—with a ruling Democratic Party passing strong regulations, ever-higher taxes on the wealthy, and supporting unions to its heart’s desire.

Unfortunately, this is far from accurate. The Democratic Party may dominate California politics, but the wealthiest state in the union no longer leads the way with innovative laws and regulations, let alone serving the interests of working people, the poor, and the middle class.

Yes, California still has a progressive income tax, the nation’s highest gas taxes, relatively strong environmental regulations, and the world’s greatest public university system—but these are legacies of bygone eras. The story of the last 20 years of single-party Democratic rule is far less inspiring (unless you’re a Silicon Valley oligarch).

Now, as progressives are making significant gains across the country, revitalizing the Democratic Party in the process, the California party remains dominated by a caste of perennial incumbents committed to neoliberal centrism that, at best, generates incremental change.

Rest assured that progressives on the ballot are part of a national movement that understands that the Democratic Party has bifurcated into a vibrant progressive wing and an increasingly sclerotic moderate establishment.

Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. Once Democrats started winning supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature, corporations and big money interests stopped wasting their time courting Republicans. They focused their lobbying on Democrats, and to great effect. California’s Democratic Party, and its leading figures, are more beholden to big business and wealthy donors than almost any state Democratic Party. This, in turn, means Democratic incumbents accrue huge campaign war chests for their re-election.

The result is a more conservative party, one that is out of sync with the electorate. Want evidence? Ask yourself how many members of the Squad have come from California? The answer, of course, is zero. Yet all public opinion polling shows that the California electorate is decisively more progressive than the national average.

It’s true that Reps. Ro Khanna and Lateefah Simon are Squad adjacent, and a few others are solid progressives—but given that California represents about 20% of the Democratic Caucus in the US House, the state’s delegation is on balance middle-of-the-road.

This disconnect—between the political beliefs of Californians and the policies supported by their elected representatives at the national, state, and even local levels—is a major barrier to the necessary transformation of the Democratic Party into a force able to vanquish the fascist-authoritarian GOP before it consolidates power and brings down the curtain on American democracy.

Simply put, the American public increasingly understands that the status quo ante of neoliberal policy, which has organized the country’s economy since the 1980s, produces one result: ever-increasing wealth inequality. The Democratic Party must break from the economics of the Clinton and Obama administrations. The Democratic base and the general public want policies that boost the lives of working Americans, just as they want a sane foreign policy and an honest democracy. They want progressive policies.

Today June 2, 2026, in California, voters have an opportunity to alter American history by electing progressives up and down the ballot. This will transform the largest state Democratic Party, bringing it back in sync with the sentiment of the state’s population so that it can lead in the development of a new 21st century social justice compact.

There are many progressive champions with a real chance of victory today—and in the general election runoff on November 3. To start, there is a clear choice at the top of the ticket: Tom Steyer for governor.

Steyer is one of three viable candidates, two of which will make the runoff. In the best circumstance, the two democrats, Steyer and Xaiver Beccera, will take first and second—a result that will translate into more Democratic victories across the state in November. However, MAGA-supporting Republican Steve Hilton still looks likely to disrupt that result. So, it’s essential to vote, and get everyone you know to vote for Steyer by 8:00 pm PT today.

Admittedly, it sticks in the throat to be supporting a billionaire, but the simple truth is that Steyer will pursue a transformative progressive policy agenda. In contrast, Xavier Beccera, who 20 years ago seemed a sincere progressive, long ago redefined himself as an establishment Democrat. Becerra is committed to maintaining Gov. Gavin Newsom’s policies that have left California stranded with the nation’s co-equal highest poverty rate, an affordability crisis that makes New York City residents blush, and a pronounced failure to lead on environmental and social policies in the manner the world expects of California.

Tom Steyer, by contrast, supports a billionaire’s tax, meaningful living wage legislation, aggressive incentives to re-boost green energy production (and film production too), and, most tellingly, a single-payer universal healthcare system for everyone in the state. A top-two finish by Steyer will guarantee a powerful debate about the direction of the state over the next five months

Beyond the governor’s race, in nearly every US house district, state assembly, and senate race, and significant city and local elections, there are strong progressive candidates challenging the dominant California Democratic Party mainstream—many of whom are poised to advance to the November runoff. Still, it’s worth noting that this has been a very confusing election season due to redistricting (and the chaos of the governor’s race), such that down-ballot candidates have had a difficult time attracting adequate attention. But rest assured that progressives on the ballot are part of a national movement that understands that the Democratic Party has bifurcated into a vibrant progressive wing and an increasingly sclerotic moderate establishment. Please do the necessary research to learn who the progressives are in your district.

