LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Political cartoonist Ted Rall and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.

Scott Stantis of The Chicago Tribune fills in for John today.

Today we discuss:

•  As Trump mulls invoking the Insurrection Act against Minnesota, the first poll after ICE gunned down Renee Good—with four shots—shows most Americans disapprove of the agency and its violent tactics. Also: ICE shoots another man and gasses a family of six trying to escape the chaos in Minneapolis, where ICE is targeting daycare centers.

•  France, Germany, Sweden and Norway rush troops to Greenland as a shown of force against the United States. Even lickspittle Republicans are pushing back against an invasion.

• María Corina Machado, Venezuela’s extreme-right politician and neoliberal darling, gave her Nobel Peace Prize to The Donald.

• Even as Israel continues to kill Palestinians in Gaza, Israel and the US announce phase two of their ceasefire: the Board of Peace.

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The post No ICE, Please | DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

There is no part of the federal government that Americans depend on more than the Social Security Administration. It is the agency that is charged with administering the earned benefits of millions. Unfortunately, after one year into President Donald Trump’s second term, SSA is in disarray. The Washington Post recently took an in-depth look at the SSA and reported among other things that:

Long-strained customer services at Social Security have become worse by many key measures since President Donald Trump began his second term, agency data and interviews show, as thousands of employees were fired or quit, and hasty policy changes and reassignments left inexperienced staff to handle the aftermath.

Exaggerated claims of fraud, for example, have led to new roadblocks for elderly beneficiaries, disabled people, and legal immigrants, who are now required to complete some transactions in person or online rather than by phone. Even so, the number of calls to the agency for the year hit 93 million as of late September—a six-year high, data shows.

SSA officials are likely to respond to the Washington Post story by pointing out that a recent SSA inspector general argued that SSA has made major improvements. Fox News reported that:

The inspector general’s report concluded that SSA’s telephone performance improved during fiscal year 2025 largely because of operational changes, including the rollout of a new cloud-based telecommunications platform, expanded automation, and staffing realignments. The platform, implemented in August 2024, allowed SSA to increase call capacity, expand self-service options, and monitor performance in real time, according to the report.

There is one catch with the inspector general’s report, and, to paraphrase Joseph Heller, it is one heck of a catch. This summer SSA changed “the type of data it reports publicly, removing information like callback wait times.” SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano told members of Congress over the summer that SSA changed the metrics because reporting the wait times might discourage people from calling the agency. Yes, you read that correctly. So, rather than fixing the problem SSA decided to not share the data. This might be a solution to a public relations problem, but it is not going to help beneficiaries in the slightest.

There is no doubt about the fact that 2025 was a tumultuous time for SSA. The year began with Elon Musk, the then head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme; and, in an address to Congress in January President Trump said that there were “shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud” in Social Security and that people up to 160 years old were receiving Social Security benefits. None of these accusations, of course, proved to be true. While Trump and Musk’s spurious claims have faded away, the damage they have done to SSA lingers on.

If Republicans on Capitol Hill are not interested in exercising their duty to provide oversight, Democrats must step up to the plate.

The current congressional leadership has shown zero interest in exercising any oversight responsibility on any issue foreign or domestic. Congress’ lack of interest or will to scrutinize the Trump administration led Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner to ask, “Is congressional oversight dead? Where does this end? If none of my Republican colleagues raises an issue, does this mean we are ceding all oversight?”

While they are not in the majority, Democrats on Capitol Hill are not powerless. They can still hold hearings of their own. These hearings would not be part of the legislative process. They would however give Democrats the platform they need to speak up for the American people. There is good news here for those who care about Social Security. The ranking Democrat on the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Social Security is Rep. John Larson of Connecticut who has fought for years to protect Social Security. Larson is the perfect person to shine a light on the current state of affairs at SSA.

If Republicans on Capitol Hill are not interested in exercising their duty to provide oversight, Democrats must step up to the plate. Seventy-five million Social Security beneficiaries are counting on them to protect their earned benefits.

Is the illegal US invasion of Venezuela, and kidnapping of its president, a “war for oil”?

To some extent, this is a reductionist debate. There are often multiple motivations for war, and there clearly are several here. Some in the administration are stuck in Cold War ideology and will use any pretext to undermine and even overthrow governments they perceive as left-leaning, as seen from President Donald Trump’s threats against Colombia, Cuba, and Mexico.

Beyond those governments, the latest Trump National Security Strategy proclaims a desire to “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.”

Still, it’s hard to ignore the role of oil. Venezuela likely has the world’s largest proven oil reserves, and Trump has repeatedly declared his intention to seize Venezuela’s oil, partly for the benefit of the United States and US oil companies.

We may eventually see US oil companies grab some of the largest oil reserves in the world, with huge direct public subsidies in the form of investment reimbursements, and indirect subsidies in the form of the US military acting as their free private security force.

There are reasonable doubts about whether US oil companies would be willing to invest in Venezuela. The poor state of the country’s oil infrastructure would necessitate major investments to upgrade it. It’s estimated to cost $110 billion to restore production to mid-2010s levels, and there’s a high likelihood of political instability in the country over the next few years.

Reportedly, many US oil companies are reluctant to invest in Venezuela despite pressure from the US government. Either way, the web of business interests that benefit, directly or indirectly, from the oil and gas industry still stand to come out ahead—and in some ways are already benefiting—from Trump’s aggression.

Stock prices for US refiners (such as Chevron and Valero Energy) and oilfield services companies (such as Halliburton) have soared in response to the US attack, with an immediate spike on the first trading day after the attack. While prices have decreased since, they remain at their highest levels in recent weeks.

Oil companies can benefit directly, even if they don’t invest in Venezuela. Crude oil prices have been on a downward trajectory over the last year due to oversupply.

This is one of the reasons the industry is skeptical about entering Venezuela—and, indeed, their short-term objectives appear to be at odds with those of the Trump administration, which claims to want more production and lower pump prices.

There’s always the possibility that Trump could use US control of Venezuela to reduce its oil production.

After all, the administration has always been friendly to the interests of the fossil fuel industry, whose leaders were among Trump’s major backers. If the US clamps down on oil production in Venezuela, that would at least somewhat alleviate the downward pressure on oil prices, benefiting the industry.

The Trump regime has openly stated its intent to “run” Venezuela, with “boots on the ground” if needed. This gives them the power to enforce further cuts in Venezuelan oil production, if they choose to do so.

Finally, we shouldn’t discount the possibility that the administration will offer enough sweeteners to make investment in Venezuela lucrative for the industry. The administration has already signaled that it may be willing to reimburse oil companies for their investment and escalate US military intervention to provide security for the US oil and gas industry. That essentially kicks the cost of production to US taxpayers.

This may not be enough to persuade the industry to invest in Venezuela. If it is, we may eventually see US oil companies grab some of the largest oil reserves in the world, with huge direct public subsidies in the form of investment reimbursements, and indirect subsidies in the form of the US military acting as their free private security force.

Setting aside the limiting debate about whether this is a “war for oil,” it’s clear that fossil fuel capitalism is already profiting from the attack on Venezuela—and may profit more in the future. If climate change isn’t reason enough to break the political power of this industry, its role in incentivizing war and conflict is another.

When widespread protests erupted in Iran over soaring inflation and high living costs, the Trump Administration openly supported the demonstrators and even pledged to launch military strikes against Iran if its security forces used violence against them. In the United States, however, when similar protests occurred — such as those following the killing of a woman by ICE in Minneapolis — the official response was strikingly different.

The post Protester Mixup appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Three images taken from videos of the slaying of Renee Nicole Good make it clear that she was not trying to run down an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent when he shot her three times and killed her.

Videos taken by different people from various angles (see CNN, ABC, and the New York Times) show what happened, including one in slow motion.

We see ICE agents apparently attempting to force Good out of her vehicle, Good backing up, then Good trying escape by turning the wheels to the right and driving forward. And we see ICE agent Jonathan Ross firing a first shot at Good from near the front of the car, then firing two more shots from alongside the car.

Common sense tells us that ICE shooter Ross never considered himself in danger of being run over, since he deliberately stepped in front of the car.

What you see is not a man being run down. What you see is not self-defense. It is an execution.

Consider two screen captures from seconds 9 and 10 of the video.

In the first, Ross appears to be in front of the vehicle and he is drawing his gun.

The vehicle had been moving backward just one second earlier, so the vehicle’s forward movement was still slow. If Ross thought the car might hit him, he had only to step to his right (our left) to get out of the car’s path. Instead he draws his gun, aims, and fires.

