The lesson of 9/11 should be that war is not the answer to any of the problems facing the United States. After inflicting violence and chaos on country after country for twenty-five years in a “global war on terror” that has evolved into a Zionist genocide and a revived Cold War against Russia and China, the widespread public opposition to Trump’s war on Iran suggests that most Americans have finally learned that lesson.

Unfortunately, powerful sections of our corrupt business and political elites have not.

Most Americans old enough to remember September 11, 2001, can still recall the horrifying images played endlessly on our TV screens as the scale of the mass murder became clear. But we also remember something else: the sinking feeling that the hopes and dreams of billions of people, in the US and around the world, would be pushed to the back-burner for the foreseeable future, as our leaders and corporate media all too predictably embraced a new agenda of revenge, fear-mongering, jingoism and military violence.

As Rumsfeld made clear to his subordinates from the outset, the 9/11 crisis provided an open-ended pretext for endless wars against enemies who had nothing to do with the attacks...

We found out later that only hours after the attacks—less than six hours after the first plane struck the World Trade Center and barely five hours after the Pentagon was hit—the planning for America’s military response to the 9/11 massacre was already under way.

At 2:40 pm, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld convened a meeting at the Pentagon. Notes taken by Undersecretary Stephen Cambone, later obtained by CBS News, recorded Rumsfeld demanding the “best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H.”—meaning Saddam Hussein—“at the same time” as Osama bin Laden. Then came the chilling instruction: “Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”

Twenty-five years later, we can look back and see how the US government used September 11 to unleash a crusade of violence, war crimes and chaos across the world. Experts like Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz and military historian Michael Howard warned from the beginning that declaring a “war on terror” made no sense and would make matters worse.

They were right, of course. But when the State Department’s annual Patterns of Global Terrorism report for 2004 showed an unprecedented increase in global terrorism following the US invasion of Iraq, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice simply cancelled and discontinued the report, replacing it with a new one with different criteria to prevent comparison with previous years.

But, as Rumsfeld made clear to his subordinates from the outset, the 9/11 crisis provided an open-ended pretext for endless wars against enemies who had nothing to do with the attacks, and for the remilitarization of the United States after the small reduction in its military spending after the end of the Cold War.

Total US military spending for the past 25 years has exceeded $21 trillion (in 2024 dollars), surpassing the combined spending of the other 18 largest military powers in the world. During that time, China has built a whole new civilization and infrastructure, and leapfrogged the US economy to become the world leader in clean energy, high-speed rail and technological sectors in which the US was once preeminent.

Both Democrats and Republicans are responsible for these counter-productive choices, and the appalling human costs of these wars on the countries the United States has attacked, bombed or invaded make this an especially atrocious way to squander our nation’s wealth.

The history of the United States during this period calls to mind an old Greek myth. Croesus, the famously wealthy king of Lydia, asked the Oracle at Delphi what would happen if he invaded Persia. The Oracle told him, “If you cross the Halys river, a great empire will fall.” Encouraged, Croesus launched the invasion. But he lost the war, and the empire that fell was his own.

In pursuing their global imperial ambitions, our leaders and ruling classes have discounted and betrayed the real sources of America’s prosperity and security: the well-being of the American people and peaceful relations with our neighbors around the world.

They have led us into war, poverty and extreme inequality, and hollowed out a system of government that was slowly becoming more democratic. At home, decades of political struggle by labor, civil rights and other social movements produced enormous advances, including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, major investments in public infrastructure and education, and a highly progressive tax system—with the top income tax rate at 91% until 1963—that helped finance those public goods and narrow the gap between rich and poor.

Contrary to the “End of History” theory embraced by many policymakers after the Cold War, and Margaret Thatcher’s famous insistence that “there is no alternative” to the extreme neoliberal capitalism that she and Ronald Reagan ushered in, societies always have political and economic alternatives. It is only a transparently self-serving choice by America’s corrupt ruling classes that saddles us with a system that keeps all decision-making power in their own hands in order to build their own wealth to the detriment of the country we all share.