So far, it’s been a very good year for progressives—let’s continue the momentum tomorrow in New Jersey, Montana, Iowa, New Mexico, South Carolina, and the largest state and soon-to-be truest bastion of progressive public policy, California.

Not least because I was 12 years old, the Bicentennial festivities felt very different from this year’s 250th birthday celebrations for the United States. This being America, commercialization was inevitable—everything was red, white and blue and was official whatever of the shindig. Overall, though, 1976 was a non-partisan affair despite being an election year following a major scandal.

No one seemed to think it should be otherwise.

Aside from the flood of Bicentennial quarters that began turning up in our change, my main interaction with the event was a junior high school field trip to Cincinnati to visit the Freedom Train, which carried notable historical artifacts but not the blockbusters I was hoping for. The Louisiana Purchase is no Declaration of Independence!

Decline was baked into the event. The train barely made it to my hometown of Dayton, whose passenger rail lines were shutting down and beginning to rust away alongside the factories that used to employ my neighbors.

America was not in awesome condition. The Vietnam War had ended a year earlier with the humiliating fiasco of the withdrawal from Saigon. Gas rationing and the OPEC crisis were fresh memories, and inflation stubborn enough to call for “WIN” (Whip Inflation Now) buttons. The president, Gerald Ford, hasn’t even been elected; the Michigan congressman had emerged, like Peter Sellers in “Being There,” from the wreckage of Watergate. In short succession we had witnessed the ouster of the vice president, then the president, and then Ford’s pardon of his disgraced predecessor, which confirmed dark suspicions that the fix is always in and the big fish never get caught. He was presiding over an impressive run of getting nothing through the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress.

And crazy women kept trying to kill him.

But it wasn’t all sour. The war was over. Criticism of the president cast him as a well-meaning, bumbling goof who couldn’t chew gum without tumbling down a flight of stairs. Though unfair, it was good-natured by today’s standards.

Most importantly, the constitutional system had worked, albeit belatedly. Republican leaders had finally abandoned Nixon, putting country above party. Nixon himself had respected political tradition enough to resign rather than subject us to protracted impeachment proceedings. Jimmy Carter, the affable, grinning Georgian who was crafting a new moderate Southern governor strategy for the post-liberal Democrats, was nailing down the nomination and exuding an irresistible optimism.

The main event was the arrival of tall ships from around the world—talk about inclusive!—with one even from the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War in New York Harbor, followed, naturally, by a nationally televised fireworks display for the ages.

The tonal contrast with the Semiquincentennial celebration centered around July 4, 2026, couldn’t be more stark.

It isn’t just a sense that the American empire is beyond mere decline but actually circling the drain, a broad-based lack of expectation that this country will ever again strive to build great things. Our exceedingly partisan president, who makes clear every day in his online and verbal communications that he does not consider half of the population of the United States to be loyal Americans, is determined to impose his personal mark on the event in a way that would never have crossed the minds of Ford or even the imperious Nixon: a triumphal arch in Washington, a $250 bill and commemorative coin both bearing his face, Trump passports, and a political rally to open his “Freedom 250” fair dedicated to the ideology of his branch of the Republican Party.

As in 1976, there will be fun—for a certain kind of American, the downscale kind Trump considers to be his supporters: a UFC cage match on the White House lawn in conjunction with Trump’s 80th birthday on June 14th, plus a NASCAR-style race through the nation’s capital and around its monuments. It’s fun for the whole family, if your family is white, male, old, and lives in a red county in a red state.

Fifty years ago, the emphasis was unity. “Each of us, of every color, of every creed, are part of our country and must be willing to build not only a new and better nation but new and greater understanding and unity among our people,” President Ford urged.