In the second photo we see the puff of vapor that accompanies the first shot. We also see that both of Ross’ feet are to the left of the car. Ross is not in the path of the car when he takes his first shot. He is not saving himself from being run down.

Shots two and three are even more obviously not in “self-defense.” As shown in the slow motion video and the screen shot below, the car has moved forward and the ICE agent is alongside the vehicle when he stretches out his arm and shoots Renee Good in the head. He fires at point-blank range, through the driver’s side window.

What you see is not a man being run down. What you see is not self-defense. It is an execution.

Neither President Donald Trump nor Homeland Security head Kristi Noem have acknowledged that agent Jonathan Ross should not have taken out his gun and killed a law-abiding citizen who only sought to escape from aggressive ICE agents. Neither even said a terrible mistake had been made. They endorsed and excused the killing, and claimed she was a “domestic terrorist.”

The execution of Renee Nicole Good was part of a practice of unnecessary and excessive force which Trump and Noem approve of and support. ICE agents have fired their guns at people in cars at least 10 times, and, short of murder, ICE agents routinely attack and brutalize those they seize. Violence against observers and reporters represent efforts to conceal such lawless ICE conduct.

The contention that an ICE shooting victim tried to run them over has become the ICE equivalent of the German Nazi claim that slain opponents were shot while attempting to escape.

No evidence supports any terrorism claim, but Noem asserted that Good had been “stalking” ICE. President Trump pointed to a further “wrong”: “At a very minimum,” said Trump, “that woman was very, very disrespectful to law enforcement.”

Citizens of a democracy are entitled to observe ICE agents, to deter them from lawless activity, and citizens of a democracy are not required to be respectful of law enforcement.

If the Department of Homeland Security can with impunity kill citizens for exercising those rights, America will not long remain a free nation.

Just a week after Donald Trump first took office as president, he signed Executive Order 13769—his first travel ban. It halted refugee admissions and suspended entry into the US for citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. All of these countries have a Muslim majority. Because of that, and also because Trump had previously said that he intends to ban Muslims from the US, critics referred to the order as a “Muslim ban.”

The backlash was immediate and broad, coming from Republicans and Democrats alike, as well as US diplomats, business leaders, universities, faith groups, and international organizations such as the United Nations and Amnesty International. Protests erupted in airports and cities across the US. A friend and I—both of us immigrants to the US ourselves—spontaneously drove to the international airport in Houston to express our outrage, along with hundreds of other protesters. I remember I felt hopeful. Surely, even people who didn’t come out to the airport would recoil once they learned what the order was actually doing to real human beings—for example, to the 78-year-old Iranian grandmother, certainly not a threat to national security, who came to the US with a valid visa to visit her children, as she did every year. She was detained for 27 hours at LAX, denied access to lawyers, and fell ill before finally being allowed to enter the country.

Today, nine years later and one year into the second Trump presidency, I’m less hopeful. On the first day of 2026, a proclamation signed by Trump took effect, expanding an earlier travel restriction to 39 countries. Citizens of these countries, as well as holders of travel documents issued by the Palestinian Authority, are generally barred from obtaining visitor, student, exchange, or immigrant visas. Turkmenistan is a partial exception: Its citizens may obtain nonimmigrant visas such as tourist, student, or exchange visas, but immigrant visas remain suspended. The other countries subject to the ban are Afghanistan, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Cuba, Dominica, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Gabon, the Gambia, Haiti, Iran, Laos, Libya, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Myanmar, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, Togo, Tonga, Venezuela, Yemen, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Together, they make up about 20% of the world’s countries.

Despite affecting far more people than the 2017 ban, this one passed almost without notice: no airport protests, no sustained outrage, and little public awareness that it had happened at all. This is partly because it has become impossible to keep up with the incessant noise coming from the White House, which Trump’s former chief political strategist Steve Bannon has explained is strategic: “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” As the noise about the Nobel Peace Prize, the “War on Christmas,” shower pressure, and wind turbines causing cancer absorbs public attention, Trump advances a steady program of norm breaking and lawlessness. The ongoing extrajudicial killings of people on boats in the Pacific and the Caribbean, the illegal abduction of Nicolás Maduro, the threats against Greenland, the masked federal agents terrorizing communities across the US, the separation of families and disappearances of people to inhumane prisons at home and abroad, and the cuts in foreign aid that have already cost countless lives are just some examples. In normal times, none of these would be partisan issues. But these are not normal times.

Entire populations are labeled as dangerous or undesirable, reinforcing discrimination and social exclusion both inside and outside the US.

As understandable and human it is that many of us are worn down by a sustained state of outrage, we must pay attention and cannot allow exhaustion to harden into indifference. Silence is complicity, and complicity is not an option.

On a human level, the January 1 travel ban means this: Students who earned admission to US universities and secured funding after years of studying and planning are now barred from enrolling, losing scholarships and life-changing educational opportunities. Students who already started academic programs in the US and traveled home to renew their visas cannot return to finish their degrees. Parents with lawful status in the US are unable to have their children abroad come and join them, leaving families indefinitely separated. Children are prevented from traveling to the US to sit with a dying parent, attend a funeral, or provide end-of-life care. Married couples, fiancés, and partners are forced into separation. Patients who rely on specialized or lifesaving treatment available only in the US are prevented from entering. Professionals and academics are unable to attend conferences. Entrepreneurs and businesspeople are blocked from attending critical meetings or negotiating deals. Entire populations are labeled as dangerous or undesirable, reinforcing discrimination and social exclusion both inside and outside the US.

This is not an exhaustive list, but merely a snapshot of the devastating and entirely predictable consequences of Trump’s new travel ban. Like its predecessors, it is not a security measure. It is a choice to inflict harm on ordinary people, and this choice is deliberately cruel. As I’m writing this, the Trump administration has announced a further escalation: the suspension of immigrant visas for 75 countries, a move that primarily affects families by closing the door on reunification. If we meet such policy choices with silence, authoritarianism has already won.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Political cartoonist Ted Rall and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.

Today we discuss:

•  Trump caves in, reversing $2 billion in cuts to mental health and addiction programs after one day, after bipartisan pushback.

•  75% of Americans don’t want the US to take control of Greenland.

• Josh Hawley (R-MO) wimps out, and joins Todd Young (R-IN) in voting against a War Powers Resolution requiring Congressional approval for Trump’s war against Venezuela that they initially supported.

• Elon Musk’s Grok AI will no longer let users virtually “undress” people.

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The post Make America Crazy Again | DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

On January 7, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis—a city long enriched by immigrants and now under assault from thousands of ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents.

Good, a 37-year-old poet and mother of three, was driving alongside her wife, Becca. They were observing an ICE raid in their community. “We stopped to support our neighbors. We had whistles. They had guns,” said Becca.

Sadly, at least three other people have been killed by ICE officers in the last five months, according to The Marshall Project.

Among them was Silverio Villegas González, a 38-year-old father and cook originally from Mexico, who was fatally shot during a traffic stop in a Chicago suburb. Keith Porter Jr., a 43-year-old father of two—and, like Good, a US citizen—was shot and killed by an off-duty ICE agent on New Year’s Eve in Los Angeles.

Across the country, more communities are responding to our nation’s descent into lawlessness by uniting around our shared humanity and demanding justice.

While the families of all these victims await justice, the violence continues. ICE agents have shot at least nine people in their vehicles since September. The Department of Homeland Security has routinely invoked “self-defense” to justify these shootings, despite video and witnesses repeatedly contradicting their accounts.

From Los Angeles to Washington DC, Chicago, Memphis, New Orleans, Portland, Charlotte, and now Minneapolis, violence has followed wherever President Donald Trump has dispatched immigration agents in the name of “public safety.”

On the same day Good was murdered, ICE conducted a raid at a nearby Minneapolis high school, reportedly tackling a teacher and harassing students. The next day, ICE agents in Robbinsdale, Minnesota forcibly detained a US citizen and Red Lake Nation descendant for no apparent reason. Stories of new outrages emerge almost daily.

And last fall, federal agents descended from Black Hawk helicopters in a midnight raid of an apartment building in Chicago, detaining all its residents, including children. (That’s in addition to killing Villegas González—and shooting another person five times.)

This escalating violence is an outgrowth of ICE’s appalling treatment of immigrants. Across the country, people have been rounded up, thrown in deadly prisons, and ripped from their families—a trend that has sharply escalated under Trump.

Thousands of masked agents in unmarked cars—equipped with military-grade weapons and the latest surveillance technology—treat cities like war zones while executing raids at workplaces, places of worship, and schools.