We can see one alternative today in New York City, where Mayor Zohran Mamdani is pursuing a different set of priorities: expanding free childcare, making major investments in affordable housing, improving public transportation, and freezing rents for tenants in rent-stabilized apartments. Electoral politics can be part of the solution, but only if it reflects what ordinary people really want, instead of limited choices between oligarchic “lesser evils.”

Americans are demanding a renewal of social progress, with universal healthcare, quality public education, and all the things we need but can’t afford as long as this bloated, destructive war machine remains our government’s top priority. As Martin Luther King lamented in 1967, “I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube.”

Twenty-five years is a long time to keep moving in the wrong direction, especially when that direction involves endless war and the destruction of other countries. We are a long way from where most Americans would like our country to be. But we have a pretty good idea of what is wrong and what we need to do:

Stop throwing money at a broken, destructive war machine. Stop threatening and blockading our neighbors. Close overseas bases and bring our troops home. Tax the wealthy. Start rebuilding our country, and replace war and militarism with cooperation and problem solving. Take public ownership and responsibility for things we all need and use, like education, healthcare, housing, infrastructure, and utilities. Abolish ICE, and other militarized institutions that waste our national resources and do not serve the public good. Insist that the military be scaled back to its legitimate role of defending the United States against a possible, but very unlikely, foreign military attack.

If we have truly learned the lesson of the past twenty-five years, then we must translate it into policies that reflect that. The real test is not whether we can finally see what went wrong after 9/11. It is whether we are able to change course.

When US President Donald Trump declared in October 2025 that “the war is over,” the statement quickly became part of the international language surrounding Gaza. Headlines shifted. Political leaders began speaking about a post-war phase. The world was encouraged to look forward—to reconstruction, diplomacy, and what might come next.

But from inside Gaza, the distinction between “war” and “peace” has never been so simple. A ceasefire may reduce the intensity of bombardment. It may change the language used by politicians and diplomats. But for Palestinians who remain surrounded by destruction, displacement, deprivation, and the remains of those who were killed, the war does not simply disappear because leaders declare a new phase.

On August 4, Gaza witnessed a devastating reminder of this reality. The remains of 112 Palestinians were buried in a mass funeral in Gaza City, more than two and a half years after they were killed in an Israeli strike on the Sabra neighborhood. The victims included 37 children. Rescue workers spent weeks searching through the ruins for their remains, working with almost no equipment and identifying bodies through fragments, clothing, family testimony, and whatever personal belongings could be recovered.

For the families, the violence did not end when the bombs stopped falling on that neighborhood. It continued in the rubble. And the 112 bodies were not an isolated tragedy. Gaza's Civil Defence has estimated that around 8,000 bodies remain beneath the rubble across the strip. Recovery teams say that removing them will require heavy equipment that is still desperately lacking. Without that equipment, the dead may remain trapped for years.

A ceasefire should be the beginning of ending the violence—not an excuse to redefine its consequences as peace.

This is what it means to tell Palestinians that the war is over. For many people outside Gaza, war is measured by explosions: the number of airstrikes, the intensity of fighting, or the number of military operations reported each day. For those of us living here, war is also measured in what remains after the explosions.

It is measured in the family searching for the body of a missing relative. It is measured in children growing up among destroyed schools. It is measured in homes that no longer exist, universities reduced to ruins, hospitals struggling to function, and displaced families who cannot return to places that once defined their lives. It is measured in the enormous task of removing the dead from beneath the rubble before their families can bury them.

The language of a “post-war” Gaza therefore risks becoming another form of erasure. It suggests that the violence belongs to the past, while the consequences are treated as a humanitarian problem waiting to be solved.

But Gaza cannot simply be rebuilt like a damaged road. A society has been shattered. Families have been separated and destroyed. Communities have disappeared. Hundreds of thousands of people have lost homes. Children have lost years of education. The physical destruction is accompanied by grief that cannot be captured by reconstruction statistics. And yet, international attention has increasingly moved elsewhere.