This year’s theme is exclusion, beginning with the Washington Mall national prayer rally led by Trump on May 17th—taxpayer-funded—emphasizing to everyone who is not an evangelical or at least a Protestant Christian that separation of church and state is dead and that we are “One Nation under God”—Trump’s version of God, who approves of emoluments, wars of choice, and not attending church.

For a showman who obsessed over the attendance at his first inauguration in comparison with that of his predecessor, it’s curious that Trump has chosen to throw a party to which at least half the country isn’t invited.

65% of Republicans plan to celebrate. Only 37% of Democrats do.

Though it’s impossible to quantify buzz or excitement, I doubt even the most avid MAGA supporter will argue that we as a people—even if you only include Republicans—are excited about what ought to be a momentous occasion, marking a quarter of a millennium as a new and different kind of nation-state. Far more people are talking about the FIFA World Cup, even if it’s to complain about how ridiculously expensive, and poorly planned it will be.

If anyone compares, Ford will beat Trump on the headcount.

This will be a tacky affair, one that reflects and further divides an already bitterly polarized electorate. Strip mall meets used car lot at the corner of “Idiocracy,” except that the movie’s wrestler-porn star prez cared about actual problems affecting people.

For both the president and for us, however, it will be difficult to match the low bar set by the first Centennial in 1876.

The main event for the 100th was an exhibition centered in Philadelphia that showcased American industry and innovation, like the first telephone and the importation of bananas, to which no one could object. It pointed the way to the future with a speech by Susan B. Anthony in favor of women’s suffrage. In a country of 46 million people, there were 10 million visitors, making it a huge success.

Sadly, that triumph was quickly forgotten in the catastrophic 1876 presidential election that found Democrat Samuel Tilden defeating Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. Northerners refused to accept the results, tainted as they were by extreme fraud in several states, because the Democratic Party had been seen as the party of the South during the recently concluded Civil War. So Congress passed the Compromise of 1877, which reassigned electoral college votes to Hayes, making him president. Tilden stepped aside in exchange for ending Reconstruction in two remaining states, leading to the brutalization of Southern Blacks after the withdrawal of Union occupation troops.

If Trump gets his way, the midterm elections will similarly be such a disgrace that the hot mess he is making of the Semiquincentennial will soon be forgotten as well.

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

 

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The results that began to surface around 5:30 pm Sunday May 31 of this year in the first round of the Colombian presidential elections left many perplexed, as Abelardo “El Tigre” de la Espriella, won an uncanny number of votes, 10,359,902 as of this writing, over 670,000 votes above the front-runner Ivan Cepeda and his vice-presidential partner Aida Quilcué, with 9,687,508 votes. Paloma Valencia and her running mate Daniel Oviedo came in a distant third, much weaker than expected with 1,639,421 votes. Sergio Fajardo, the perennial symbolic centrist candidate, came in with 1,008,864 votes. The blank vote came in fifth with 406,955 votes, while Claudia Lopez, the neoliberal former Bogotá mayor, scrounged 225,480 votes, just above Santiago Botero’s 206,128. Mauricio Lizcano came in eigth with a handsome 53,839 votes. The remaining 50,000 votes were shared among a handful of remaining candidates.

Ivan Cepeda questioned the results shortly after the first round was called: “There is a discrepancy that we want to verify with respect to the electoral results. This isn’t just any old discrepancy. We are talking about 885,000 people or ID numbers.” He added, “There is information that indicates atypical votes from an undetermined number of tables. [...] Let us emphasize that only when the commission analysts clarify this discrepancy clearly and rigorously, will we share our conclusions on the results of this election.”

The electoral commission is required to clarify the situation within 72 hours. Similar concerns were raised after the March primaries and congressional elections, when 600,000 votes were recovered by Cepeda's party after they flagged irregularities, leading to 20 additional congressional seats.