Citizens and noncitizens alike have been racially profiled and kidnapped at courthouses and off the streets without warrants or probable cause. Trump has also used ICE to attack free speech, abducting and jailing students like Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, and Rümeysa Öztürk who spoke out against the Gaza genocide.

In addition to the shootings, 32 people died in ICE custody last year alone—and as of this writing, four more people have died in custody so far this January.

Abysmal conditions in ICE prisons, including medical neglect, have resulted in these tragic and avoidable deaths, leaving families shattered and still searching for answers. Nearly 69,000 people are currently being held in ICE prisons, the vast majority of them without a criminal record. According to ProPublica, ICE also detained over 170 US citizens last year.

ICE has repeatedly denied members of Congress entry to its detention facilities, interfering with Congress’ constitutional oversight authority. Still, Congress enables ICE’s abuses through billions in funding increases. ICE’s $14 billion annual budget for detentions alone, note Lindsay Koshgarian and Sarah Lazare, is more than the total military spending of 124 countries.

Across the country, more communities are responding to our nation’s descent into lawlessness by uniting around our shared humanity and demanding justice. A recent poll shows, for the first time, net positive support—including among self-described moderates—for abolishing ICE.

These Americans understand that no one is safe as long as ICE still exists, operates with impunity, and terrorizes communities. How many more deaths will it take for Congress to hold this agency accountable?

On January 3, 2026, the United States did not merely bomb a sovereign country and capture its president. It displayed, in the most unambiguous terms, a total defiance of the post-war international order that it helped create. When US special forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife and National Assembly Deputy Cilia Flores from Caracas and transported them to a Brooklyn jail, they did not simply violate Venezuelan sovereignty. They declared that sovereignty itself, for any nation that refuses subordination to US imperialism, holds no weight.

As Nicolás Maduro Guerra, the president’s son, stated before Venezuela’s National Assembly: “If we normalize the kidnapping of a head of state, no country is safe. Today it’s Venezuela. Tomorrow, it could be any nation that refuses to submit.”

The response to this act, regardless of one’s political orientation or views on the Maduro government, will determine whether the concepts of international law, multilateralism, and the self-determination of peoples retain any meaning in the 21st century. This is not a question for the left alone. It is a question for every nation, every government, and every citizen who believes that the world should not be governed by the principle that might makes right.

The Logic of Hyper-Imperialism Unveiled

What distinguishes the current phase of US foreign policy from earlier periods of intervention is its brazenness. When the CIA orchestrated the overthrow of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz in 1954, Washington maintained the pretense of responding to communist subversion. When American forces invaded Panama in 1989 to capture Manuel Noriega, the justification was framed within a discourse of law enforcement. The history of US intervention in Latin America spans over 40 successful regime changes in slightly less than a century, according to Harvard scholar John Coatsworth.

Every government that has sought to develop independently, that has attempted to control its own natural resources, that has resisted subordination to Washington, must recognize that what has happened in Venezuela could happen to them.

But President Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States would “run” Venezuela represents something qualitatively different. Here there is no pretense. When asked about the operation, Trump invoked the Monroe Doctrine and said that these are called “Donroe Doctrine,” signaling that the Western Hemisphere remains a zone of US dominion—an assertion clearly made in the National Security Strategy launched in November 2025. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s subsequent clarification that the US would merely extract policy changes and oil access did nothing to soften the nakedness of the imperial project.

This represents what we at the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research have identified as “hyper-imperialism,” a dangerous and decadent stage of imperialism. Facing the erosion of its economic and political dominance and the rise of alternative centers of power (mainly in Asia) US imperialism increasingly relies on its uncontested military strength. The Chatham House analysis is unequivocal: This constitutes a significant violation of Venezuelan sovereignty and the United Nations Charter. There was no Security Council mandate, nor any claims to self-defense.

The post-1945 international order established the formal principle that states possess sovereign equality and that force against another state’s territorial integrity is prohibited. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter was designed precisely to prevent the powerful from treating the world as their domain, which the US has now blatantly ignored.

The Test for Global South Solidarity

The kidnapping of President Maduro poses an existential question to the discourse of “multipolarity.” While the seeds of a multipolar world order may exist (China’s economic rise, the increasing political assertiveness of Global South countries, BRICS and its expansion, the increasing trade in local currencies) they have proven to be extremely limited in the face of the US unilateral use of force. This is an uncomfortable truth.

The initial responses from governments suggest the difficulty of moving from rhetorical condemnation to material constraint. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva correctly identified the stakes when he condemned the capture as crossing “an unacceptable line” and warned that “attacking countries, in flagrant violation of international law, is the first step toward a world of violence, chaos, and instability.” Colombian President Gustavo Petro rejected “the aggression against the sovereignty of Venezuela and of Latin America.” Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum declared that “the Americas do not belong to any doctrine or any power.” China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi condemned US military intervention and called for the release of President Maduro, saying, “We don’t believe that any country can act as the world’s police.”

The groundswell of opposition confronts a structural problem: The institutions designed to prevent such actions are incapable of constraining the permanent members of the Security Council. The United States can veto any resolution condemning its behavior. The emergency Security Council meeting convened at the request of Venezuela and Colombia produced denunciations but no enforcement mechanism.

Every government that has sought to develop independently, that has attempted to control its own natural resources, that has resisted subordination to Washington, must recognize that what has happened in Venezuela could happen to them. Trump’s threats against Cuba and Colombia underscore this point.

Sovereignty, Resources, and the Right to Self-Determination

The pattern is well established with the successive overthrowing of heads of states when they tried to implement land reform like Árbenz in Guatemala, nationalize national resources under Salvador Allende in Chile and Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran. The thread continues to the present situation in Venezuela.

While the real limits of “multipolarity” in this stage of US hyper-imperialism have been laid bare, we must continue building our collective capacity to resist.

Venezuela possesses the world’s largest proven oil reserves, estimated at 303 billion barrels. Trump made no effort to disguise the centrality of oil, announcing that American companies would rebuild Venezuela’s oil industry and the US would be “selling oil, probably in much larger doses.” The maritime blockade preceding the military operation served the explicit purpose of strangling the country economically.

Yet the entire trajectory of the US Venezuela policy since 2001, from funding opposition groups to the 2002 coup attempt, to Operation Gideon in 2020, to the “maximum pressure” sanctions, has been designed to prevent Venezuela from making free choices. The assault accelerated after Venezuela enacted its 2001 Hydrocarbons Law asserting sovereign control over oil resources.

Conclusion

The kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and National Assembly deputy Cilia Flores should compel a fundamental reassessment of the state of the international order. The formal institutions and legal frameworks that were supposed to prevent great power aggression have failed to constrain Washington’s imperialist aggressions. This places an enormous responsibility on the governments and peoples of the Global South. The debates around multipolarity, BRICS, South-South cooperation, and de-dollarization are rendered academic if they do not translate into the practical capacity to impose costs on actions like the invasion of Venezuela. Ultimately, the imperialist aggression against Venezuela has repercussions for governments and peoples around the world, regardless of their ideological orientation or views on the Maduro government. While the real limits of “multipolarity” in this stage of US hyper-imperialism have been laid bare, we must continue building our collective capacity to resist. The defense of Venezuelan people’s sovereignty, after all, is a defense of the sovereignty of all our nations.

President Donald Trump’s statement that United States should go into Venezuela and “take back" the oil reflects historical ignorance, and a deeply entrenched extractive mindset—a mindset that has treated Latin America as a resource colony for over a century.

His claim that Venezuela “stole” US oil refers to Hugo Chávez’s decision in the early 2000s to nationalize foreign-owned oil assets, including those held by American companies. To understand that decision, we must look at the conditions that provoked it. For decades, foreign firms and domestic elites extracted enormous profits while ordinary Venezuelans languished in poverty. By the late 1990s, nearly half the population lived below the poverty line despite massive oil revenues, and income inequality was extreme.

Chávez rejected the 1990s Apertura Petrolera model, which opened the oil sector to foreign investment on highly favorable terms, allowing multinational corporations to capture disproportionate gains while the state received relatively little. The 2001 hydrocarbons law reversed this: Royalties were increased to 30%, joint ventures required majority state ownership, and PDVSA reclaimed control over production. Oil revenue was redirected to misiones—social programs that reduced poverty from 50-30%. Venezuela’s resource nationalism disrupted entrenched profit expectations, and that disruption angered the powers accustomed to extractive entitlement.