This is perhaps the most painful part. People around the world demonstrated for Gaza. Students occupied campuses. Human rights organizations documented violations. Workers and trade unions called for solidarity. Millions of ordinary people refused to accept the destruction of an entire population as normal.

But public sympathy does not automatically produce political action. Western governments can express concern while continuing to treat Gaza as a diplomatic file rather than a human emergency. Leaders can call for peace while failing to ensure that Palestinians have the conditions necessary to live with dignity. Statements can be issued, condolences offered, and conferences held—while the consequences of the destruction remain largely the responsibility of Palestinians themselves.

This is why the words “the war is over” matter. Words shape political reality. When a government, president, or media institution describes Gaza as post-war, audiences far from the strip may assume that the emergency has passed. Attention moves elsewhere. Political pressure decreases. The suffering becomes background noise.

But the people of Gaza cannot move on simply because the world has decided to. The 112 people buried in August had already waited nearly three years for a grave. Thousands more remain beneath the rubble. Their families are still waiting. And millions of Palestinians are still trying to understand what “peace” is supposed to mean when they have nowhere safe to return to and so little ability to rebuild what was destroyed.

A ceasefire should be the beginning of ending the violence—not an excuse to redefine its consequences as peace. If the international community truly wants to speak about a post-war Gaza, it must first confront what the war has left behind. That means guaranteeing sustained humanitarian access; enabling the removal and identification of those buried beneath the rubble; supporting the rebuilding of homes, schools, hospitals, and universities; and establishing meaningful accountability for violations of international law.

Most importantly, Palestinians must not be treated merely as recipients of humanitarian assistance. They must be recognized as people with rights, agency, and a future that belongs to them. The world may want to turn the page on Gaza. We cannot. We are still living in the pages that came before.

For those of us here, the war is not an entry in a history book. It is the rubble outside our doors, the empty chair at the family table, the child who cannot return to school, and the grave that took years to become possible. So when the world is told that the war is over, listen to Gaza.

Look beneath the rubble.

Count the graves.

And ask whether peace can truly be declared while thousands of the dead are still waiting to be found.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

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

Today we discuss:

• In the harrowing months that followed the attacks on the World Trade Center, New Yorkers were repeatedly assured that the air around the fallen towers was safe to breathe. But 10 months later, health officials were still finding evidence of asbestos as much as a half mile away according to documents released by Mayor Zohran Mamdani after decades of cover-ups.

• The Trump administration did not oppose a UK-led initiative to impose new sanctions on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. The White House’s decision not to push back on the UK effort is a signal of its frustration with the Netanyahu government’s policy in the West Bank. Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden joined.

• Israeli opposition politicians said that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “unfit” for office after a newspaper reported he had been warned that Hamas was planning a major operation weeks before the Oct. 7, 2023, attack but did not alert security officials.

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Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar are right about the central problem in their new proposal: Advanced AI systems are gaining capabilities faster than public safeguards are catching up. Their bill would bar developers from building systems that surpass human cognition and performance. The impulse is understandable. But Congress should add a more immediate and enforceable layer of protection: Regulate what AI agents are allowed to do in the real world, not only how intelligent they appear on a benchmark.

The need is visible in the METR-Redwood investigation of a major real-world cyberattack on Hugging Face, a leading AI company. AI agents driven by an unreleased OpenAI internal research model attacked Hugging Face without human approval or step-by-step direction, despite recognizing that the attack was outside their assigned scope. Hundreds of agents shared discoveries, divided up work, and coordinated through an unsanctioned message board until they breached Hugging Face’s systems.

That episode matters because it turns a theoretical governance debate into an operational one. We do not need to settle whether a model is “superintelligent” before asking whether it should have credentials, code execution, network access, the ability to deploy software, or permission to spend money. Those are concrete powers. Government can regulate them now.

Congress should start by tying safeguards to authority. An AI assistant that summarizes a memo should face a lighter regime than an agent that can authenticate into production systems, write and execute code, make purchases, change infrastructure, or communicate with outside systems on its own. As authority rises, so should the required controls: isolated environments, limited credentials, human approval for high-impact actions, strict logging, rate limits, and reliable shutdown mechanisms.