Out of approximately 24,000,000 votes cast in the first round, the challenge will be how to get the 3 million or so votes in play, while also mobilizing new voters for the second round. Paloma Valencia, formerly the chosen successor of Alvaro Uribe, has already endorsed Uribe’s new horse (tiger?) Abelardo de la Espriella for the second round of the race, presumably giving him close to 11,000,000 votes for the second round. However, Valencia’s running mate, Daniel Oviedo, has indicated he will not support de la Espriella. Where his nearly 1,000,000 voters from the march primaries will align remains uncertain. He was a kind of neoliberal semi-progressive centrist before aligning with the heiress of the paramilitary political tradition in Colombia. Ironically, Valencia, in her attempt to appear centrist, seems to have lost more votes to de la Espriella than she gained from Oviedo. In the immediate aftermath of the first round results, Sergio Fajardo was coy about where he would try to direct his million-plus votes. If they were to go to Cepeda, he would be in striking distance of de la Espriella. Claudia Lopez’s votes would be an additional boost to whomever she endorses, while Santiago Botero’s 200,000 votes will likely go to de la Espriella, due to his narrow political profile as a businessman accused of domestic violence.

In the background, questions lurk about US intrusion, after threats made by President Trump and Colombian-born Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) toward Colombia as a whole if they vote the left back into office.

In 2022 Gustavo Petro won 8,542,000 votes in the first round, more than 2,000,000 votes behind the combined right-wing frontrunners, Rodolfo Hernández and Federico Gutiérrez. In the second round, he increased his vote count to 11,281,013, an increase of more than 2,700,000 votes from the first round. This means the focus over the next three weeks will be on turnout, beyond the jostling and backroom negotiations for support from the rest of the first-round candidates. Whoever can increase their turnout more dramatically will be the victor, assuming a clean election.

Abelardo de la Espriella is a Jekyll and Hyde character construction: imagine Alan Dershowitz wrapped up in the Batman comic book version of The Joker, in a bipolar bind with billionaire Bruce Wayne.

Of the current right-wing authoritarian archetypes, de la Espriella fits neatly between the evil clown, represented by President Donald Trump and Argentinian President Javier Milei, and the sadistic heir represented by presidents Nayib Bukele and Daniel Noboa (and Trump) in El Salvador and Ecuador (and the US), respectively. You could also say he is a non-senile version of Rodolfo Hernandez, the “outsider” right-wing real estate tycoon candidate who “surprised” the right-wing establishment by coming in second for the first round of the 2022 elections, which Petro ultimately won.

De la Espriella became wealthy while representing the dregs of Colombian high society, paramilitaries, cocaine capos, money launderers, pyramid schemers, mass murderers, and the like. In the carefully produced image de la Espriella has cultivated over the course of the campaign, he flaunts his lavish lifestyle, always with a twist of misogyny, while promising Nayeb Bukele-style policies, including persecution of the left, 10 new maximum security prisons, and Mileiean cuts of 40% of the public sector.

The pattern set by Trump in the US, Milei in Argentina, Bukele in El Salvador, Noboa in Ecuador, and now Asfura in Honduras, seeks to replicate itself with de la Espriella in Colombia.

Ivan Cepeda is a philosopher and politician, whose father was assassinated in 1994 as a senator for the Union Patriotica during a genocidal purge of the left-leaning political party by the same mafia elite that de la Espriella made his name defending. Cepeda has spent much of his time as a congressman, revealing the crimes of de la Espriella’s forebear, ex-president and paramilitary boss Alvaro Uribe, and aligning with popular President Gustavo Petro’s political economic program, which has initiated the process of land restitution to victims of Colombia’s decades-long civil war, and raised minimum wages in a country with the fifth most extreme wealth disparity on the planet. That is down from the third most extreme wealth disparity Colombia claimed leading out of the previous (Uribista) Duque administration into the Petro administration.

Cepeda recognizes that the road out of extreme wealth inequality requires the long-term continuity of a political project that makes solving this most fundamental of socioeconomic problems its top priority. Cepeda’s proposals build on the groundwork laid by the Petro coalition, seeking to expand public education and healthcare, while continuing the redistribution of land to millions of Colombians displaced by decades of the armed conflict promoted for so many years by Uribe and his mafia.

In the background, questions lurk about US intrusion, after threats made by President Trump and Colombian-born Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) toward Colombia as a whole if they vote the left back into office. The recordings released by HONDURASGATE and Red Diario of former Honduran president and convicted drug and weapons trafficker, Juan Orlando Hernandez, paint a picture of a US-Israel backed plan to topple left-wing governments in the region, with a particular focus on Colombia and Mexico, to pave the way for mafia states to ensure easy access by US and Israeli multinational corporations to oil and gas and key minerals for the construction of their rapidly expanding techno-fascist infrastructure.