And this is not new. History shows that the United States has long responded aggressively when resource-rich countries assert control over their own wealth. A striking example is Iran in the early 1950s. Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who became premier in 1951, moved to nationalize the Iranian oil industry, previously controlled by the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. This bold assertion of sovereignty enraged foreign powers, leading Britain and, eventually, the US, to orchestrate a coup in 1953. Known as Operation Ajax (CIA) and Operation Boot (MI6), the intervention involved bribing politicians and military officials, disinformation campaigns in the media, and street riots to destabilize the government. Mosaddegh was overthrown, and the Shah reinstated, ensuring continued foreign access to Iranian oil.

Trump’s promise to “take the oil” is an insult to the sovereignty of Venezuela and the dignity of its people, effectively saying that national wealth is only legitimate when it aligns with US corporate interests.

Chávez’s Venezuela follows the same pattern. By denying US companies unfettered profits from national resources, he provoked the wrath of powers accustomed to resource imperialism. The outrage was not about governance or efficiency, it was about lost profits and disrupted expectations. When Trump threatens to “take the oil,” he is articulating a familiar imperial logic: Countries that assert control over their resources, rather than surrender them to foreign extraction, are to be punished. Venezuela is merely the latest chapter in a long story of sovereign nations being denied the right to decide how their wealth is used.

This is not to claim that Chávez’s policies were without flaws. Large-scale expropriations discouraged investment, PDVSA became politicized, technical expertise left the country, and overreliance on oil left the economy vulnerable. Production fell from around 3.5 million barrels per day in 1998 to roughly 2.5 million by 2013. But these economic and institutional shortcomings do not legitimize foreign seizure. Venezuela’s resources belong to its people, not to external actors asserting entitlement through power.

Trump’s rhetoric also ignores the environmental reality of Venezuela’s oil. The country’s reserves are among the heaviest and most carbon intensive in the world. Extraction requires enormous energy inputs, produces high methane emissions, and relies heavily on gas flaring. Venezuela has suffered repeated oil spills, chronic gas leaks, and widespread infrastructure decay. Increasing production under these conditions would intensify ecological damage in an already fragile system.

Trump’s promise to “take the oil” is an insult to the sovereignty of Venezuela and the dignity of its people, effectively saying that national wealth is only legitimate when it aligns with US corporate interests. Resource nationalism is a legitimate exercise of sovereignty, but the reaction to it frames it as illegitimate and criminal.

The lesson from Venezuela is not that resource nationalism should be abandoned. It is that sovereignty and markets must be balanced, executed carefully and democratically. Ignoring either leads to failure. Venezuela needs recovery, investment, and reform but that process must be led by Venezuelans, not dictated by foreign powers claiming historical rights to expropriate. Going in to extract oil under US control would deepen environmental damage, compound social injustice, and revive a colonial logic the world has spent decades trying to leave behind.

“Renee sparkled. She literally sparkled. I mean, she didn’t wear glitter but I swear she had sparkles coming out of her pores. All the time. You might think it was just my love talking but her family said the same thing. Renee was made of sunshine.”

The words are those of Renee Good’s wife Becca. They cut to our heart—our humanity. She was shot in the face by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, who then muttered: “Fuckin’ bitch.” The murder of this 37-year-old mom as she tried to drive around the ICE guys who stopped her is national news, of course. Almost everyone has seen at least one of the many videos of the incident and, you might say, the national dialogue about virtually anything else has been put on hold.

At least it seems that way. Is ICE keeping us safe from vicious, radical terrorists, along, of course, with those horrific immigrant invaders, or is it obliterating humanity’s sunshine?

President Donald Trump hasn’t simply handed us a new enemy of the moment, something most US presidents have loved to do, certainly in my lifetime: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan... uh, Gaza. Trump has declared that our main enemy is here at home, the ones fleeing chaos and poverty in their home countries and crossing our borders—you know, the rapists, murderers, drug dealers, insane-asylum escapees, etc. (Trump explains it all clearly on X.) But the enemy is also you, if you question his racism and belligerence in any way. If you are outraged by the killing of Renee Good and so many others, not to mention the kidnapping of hard-working Americans and their deportation to concentration camps, well, maybe you’ll be next.

Whether or not Trump is “being Hitler” is beside the point. He’s feeding not just hatred to his supporters—contempt for the radical left—but he’s also feeding them a chance for actual victory over the left: the chance to create the world they want.

Trump is at war with half—maybe two-thirds—of the country. He’s invading the cities—including Minneapolis, where Renee Good lived—that voted against him, that dared to declare themselves sanctuary cities. Where is this all going? Unsurprisingly, a lot of people see a parallel with Hitler and the Nazi era. They call ICE Trump’s Gestapo.

Of course, there’s plenty of disagreement and criticism about this. Come on, this ain’t the Third Reich! And I agree, to an extent. I see little value in comparing Trump to Hitler simply to intensify the insult you’re throwing back at him. But in a larger sense, God help us! What is going on here?

The US has waged hellish and unnecessary wars before, but what’s going on now under Trump is different. What I sense here is looming social change: the undoing of any semblance of democracy. Trump is seizing hold of the hatred and political rancor that exists in this country and is attempting to use it to his advantage. He’s feeding it to his supporters, empowering them with it. He has no interest whatsoever in uniting the country, finding common ground between sides, or embracing complex values as he governs. He just wants to eliminate the bad guys, the anti-Trumpers. All of us have a dark side, and Trump has been successfully summoning the darkness of his supporters. Go get ’em, boys! And wear your masks.

Whether or not Trump is “being Hitler” is beside the point. He’s feeding not just hatred to his supporters—contempt for the radical left—but he’s also feeding them a chance for actual victory over the left: the chance to create the world they want. This would be a world without political correctness, a world with the freedom to be racist and misogynist and, what the hell, tear down the Statue of Liberty. He and his believers believe they are creating white America.

How do we push back against this? How do we stop it before it gets politically entrenched and starts pulling in the American center? I can’t think of a harder question to answer. So let me quote some more words from Becca Good about Renee:

Renee leaves behind three extraordinary children; the youngest is just six years old and already lost his father. I am now left to raise our son and to continue teaching him, as Renee believed, that there are people building a better world for him. That the people who did this had fear and anger in their hearts, and we need to show them a better way.

We thank you for the privacy you are granting our family as we grieve. We thank you for ensuring that Renee’s legacy is one of kindness and love. We honor her memory by living her values: rejecting hate and choosing compassion, turning away from fear and pursuing peace, refusing division and knowing we must come together to build a world where we all come home safe to the people we love.

Marianne Williamson, who quoted these words in an email post, contrasted them with JD Vance’s comment that Renee Good’s real tragedy was that she had been “radicalized by left-wing ideology.” “If that was ‘left-wing ideology,’ Mr. Vice President,” she wrote, “I’ll take it.”

Every life is precious. Never let knowing this be stolen from you. When it comes to reclaiming the country, that’s the starting place, even—especially—when you’re face-to-face with an armed guy wearing a mask.

Iran’s Islamic regime is under incredible pressure as the protests that begun in late December over the collapse of the currency have morphed into a mass popular uprising that has spread across the entire country and shows no sign of slowing despite a brutal crackdown that has resulted so far in the killing of thousands of protesters.

Make no mistake about it. Iran’s current leadership is murdering its own citizens in order to remain in power and thus block the growing support for secularism, freedom, and democracy. It’s as simple as that. This is a regime that has been facing unprecedented hostility by the United States and some of its closest allies since coming to power in 1979 but has been far more interested in exporting the Islamic revolution than looking after the well-being of its own citizens. It is a reactionary regime that has suppressed the fundamental rights of women, banned independent trade unions, and engaged in a systematic crackdown of communists and other leftists, all the while catering to powerful national capitalist interests.

Iranians have a long history of rebellion against authoritarianism and repression. Under the Shah, Iran had one of the world’s most brutal and repressive regimes, strongly supported by the United States. Indeed, while the Shah sought to modernize the country and even gave women the right to vote, and the Family Protection Law of 1968 granted women certain rights in divorce and custody, he and his generals ran the country with an iron first. Tens of thousands of Iranians were killed during the Shah’s reign, and Iran’s dreaded secret police, SAVAK, employed torture and execution to stifle political opposition.

Yet, Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution, aided by Marxists, intellectuals, various secular groups, and the middle class, did not represent a transition from monarchy to democracy. Instead, it replaced a brutal, pro-Western monarchy with a theocratic regime that rolled back much of the social progress that had occurred up to that point. Repression came back, this time with an Islamic face, though the regime enjoyed at first considerable support among merchants, students, clerics, and the poor. Khomeini’s regime massacred and exiled all communists and embarked on a campaign of purification of policies. Women’s rights were drastically curtailed, and this included the removal of professional women from the public sector as well as the adoption of various means and methods aimed at discouraging women in general from entering the labor force.