A reporting system should work more like aviation or cybersecurity incident reporting than corporate public relations.

This approach would avoid a familiar regulatory mistake. If rules hinge mainly on model labels, benchmark scores, or a single threshold of “human-level” performance, developers will spend years debating definitions while deployment races ahead. Authority is easier to observe. A system either can or cannot reach a protected database. It either can or cannot execute code. It either can or cannot initiate transactions. Regulators can write clear obligations around those permissions.

Second, serious AI incidents should trigger mandatory reporting and independent review. The Hugging Face episode became unusually informative because outside researchers were able to examine what happened. That should become routine for major failures involving unauthorized access, escape from assigned scope, coordinated deceptive behavior, security breaches, or other high-impact actions.

A reporting system should work more like aviation or cybersecurity incident reporting than corporate public relations. Companies should have a defined window to disclose serious events to an appropriate regulator and provide enough technical evidence for independent investigators to reconstruct what the system did, what permissions it had, what safeguards failed, and what changed afterward. Public reports can protect sensitive details while still revealing the lessons other organizations need.

Third, frontier evaluation should test agents in conditions that resemble deployment. Intelligence benchmarks matter, but they are not enough. Regulators and independent evaluators should test whether agents coordinate with one another, seek greater privileges, persist after a task changes, exploit tools in unintended ways, conceal relevant actions, or continue operating when instructions conflict with an opportunity to achieve a goal.

The point is not to prove that every advanced model is dangerous. It is to discover which capabilities become dangerous when paired with real authority.

I’m no AI skeptic. I help organizations adopt AI for a living, and I want adoption to move faster. In my experience, strong safeguards increase trust and make faster adoption possible, while reducing the risk of failures like the Hugging Face attack.

That trust problem is already becoming political. Common Dreams has reported both the Hugging Face breach and the growing push in Congress for stronger limits on advanced AI. Public concern will not be solved by asking people to trust developers’ intentions. It will be reduced when institutions can show that powerful systems operate inside enforceable boundaries and that failures receive independent scrutiny.

The same logic should appeal to companies eager to deploy AI. Clear authority tiers give executives a practical way to decide which use cases can move quickly and which require more controls. A writing assistant can be deployed widely. An agent with access to payroll, customer records, cloud infrastructure, or industrial systems should pass a much higher bar. That distinction helps organizations move faster where risks are low instead of slowing every use case because the most powerful deployments remain poorly governed.

Sanders (I-Vt.) and Casar (D-Texas) are forcing an overdue debate about whether society should permit systems that humans may not be able to control. Congress should pursue that question. But it should not wait for a philosophical consensus about superintelligence before addressing the powers already being handed to AI agents.

The Hugging Face breach shows the practical issue in plain terms. Agents with enough access and freedom can turn capability into action. The most useful near-term rule is therefore straightforward: The more authority an AI system receives, the stronger the independent testing, reporting, access controls, and human oversight it should face.

We can argue about how smart future AI will become. We already know that today’s agents can coordinate, exceed their assigned scope, and breach real systems. Regulation should start with the powers we can see.

On September 2, 2026, Democratic Congresswomen Delia Ramírez of Illinois and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota hosted a shadow hearing in Congress on “Breaking the Blockade: Reassessing the Moral and Legal Failures of US-Cuba Policy.” A shadow hearing, called by the minority party, has all the formalities of an official hearing of Congress. Four distinguished witnesses gave testimony about the current state of life in Cuba under the oil blockade imposed by the Trump administration in January, and additional coercive measures that have been steadily imposed since then.

Dr. Tania Zakrison of the University of Chicago Medical Center described a “humanitarian catastrophe” due to cumbersome licensing and state overcompliance with sanctions, which mean that supplies are not available to prevent loss of limbs in diabetes patients, for example, and that children and cancer patients are dying due to lack of medicines. The lack of oil to fuel the electrical grid and pump water has caused a severe water shortage. “One-third of the population now has no water at all and are digging into the ground to drink muddy, untreated water,” said Dr. Zakrison. This, coupled with a lack of supplies such as IV fluid bags, is contributing to the recent doubling of infant mortality; research clearly attributes the causality of thousands of excess child deaths to the blockade. Food production is down 60% since January. Doctors “are bearing witness to the preventable deaths that we in the US are causing.”