The US is an imperialist power with a long history of undermining democracy throughout the world. The Iranian people will not accept US interference into their own political affairs.

Iranian women took to the streets by the thousands just a few weeks after the revolution to oppose Khomeini’s decree mandating the hijab. This decree was followed by a ban on alcohol, the separation of men and women in schools and beaches, and the criminalization of music. Iran was converted in no time from a Westernized society with a brutal political regime to an Islamic state sustained by an equally brutal political regime. Under the new social order, religion and state mixed as thoroughly as they did in Saudi Arabia. The only difference is that the two countries followed different branches of Islam--Iran’s political system is based on Shiism, while Saudi Arabia’s rests on Wahhabism.

More recently, in 2022, the death of the 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman Jina Mahsa Amini while under morality police custody sparked the nationwide “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests, which people from all walks of life joined to call for an end to the four-decade rule of Iran by the religious fanatics. The Iranian authorities responded by detaining thousands of people while killing more than 560 protesters. It was reported that the average age of those arrested was 15.

The key reasons behind the current anti-government protests are economic hardships and political grievances. Iran’s economy has been under severe strains for a long time due to the international sanctions but also because of mismanagement, corruption, and a host of deep structural problems (chronic inflation, widespread poverty, and high youth unemployment, among others) which the regime has failed to address.

Protests broke out on December 28 after the Iranian currency, the rial, crumbled against the US dollar, leading to soaring food prices and to an even higher inflation rate, which had already risen to nearly 50%. It all started with demonstrations by shopkeepers in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, but they quickly spread to numerous cities across the country, reflecting deep and widespread discontent among the general citizenry with the current regime. This means that the protests, which have been very large in size and joined by people from across Iranian society, are not simply driven by economic worries. They are political protests against a corrupt and oppressive regime.

According to some sources, more than 2,500 people have been killed by the Iranian authorities since the protests begun, but there are unverified reports, suggesting that the number of protesters killed could be at least 12,000 and possibly as high as 20,000. Leading Iranian officials have labeled protesters as “enemies of God,” a charge that is punishable by death under the laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran. They also insist that the protests are foreign driven.

Israel and the United States would like nothing more than to see regime change in Tehran and turn Iran into a US-Israeli vassal state. But the claim that the Iranian people are protesting against a dictatorship by being a pawn in the hands of foreign powers deserves nothing but scorn. Nonetheless, it speaks volumes of how alienated the regime’s rulers must feel from the nation’s citizenry. I suspect that deep down they are cognizant of the fact that their regime lacks political legitimacy in the eyes of the vast majority of the Iranian people.

The people of Iran have not forgotten the involvement of the CIA in the 1953 coup that ousted the democratically elected Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh. Their desire to get rid of Iran’s current regime is not an invitation for foreign interference. Indeed, who is to say that perhaps none of the courageous protesters would be paying with their lives for Iran to be free from an oppressive theocracy if the 1953 coup hadn’t happened?

It’s virtually impossible to predict what lies ahead for Iran and its people. But if President Donald Trump decides to take military action against Iran’s current regime, nothing good will come out of it. The US is an imperialist power with a long history of undermining democracy throughout the world. The Iranian people will not accept US interference into their own political affairs. In fact, such action may cause many Iranians to unite, at least temporarily, behind the regime. In sum, only the Iranian people themselves should be able decide their nation’s future.

The lack of market reaction to the news that Trump ordered his Justice Department to investigate criminal charges against Fed Chair Jerome Powell surprises many people. After all, everyone knows that the claims about cost overruns being the basis for the investigation is nonsense. Trump wants to threaten Powell with criminal charges because he ignored Trump’s demand that he lower interest rates.

This ordinarily would be seen as a very big deal. Ever since Nixon, presidents have been reluctant to be seen as pressuring the Fed. In fact, their concern on this issue often seemed absurd to my view. President Biden didn’t want his Council of Economic Advisors to even comment on interest rate policy, as though giving a view based on the economic data would be undue pressure.

But there is a big difference between presenting an economic argument and threatening to imprison a Fed chair who disagrees. And we now see which side Trump comes down on.

But apparently, the markets are just fine with this new threat. The major stock indexes all rose on Monday, although bond prices fell slightly, pushing long-term rates higher. The dollar also fell modestly.

The non-reaction of the stock markets might seem surprising. After all, the independent Fed is considered a sacred feature of US prosperity. There is no shortage of economists who will insist that a Fed that is subordinate to the whims of a president is quick route to double-digit or even triple digit inflation. (I’m more agnostic on this one, but the markets generally don’t listen to me.)

Anyhow, Trump is now not just looking to fire an insubordinate Fed chair, he’s looking to throw him in prison. And the markets just yawned.

This reaction should cause us to start asking how the markets might react if Trump just cancels or outright steals the 2026 elections in order to keep his lackeys in control of Congress. Under any other modern president, the fear of a cancelled or stolen election would be silly. While they might have used dubious tactics leading up to an election, we could be comfortable that the votes would be counted, and the outcome would be binding. (Florida in 2000 is a major exception.) No one ever suggested that an election would be cancelled.

But Trump has made it clear that he considers both cancellation and ordering that some votes not be counted as serious options in his recent New York Times interview. No one can be safe in assuming that we will have a normal democratic election this year.

Given this reality, we might want to speculate on how the markets would react in the event that Trump does decide to end American democracy. We now know that most of the big money boys couldn’t care less about democracy. Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Tim Cook have been happy to cozy up to Trump in Mar-a-Lago, even as he violates one democratic norm after another. Elon Musk has made it clear that he has contempt for democracy, insofar as it means allowing non-white people to vote.

This gang would obviously have no moral issues with a cancelled or stolen election. But what about the economics?

Trump has already made it clear that he will favor businesses whose leaders praise him and punish those who criticize him. His most recent effort in this direction was saying that he intended to ban ExxonMobil from access to Venezuelan oil because its CEO said what every oil analyst has said since Trump became president of that country: it will be difficult for companies to profitably invest there.

The economies of countries where the leader can reward or punish companies on a whim tend to not do very well. The courts have provided a limited check on Trump’s whims as has even this pathetic Congress. However, if Trump is deciding who serves in Congress, the checks will be gone. We will have full-rule by our demented 79-year-old president.

Perhaps markets will be fine with that. With enough rear-end licking some companies may still do fine, but it would seem on the straight economics most people with money would probably prefer to invest in a serious country. Let’s hope we don’t have to find out.

Trump has decided that the government should not give money to defense contractors who then reroute our tax dollars via stock buybacks to stockholders and executives.

A stock buyback, for those unfamiliar, is when a corporation repurchases its own shares, thus boosting the share’s price, a legalized form of stock manipulation. CEOs, who are paid mostly in stock incentives, and large investors directly benefit from stock buybacks, and unlike with dividends, don’t have to pay taxes until they sell their shares.

In the weapons industry, this isn’t news. Studies show that defense contractors spent three times more on dividends and stock buybacks than on capital investments needed to fulfill their contracts over the last decade. In Europe, it was the other way around with defense companies spending twice as much on capital investments compared to dividends. (They don’t do stock buybacks.)

The New York Times cited a Department of Defense study during the Biden administration that “found that top US defense contractors spent more on returning cash to shareholders in the form of dividends and stock buybacks between 2010 and 2019 compared to the previous decades, while spending on research and new or upgraded factories had declined.”

You’ve got to wonder why the Biden administration didn’t try to stop this scam. Maybe it feared looking anti-military. Or maybe it thought such an action would be too upsetting to their Wall Street donors who feast on stock buybacks?

Now we have Trump doing what the Democrats should have done long ago, announcing he will stop buybacks and cap executive salaries at profligate defense contractors:

• His Executive Order directs the Secretary of War to take steps to ensure that future contracts prohibit stock buybacks and corporate distributions during periods of underperformance, non-compliance, insufficient prioritization or investment, or insufficient production speed.
• The Secretary shall further take steps to ensure that future contracts permit the Secretary to, upon determining that a contractor is experiencing such issues, cap executive base salaries at current levels (with inflation adjustments permitted) while scrutinizing executive incentives to ensure they are directly, fairly, and tightly tied to prioritizing the needs of the warfighter.

How about Preventing Mass Layoffs?