Rev. Dr. Robert Turner of Empowerment Temple in Baltimore, Maryland visited Cuba in July: “What I found was not a hostile, defeated, nor broken people. I found peaceful, loving, resilient, ingenious people surviving decades of a US embargo and now a blockade that has turned survival itself into a daily act of will.” Our government “has decided that disagreement over the political and economic system justifies collective punishment. That is more than reprehensible,” said Rev. Turner. “It is sinfully wicked and an abuse of the power God has allowed America to possess… What I saw was a constructed crisis, suffering manufactured by policy—our policy.”

Attorney Suzanne Adely, president of the National Lawyer’s Guild, listed several ways in which the US blockade of Cuba violates international law and is repeatedly condemned by the international community. Yet it escalates and is now accompanied by threats of illegal US military aggression. She stated: “The US justification—that Cuba poses an ‘extraordinary threat’ to national security—is legally untenable. A small island subjected to six decades of economic warfare cannot credibly threaten the United States. Likewise, Cuba’s designation as a 'State Sponsor of Terrorism' is arbitrary and politically motivated. It contradicts objective counter-terrorism criteria and ignores documented violations by other states, undermining the credibility of the list itself.”

“We have to talk about Cuba every single day until it becomes part of our algorithm."

Ms. Adely indicated that while Cuba is under siege and being denied the right to sovereignty, the US is arguably committing crimes against humanity and possibly even genocide.

Felix Sharpe Caballero, a Cuban-American living in Detroit who frequently visits family on the island, said: “I testify at great peril. There is a lot of patent hostility in the Cuban-American community. But to be silent, would be a betrayal.”

Caballero continued: “The injustices perpetrated on the Cuban people today have reached the point, quite frankly, of genocide. We are using hunger, lack of medicine, electricity to cook and draw water, food, and basic hygiene products… on the Cuban people to achieve the economic overthrow of the Cuban government. There are 7,000 containers sitting across the world that are not being delivered to Cuba because of State Department activity. The United States of America has been fighting a proxy war on behalf of the Cuban American aristocracy in South Florida.”

Mr. Caballero has learned from his physician cousin in Havana what happens to babies in the NICU when the power goes out. As his voice cracked, he indicated that “some of those babies are not going to recover when the power comes back on.”

With six other members of her Progressive Caucus in attendance, including Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Maxine Dexter (D-Ore.), Jonathan Jackson (D-Ore.), Chuy Garcia (D-Ill.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), and Omar, Congresswoman Ramírez concluded the session by saying, “This shadow hearing is just the beginning.” She urged the American people to raise the profile of this issue. “We have to talk about Cuba every single day until it becomes part of our algorithm.” Ramírez vowed to keep pressuring her colleagues to pass three key pieces of legislation:

• H.R.7521 and its companion S. 136, the United States Cuba Trade Act to lift the blockade.
• Resolution 1056 to Annul the Monroe Doctrine, which advocates for “terminating all unilateral economic sanctions imposed through Executive orders, and working with Congress to terminate all unilateral sanctions, such as the Cuba embargo, mandated by law.”
• H.Con.Res 106 to Stop Unauthorized Military Action in Cuba.

Congresswoman Ramírez’s concluding words were: “May we not remain silent at a time of injustice and what feels like a quiet genocide on the Cuban people. We will end this blockade. It’s the responsibility of Congress to do its darn job to end it.”

It is also the responsibility of all people of conscience to make sure that happens.

A video recording of the shadow hearing can be found here.

After the CIA overthrew Iran’s democratically elected leader, U.S. policymakers helped themselves to Iranian oil at discounted prices and smugly congratulated themselves. But the blowback was a bitch. Their puppet ruler, the Shah, was soon overthrown by revolutionaries who despised and resented the United States. Sanctions intended to soften the Islamic Republic had the opposite effect, hardening its resolve and prompting it to wage proxy wars against the U.S. and Israel throughout the Middle East. Fifty years later, the Middle East is a hot mess, Iran is its dominant regional power, and the United States has lost. So why is the U.S. pursuing similar policies against oil-rich, socialist-majority Venezuela?

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Last week there occurred a watershed moment in the history of American political cartooning. A major American newspaper, the Baltimore Sun, published an editorial cartoon created not by a cartoonist or graphic artist, but by unidentified staffers using artificial intelligence.

One year ago, the Sun fired its Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, Kevin “KAL” Kallaugher. (Disclosure: KAL and I are friends.)

Which AI model was used was not disclosed, but more likely than not it was ChatGPT by OpenAI.

Why do I think so? I asked various AI models. I’m not a Luddite!

As a cartoonist, my reaction was similar to that of most of my colleagues. I checked out the cartoon. It sucked.

What the Sun published as a cartoon sucked worse than any cartoon ever drawn by any professional cartoonist could or ever has sucked, which is to say, a lot. This lickspittle slop sucked up to the mayor—no good political cartoon ever supports a politician, only criticizes them—and it had all the compositional subtlety of a propaganda poster published by the government of Saddam Hussein. H.L. Mencken, the brilliant, ornery columnist who spent years at the Sun, is surely biting his editors’ shins in hell, where they certainly reside.

All things considered, the gross incompetence of the Sun’s wading into the lifestyle of the artiste manqué is as good as it gets for a profession that is no longer in danger of dying, or in process of dying, but well and truly dead after having been murdered by publications like the Sun.

A professional humorist might have prompted AI to create work with superb humor and insight, albeit relying on the generic sub-MAD look of AI slopart. Since the concept is 99% of what makes a good cartoon, a good idea with lame art would have been even more disastrous for human cartoonists.

This being America, though, there’s always a danger that we might be missing the point of this startling low-budget attack on journalistic quality.

Yes, it’s disgusting that a newspaper that can afford to pay rent on an office building can’t scrape up the cash to hire a real cartoonist, employ a freelancer to create real political cartoons, or purchase work by real people for pennies on the dollar from a syndicate. Yes, it’s ironic that a newspaper that clearly doesn’t value cartoonists nevertheless understands that readers expect to see cartoons in their newspaper, and thus chooses to fill the hole in this ridiculously undignified way. And yes, this is an insult to readers.

The real issue here, however, is one that everyone, regardless of their politics, ought to be able to get angry about: theft. The Baltimore Sun is stealing from hundreds of cartoonists. And it owes them compensation.

The vast majority of the widely used AI models—ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, etc.—were “trained” on millions of articles and images scraped from the World Wide Web. This includes thousands, most likely hundreds of thousands, of political and other cartoons.

Neither cartoonists nor, for that matter, writers were approached by these giant multi-billion-dollar technology companies to rent or purchase the training rights. Operating under the “move fast and break things” dictum that it’s easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission, they stole copyrighted material worth billions of dollars without asking, much less obtaining, permission from the copyright holders.

When editors or staffers at the Baltimore Sun input their prompt to ChatGPT or whatever other model they used, it drew on that illegally purloined material to create their abomination of a cartoon. They also stole countless other cartoons—one-offs posted by individuals, stuff drawn by children and posted by their parents, there was no limit. If you ever drew or wrote anything on the Internet, you were almost certainly robbed too.

The newspaper, in other words, bought and published stolen material. At an incredible scale. Even though giant tech companies want you to think otherwise, there’s no practical difference between publishing AI work generated using pilfered intellectual property and buying a stolen TV out of the back of someone’s car.

Numerous lawsuits are working their way through the courts about these issues. (Disclosure: I am one of thousands of plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit and settlement against Anthropic, owner of the Claude AI model.)

There are smaller, ethically sourced artificial intelligence models. In those models, an artist uploads only their own original material and the AI learns that material and can then, with considerable work, begin to generate images drawn in that style. If that’s what the Baltimore Sun did here, and they have an on-staff artist whose work was used to train an AI, it’s still wrong because they are refusing to employ flesh-and-blood cartoonists. But it’s not illegal.