If the Democrats wanted to show more concern for working people they would jump all over this executive order and push legislation to expand it to include a prohibition of compulsory layoffs at all defense contractors. If a contractor wants to change staffing levels, they should offer voluntary financial buyout packages. No one should be forced to leave.

This is an easy case to make. Why should taxpayers give money to corporations that then lay off taxpayers so that they can shovel more and more of our tax dollars to the wealthy? If the problem is that these defense contractors fail to deliver products on time they need more workers, not fewer.

Instead of wallowing in the Epstein files, the Democrats should declare again and again that mass layoffs are the weapon of choice to enrich executives and Wall Street. Fight for the damn jobs!

In April, the Labor Institute, in cooperation with the Center for Working Class Politics, produced a YouGov survey of 3,000 voters in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In the survey, we asked voters to evaluate a state ballot initiative we invented that read:

“Corporations with more than 500 employees that receive taxpayer-funded federal contracts are prohibited from conducting involuntary layoffs of American workers. All layoffs during the life of a taxpayer-funded contract must be voluntary, based on employer financial incentives. No one shall be forced to leave.”

Overall, 42 percent supported the proposal, while 26 percent opposed it and 32 percent were not sure. The no-layoff proposal was brand new, unheard of by anyone before the survey was administered, yet it tied for fifth in popularity among 25 economic proposals. Furthermore, we reported that:

“Respondents from key demographic groups that Democrats have struggled to reach in recent electoral cycles showed robust support for the policy, which was tied for fifth among respondents without a four-year college degree and those whose family income was less than $50,000 per year, and tied for sixth among respondents who reported a declining standard of living and those who live in rural areas and small towns.”

This no-layoffs policy would be a big winner for the Democrats leading up to the mid-terms. But it would not be a winner for the financial backers of the party who cherish their stock buybacks.

So here we are again. Trump outflanking the Democrats on a populist economic proposal, like cancelling NAFTA, one that the Democrats failed to address while in power. In this case, the Democrats could push Trump even further by tying job stability to federal defense contracts, something that working people would greatly value but would be upsetting to Wall Street.

The Democrats could push Trump, but will they dare to take that leap? One would hope so, but don’t hold your breath.

The failure to rigorously defend working people over the last forty years against needless mass layoffs may be why so many voters right now are willing to consider a new political party, independent of the two billionaire parties.

Much more on that to come.

There are moments when the danger facing a nation is not announced by sirens or declarations of war, but by something quieter and more corrosive: fear—abroad and at home—paired with the normalization of lawlessness at the very top of power.

The United States is living through such a moment.

A growing number of economists, constitutional scholars, and foreign-policy experts—including Professor Jeffrey Sachs—have warned that the country is now operating under an effectively unchecked presidency, and this is very dangerous. What once sounded theoretical has become tangible. Executive conduct has crossed from aggressive policy into outright violations of constitutional structure, international law, and basic norms of human dignity—leaving Americans and foreign populations alike unsure where law ends and coercion begins.

Consider Venezuela. A sitting head of state was forcibly apprehended and remains detained despite long-established principles of head-of-state immunity recognized by both international law and US courts. No congressional declaration of war was issued. No authorization for the use of military force was granted. Yet naval deployments, explicit threats of escalation, and coercive demands have proceeded as if constitutional limits were optional.

This is not a policy disagreement. It is a rupture of the separation of powers.

A republic cannot survive this indefinitely.

Under the Constitution, Congress—not the President—decides when the nation enters hostilities. When force is used without that authorization, the injury is not foreign; it is domestic. It alters the legal obligations of service members, bypasses elected representatives, and establishes precedents that future presidents will inherit and may get to expand. What is done once without consequence becomes permissible forever.

The international consequences are equally severe. When restraint is publicly described as conditional on “cooperation,” the message is unmistakable: compliance is demanded under threat. Under international law, consent extracted through coercion is no consent at all. Agreements reached in such conditions are void, unstable, and corrosive to global order. They invite retaliation, miscalculation, and escalation.

Against this backdrop, the President’s own conduct has crossed from provocation into mockery.

Posting a mug-style image of himself online with the caption “Interim President of Venezuela” is not political satire—it is a display of contempt for a population already living under the shadow of military threat. Venezuelan civilians fear for their lives. Survivors of armed attacks have described, in horrific detail, the killing of guards and soldiers by US troops acting like mercenaries with no mercy, aligned with US objectives, sparing only the President and his wife to be taken alive. In that context, ridicule from the most powerful office on earth is not harmless. It is psychological warfare by indifference.

And the fear does not stop at the border.

Inside the United States, many citizens have grown quiet—not because they are indifferent, but because they are afraid. Afraid of retaliation. Afraid of being singled out. Afraid that the institutions meant to protect them are bending rather than holding. Silence, under these conditions, is not consent. It is duress.

That fear is reinforced when the President openly refuses to rule out acquiring foreign territory by force. When Greenland and Denmark rejected his demands, the response was not reassurance but continued ambiguity. Sovereignty, once treated as inviolable, was suddenly spoken of as negotiable—through pressure, leverage, or worse. This is not how democracies speak. It is how empires test boundaries.

What ties these episodes together is not ideology, but the erosion of restraint. Courts are pressured to proceed where jurisdiction is barred. Congress is sidelined in matters of war and peace. Sovereign resources are discussed as assets to be reassigned under coercive conditions. Threats substitute for diplomacy. Mockery substitutes for leadership.

A republic cannot survive this indefinitely.

The Constitution was designed precisely to prevent this concentration of power. War powers were placed in Congress to slow escalation. Immunities were recognized to prevent cycles of retaliation. Diplomacy was meant to replace force, not disguise it. When these guardrails fail, the danger is not merely to foreign nations—it is to the constitutional order itself.

The most alarming feature of the present moment is not outrage, but normalization. Each uncorrected violation lowers the threshold for the next. Each silence under fear teaches power that it need not explain itself.

America is now at a point where clarity is no longer optional. A President who acts beyond constitutional authority must be confronted with the limits of that authority. Violations of the Constitution and of international law must be acknowledged—not obscured, denied, or ridiculed—and immediately remedied through full and lawful redress (as guaranteed by the First Amendment’s right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances). The alternative is not ambiguity. It is consequence.

If redress is refused, if illegality is neither recognized nor corrected, the Constitution provides a final safeguard. Removal from office is not vengeance; it is a mechanism of preservation. It exists precisely for moments when power becomes unmoored from law.

“America Under Siege” does not mean tanks in the streets. It means a nation deciding whether constitutional limits still matter when they become inconvenient. And history is unforgiving to republics that delay that decision for too long.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Political cartoonist Ted Rall and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.

Today we discuss:

•  Bill and Hillary Clinton tell the House Oversight Committee say they’ve “had enough” of the Epstein investigation and won’t testify despite a subpoena. James Comer says he’ll hold the former First Couple in contempt of Congress.

•  Iran says it may attack US military bases if the US attacks it again. Protesters claim 2,400 of their own have been killed in Iran.

• Ogala Sioux and Lakota Nation officials say tribal members are being targeted in Minnesota and held hostage by ICE to coerce them into allowing ICE operations on tribal land. HHS outnumbers cops in Minneapolis. And: federal prosecutors are resigning over the DOJ’s instructions to go after Renee Good’s widow.

• Japan and South Korea cozy up to confront China.

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The post What Happens on Epstein Island Stays on Epstein Island | DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Let me start by putting things bluntly: Don’t bother to tell Donald Trump, but with his distinct help, we’re doing nothing less than cooking ourselves. Thanks to the continued use of fossil fuels in a staggering fashion and the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, almost half of the world’s population now suffers through 30 additional days of extreme heat annually. Heatwaves roll in thicker and faster every year.

On average, according to the medical journal The Lancet, 84% of the extremely hot days we’ve faced over the past five years would not have occurred without human-induced climate change that the American president seems intent on making so much worse. Heat-related deaths are already 63% more frequent than in the 1990s. That Lancet article also reported that heat- and drought-related hunger, as well as deaths from wildfire smoke and industrial air pollution, are breaking records globally almost yearly.

Climate Impacts Tracker dubbed 2025 “The Year of Climate Disasters,” noting:

Flash floods tearing up a Himalayan village in India, hurricanes and wildfires ravaging the US, heatwaves and wildfires scorching Europe, record-breaking heat in Iceland and Greenland, torrential rains and floods roaring through Southeast Asia—2025 marked yet another year of human tragedies, driven by extreme weather events.

The number of environmental disasters and their destructiveness are only ratcheting up in step with increases in global greenhouse gas emissions, ever more extraction of key minerals, the ever-greater exploitation of biological resources, and outbreaks of resource wars (most recently with the US assault on Venezuela). All of that is linked to one crucial phenomenon: the single-minded pursuit of economic growth by the owning and investing classes. Not surprisingly, they reap the lion’s share of the benefits from such growth and bear next to none of its devastating consequences.

Though it’s seldom highlighted, the world economy has indeed reached an astounding physical scale. During the past century, resource extraction has doubled every 20 years or so. Indeed, humanity reached a grim milestone in 2021, when the global quantity of human-made mass—that is, the total weight of all things our species manufactured or constructed—surpassed the total weight of all living plant, animal, and microbial biomass on this planet. And worse yet, that mass of human-made stuff continues to grow, year by year, even as the natural world diminishes further.

In other words, our species is vainly striving to circumvent what’s come to be known as Stein’s Law from an aphorism credited to economic guru Herbert Stein: “If something can’t go on forever, it won’t.”

Societies could indeed achieve a distinctly better quality of life because of (not in spite of) degrowth.

Count on this: At some point, global economic growth will finally have to grind to a halt and shift into reverse. After all, if the corporate and political powers carry on with business as usual, such growth will end in chaotic, violent collapse. (Think Mad Max.) But if the elites can be thwarted and we can dramatically reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and other resources in a reasonably well-planned way, we might be able to avoid that fate.

That’s the pitch put forward by the degrowth movement. In essence, it’s a refutation of the “green growth” doctrine. (Green-growthers, ignoring Stein’s Law, claim that technological “innovation” will ensure that economies can continue to grow indefinitely.) In that debate, degrowth finally seems to be getting a leg up. A 2023 survey of nearly 800 climate-policy researchers found that almost three-quarters of them favored degrowth or no growth over green growth.

And here’s the reality the rest of us need to take in: Societies could indeed achieve a distinctly better quality of life because of (not in spite of) degrowth, since full-scale restraints on the endless extraction and consumption of fossil fuels could force them to ensure that their limited resources would be used to satisfy basic human needs instead of being wasted on yet more increasing profits for the already wealthy few.

The growth-addled political and economic forces pushing us toward ecological doom are many and formidable indeed. And that makes it ever more important that people in rich, overconsuming countries like ours come to realize how important it is that we stand up to the forces of ecocide, while developing a more realistic vision of the better world that awaits us once we’ve jumped off the growth-by-carbonization bandwagon.

One way to bring that better world into sharper focus is to examine a few of the many miseries and dangers that degrowth would help us alleviate or even leave behind. What follows is just a handful of examples.

Goodbye, War Machine

Topping the list of American institutions and resources that a degrowth economy could starve would be the US military-industrial complex. After all, the Pentagon is actually the largest institutional user of fossil fuels in the world. The greenhouse gases our military emits, even in peacetime, are believed to have a global-warming impact of 60 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually. The Earth can’t handle that any longer.

To begin shrinking our military’s now trillion-dollar annual budget would not only prevent a significant amount of global warming but also save countless human lives and greatly enhance the quality of life in this country and across the planet.

With degrowth, for example, the Defense (not—thank you, Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and crew!—War) Department’s nearly 3 million employees, who enable the resource-heavy, deadly work of war-fighting, imperialism, and, if the Trump administration gets its way, the suppression of domestic political protest, can find themselves better jobs. After all, employees in all but the top echelons of the military, underpaid and exploited, endure often harsh working and living conditions. Zeroing out the Pentagon would free up a vast workforce to help meet people’s actual needs rather than killing all too many of us on this planet (most recently, at least 115 in the bombing of Venezuelan boats and 40 more in the January 3rd attack on Caracas). And they’d be better off losing those jobs.

Enlisted personnel receive such small paychecks that many are eligible for SNAP (“food stamp”) benefits, even if only 14% apply for them. Among the families of junior enlisted troops, 45% often can’t afford enough food. More than 286,000 of them don’t get an adequate variety or amount of food and, of those, about 120,000 report sometimes skipping meals and eating less than they need for fear of running out of money.

And that’s not all. A nationwide analysis suggested that towns and cities abutting military bases have higher crime rates (19% greater for property crimes and 34% for violent crimes) than similar towns not near such installations.

Worse yet, people living or working in or around military bases are often exposed to dangerous levels of toxic contamination over long periods and can also be plagued by noise pollution. Not surprisingly, studies have also found high rates of hearing loss among the troops. In the United States, almost 15% of active-duty personnel suffer hearing impairment of some sort (and it’s one of the most common health problems among veterans as well).

Dismantling our war machine would also help restore a better quality of life for tens of millions of people elsewhere. Consider the death and misery our military has inflicted during the past six decades on Indochina, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Kuwait, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Iran, and now the Caribbean Sea, the Eastern Pacific Ocean, and of course Venezuela.

As if that weren’t bad enough, for decades, our military-industrial complex has provided armaments to repressive, murderous regimes around the globe—Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people being the most recent example.

Adiós, Vehicular Supremacy

In a much less resource-intensive American society, human needs would also no longer be subordinated to those of gasoline-driven motor vehicles, and our collective quality of life would improve dramatically.

Based on the importance of keeping this planet livable, any ecologically sane society would break free from what Gregory Shill has labeled “automobile supremacy” and that, of course, would be a particularly significant accomplishment for any degrowth movement in the United States or other wealthy countries.

As a start, motor vehicles are regularly among the top 10 causes of death for US residents under the age of 55. Worse yet, pedestrian fatalities, which had been falling for decades, shot up by 71% between 2010 and 2023, while fatalities caused by increasingly taller, heavier, more aggressively armored pickups and SUVs climbed at precisely twice that rate, 142%.

Starving militarism and automobile supremacy of resources, while improving the quality of life of our communities, would also go a long way toward halting the ecological breakdown of this planet while the sources of many smaller-scale dangers and ills would also fade into the past.

With private gas-driven vehicles largely replaced by extensive transit networks, electric vehicles, and bike and foot traffic, we also won’t have to contend with as many road-raging drivers in armored pickup trucks the size of World War II tanks. We won’t face the health dangers posed by air and noise pollution from vehicle traffic. Our cities will have vastly more green space, because significant parts of the 30% of their soil surface now covered by concrete or asphalt solely to accommodate motor vehicles could be revegetated. And we won’t suffer the extra-blistering summer heat that comes with such over-paving.

With degrowth and the end of automobile supremacy, traffic jams will vanish into the past; we’ll no longer risk being killed while simply walking, biking along a roadway, crossing a street legally, or engaging in lawful, peaceful protest; and everyone will all too literally be able to stop driving everyone else crazy.

Farewell to So Many Other Fossil-Fuelized Plagues

Starving militarism and automobile supremacy of resources, while improving the quality of life of our communities, would also go a long way toward halting the ecological breakdown of this planet while the sources of many smaller-scale dangers and ills would also fade into the past. Taken alone, each might appear insignificant, but cumulatively, such culprits severely degrade the quality of life in our wildly growth-oriented economy. As just one example of something that, with degrowth, we could say “good riddance” to, let me suggest that loud-mouthed neighborhood bully, the leaf blower.

Generating wind speeds approaching those of an EF5 tornado, gas-powered leaf blowers blast out noise at 95 to 115 decibels (two to eight times louder than the safe upper limit set by federal agencies). Electric leaf blowers, while less noisy, still significantly exceed the maximum safe noise level near schools, hospitals, daycare centers, retirement homes, or anywhere else where there are vulnerable people present.

Most gas-powered blowers and other deafening lawn machinery are operated for long hours by commercial landscaping crews, whose ears are just a couple of feet from the roar. Often surrounded by other leaf blowers, lawn mowers, and gas-powered equipment, such workers commonly suffer hearing loss.

The noise of a leaf blower, like that produced by vehicular traffic and wind turbines, is rich in low-frequency sound that carries long distances, easily passing through walls. Exposure to such noise raises the risk of a range of health problems, including sleep disruption, mental stress, high blood pressure, heart ailments, stroke, and immune-system dysfunction.

And keep in mind that the substitution of leaf blowers for perfectly functional rakes is just the tip of the iceberg. Our economy is now chock-full of unnecessary products that diminish the quality of life and would be left in the nearest ditch if energy consumption were deeply reduced.

Hello Again, Night Sky

By ending profligate energy consumption, degrowth could also restore much-loved wonders of nature that the growth economy has stolen from us.

Consider the night sky. Since 2010, in cities and towns, as well as anyplace near them, “skyglow” (a bleaching out of the night sky that hides stars from view) has been increasing at an astonishing rate of 10% a year.

This surge in light pollution has coincided with the rapid adoption of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) for streetlights and other outdoor illumination. Such LEDs produce far more light per watt of energy consumed than older light sources. Unfortunately, companies and municipalities have taken advantage of LED efficiency not by cutting their energy consumption, but by flooding parking lots, streets, billboards, sports fields, and car dealerships with even brighter light.

We’d reap myriad benefits by deeply cutting resource use while ensuring that collective sufficiency and justice for all become the focus of our world.

Most LED lighting now in use is rich in short wavelengths at the “cool-blue” end of the visible spectrum, which ensures that it will be scattered by the atmosphere more efficiently and so produce a rapid increase in skyglow. As a result, stars have all but disappeared from the night sky in cities, suburbs, and nearby rural areas.

Exposure to cool-blue light at night also threatens humans and other species by disrupting our circadian sleep-wake cycle. Among the impacts on human health are gastrointestinal disorders, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and even cancer.

A degrowth society dialing down its energy use would not only reduce light and noise pollution but achieve significant advances in environmental justice. Brightly lit industrial and commercial facilities and parking lots are all too often placed in low-income, racialized communities. As a consequence, across the United States, light pollution is more severe in neighborhoods where a larger proportion of the population is Black, Latino, or Asian.

Amid mounting ecological and humanitarian crises and with Donald Trump still in the White House for another three potentially devastating years, the vanishing of the heavens may be regarded as a problem only for astronomers and aesthetes. But such a view badly underestimates how important the starry night sky has proven to be to our culture, scientific progress, and social cohesion. It was an unalloyed good, shared freely and equally by all humanity. And it could be so again if, with degrowth, we put our cities and towns on a dimmer switch.

To be clear, the degrowth movement’s not claiming that the way to prevent ecological and civilizational collapse is simply to play Whac-A-Mole by working our way through individual problems like traffic congestion or light and noise pollution. In fact, the point of degrowth is that societies should leave all such problems, including the potential disaster of climate change, in history’s trash heap. We’d reap myriad benefits by deeply cutting resource use while ensuring that collective sufficiency and justice for all become the focus of our world.

As a Black queer advocate and policy professional, I have never been naive about politics. But 2025 surpassed even cynics’ worst fears. The Trump-Vance administration didn’t just change laws; it dismantled protections, erased identities, stripped away care, and declared that some lives don’t matter.

Black and brown communities already battling racialized policing, economic precarity, and limited access to care suffered new blows on multiple fronts. For women, girls, transgender youth, disabled people, queer folks, immigrants, the message was clear: Not only your rights, but your bodies, your health, and your lives are expendable.

President Donald Trump’s January 20, 2025 executive order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth” redefined gender as a binary fixed from birth. Across agencies, “gender” became “sex,” and gender identity was erased from federal recognition and protections.

Trump’s January 24 executive order reinstating Hyde Amendment-style restrictions cut virtually all federal funding for abortion, and clawed back health funding for reproductive services. The 1977 Hyde Amendment banned using federal funds for abortion (except in cases of rape or incest or a life-threatening pregnancy). Doubling down on it disproportionately impacts women, girls, low-income people, and communities of color.

Communities of color, LGBTQI+ people, women, girls, and transgender youth are not disappearing. We are organizing; we are resisting; we are making care, dignity, and justice real.

By mid-2025, all federal support for LGBTQI-specific crisis services through the national suicide prevention hotline 988 was suspended—a direct blow to people who rely on them when they have nowhere else to turn.

Over the course of the year, health-equity protections, data collection on sexual orientation and gender identity, nondiscrimination guidance, and federal support for queer and trans-inclusive care were all revoked.

Taken together, these actions aren’t just policy changes; they symbolize structural denial of the needs, identities, and very existence of people the administration doesn’t want to see in its vision for America, or indeed the world.

Last year it overhauled how the US reports on human rights, categorizing abortion access, gender-affirming care, and protections for LGBTQI+ people as “human rights violations” while ignoring systemic racism, police violence, economic inequality, and state-sanctioned oppression. This brazen rewriting of global norms on human rights gives cover to oppressive regimes and undermines US leadership and moral standing.

So where do we go from here?

We need to hold ourselves accountable for building real equity in real time. We must reclaim care as a form of resistance. Our laws at every level must guarantee access to healthcare, behavioral health services, gender-affirming care, mental health support, comprehensive data collection, and nondiscrimination protections. They must guarantee reproductive autonomy and community safety for everyone, and especially for those denied these rights the longest. Care, autonomy, and safety are imperative at all times, and can’t be suspended or soft-pedalled when ideological winds shift.

Those most impacted by the shifts must shape the path forward: Women of color should be at the center of reproductive health and justice efforts. Queer people from historically marginalized communities should guide design of mental health and crisis-response systems. Transgender youth should lead national conversations about their own safety and autonomy.

2025 was not just a bleak moment in our history; it is a warning about our future. It shows how quickly rights can be erased, how destructive the raw exercise of power can be, and who gets scapegoated for the ensuing chaos.

But it also demonstrates our strength and resolve. Communities of color, LGBTQI+ people, women, girls, and transgender youth are not disappearing. We are organizing; we are resisting; we are making care, dignity, and justice real.

The Trump-Vance administration believed they could turn back the clock by cutting services, weaponizing laws and regulations, and trying to erase our identities. They have deeply underestimated us. We are not waiting for permission to exist. We are still here. We are still building. And we will not be erased.

A lump of coal is Santa’s proverbial gift to children who have been naughty. But what naughtiness makes Americans deserve the coal that the Trump administration is trying to inflict on us? The current incoherent energy policy will increase electricity prices even more than they would rise otherwise.

Admittedly, the coming demise of coal, which the administration may delay but not ultimately prevent, will be very hard on the people who work in the coal industry. And it will badly hurt communities where coal is the chief industry and states in which they are located.

Understandably, the coal industry has contributed generously to politicians who try to protect it, and its donations have paid very large dividends for that industry. But forcing electric utilities to keep burning coal, and stomping on potential competitors who could defeat it in any fair competition, is not the right way to protect the people and communities involved in a declining industry.

Government support for these people could take many more reasonable forms, including retraining programs, special support for schools and other local government services, and possibly even making workers eligible to collect Social Security and to be on Medicare before they would otherwise be old enough. These people should not be singled out to pay for the benefits that society as a whole will receive from abandoning the use of coal—the taxpayers as a whole owe it to them.

The current administration should abandon its current incoherent policies and stop trying to micromanage the energy market.

Rational policy would not try to protect people in particular energy industries. It would aim to create equal conditions within which all sources of energy could compete. The main present alternatives to coal include oil, natural gas, solar, wind, atomic, and geothermal sources. Each of these has its own unique combination of advantages and disadvantages.

During the last 200 years the world has shifted from one dominant energy source to another as technologies advanced and economic conditions changed. For a long time coal was the cheapest and most abundant fuel, but it was displaced by petroleum and, more recently, by natural gas. Each of these fuels prevailed because it was available and cheaper than the alternatives.

Atomic energy, at one time expected to take over and make electricity “too cheap to meter,” never took off to that extent for various reasons, not the least of which was its expense.

Thanks to research during the last half century, the cheapest sources are now solar panels and wind turbines. They are therefore the chief threats to the coal, oil, and natural gas industries, and especially to coal. That is why the Trump administration has concentrated on wiping out the wind turbine projects in the Atlantic Ocean, even those that are nearly finished and in which billions of dollars have been invested.

The administration claims that the offshore wind projects are a threat to national security, a possibility that had been thoroughly vetted and rejected by government experts before the projects began.

It also claims that wind and solar energy are unreliable, since the sun does not always shine and the wind does not always blow. But these are only problems locally. The sun is always shining on exactly half the planet, and winds are always blowing somewhere.

The intermittency problem does not exist when we consider the world as a whole. Once we have connected up the whole planet into a single electrical grid—now entirely possible—solar and wind energy will be just as dependable as the older energy technologies. And they will be cheaper than the older technologies even when we include the cost of building and operating the grid that they will require.

If we want the cheapest possible electricity—and who doesn’t?—we should support creation of a level playing field for all possible sources of energy. The current administration should abandon its current incoherent policies and stop trying to micromanage the energy market.

Does this Republican administration believe in free markets or doesn’t it?

Among modern industrialized nations, the United States stands out as one of the very few that still lacks universal healthcare. Why do Americans accept this situation?

The post Universal Healthcare? appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.