I reached out to the Sun to find out if that’s what they did. They did not reply.

If, on the other hand, as seems exceedingly likely, they used unethically sourced AI, the copyright section of the United States federal code requires that they pay each cartoonist whose work was illegally scraped at least $750 per scraped cartoon. There are hundreds of cartoonists and estates of deceased cartoonists who would be included in this category. The Sun and the relevant AI company used here ought to be held jointly and severally liable for this total sum, which may exceed the total market capitalization of most newspapers.

Under its current editorial direction, the Baltimore Sun purports to be a conservative publication that respects property rights. Capitalism cannot function if workers can have their products stolen from them without recompense. If this is the Wild West, what will be the motivation for entrepreneurs, artists or anyone else to be creative?

Consider this a cease and desist, Baltimore Sun. Delete the cartoon from your online edition. Issue payments of at least $750 to each and every cartoonist whose work was illegally scraped by your AI model. Apologize to your readers and promise never to do anything like this again.

The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, the only group of which I’m a member, issued an open letter calling on the Sun to do the right thing. I don’t share the sentiment that AI is evil or the belief that this genie can be shoved back into its bottle, but it’s a nice statement.

What we really need is to nip this wholesale theft of intellectual property in the bud and hit the bastards who profit from unethically-trained AI in the wallet. We need an enterprising lawyer to organize a class-action lawsuit.

I’d be happy to help organize the effort.

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is a Pulitzer finalist, twice the winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and a former president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas.”)

 

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Watch the full event stream here. Ralph Nader and Busboys and Poets present Galvanizing Labor Day for a specific Workers’ Compact (see: Ralph Nader’s Compact for American Workers and Robert Reich’s 10-Point Plan To Make America Affordable).  This event featured discussions of how unions can maximize the impact of Labor Day to mobilize workers and…

Summer passed. People traveled, went into nature, spent time with family, laughed, rested, and enjoyed life—and that is a good thing. Now school has started again, and children are walking back into classrooms with backpacks, excitement, and plans for another year.

But for many families, there is no return to normal.

Since the war in Iran began earlier this year, civilians have been killed, injured, displaced, and traumatized. Sometimes their stories reach us. Sometimes they barely break through the noise.

I still think about the girls’ elementary school in Minab, where more than 100 children were killed. They were children. Students. We call children “angels,” and then somehow their deaths become another statistic of war.

I will continue doing whatever is within my power—peacefully—to advocate, speak, question, educate, build bridges, and push back against the idea that one innocent life should matter more than another.

And now another story.

On September 1, a wedding celebration in southern Iran was struck. Families, women, and children were gathered there to celebrate a beginning. Instead, civilians were killed and dozens were injured.

A wedding.

Children.

Families.

Read those words again.

And yet stories like these can pass through the news cycle astonishingly quickly.

We have watched versions of this same human tragedy in Gaza, Sudan, Iran, and far too many other places. Different governments. Different conflicts. Different explanations. But ordinary people keep paying the price.

What a nasty world we are living in. Seriously, nasty.

What happens to us when war can be discussed in the language of “peace,” while dead civilians become “collateral damage”?

We are rightly taught: Never forget. We remember our national wounds. We remember the mornings when ordinary people left home and never returned. We remember atrocities and tragedies because remembering human suffering matters.

But “never forget” cannot be selective.

If we genuinely want a more peaceful world, remembrance must extend beyond nationality, religion, ethnicity, politics, and borders. A child should not have to belong to our country, our community, or our side for us to recognize the value of that child’s life.

And yes, I understand emotional exhaustion. Ordinary people become tired of war, death, images of suffering, and terrible news. Sometimes putting our heads in the sand feels like the only way to continue with our own lives.

I feel that exhaustion too.

But I keep coming back to something very simple:

Killing civilians is not peace.

Ignoring their deaths does not make their lives matter less.

And silence should never determine whose suffering the world is willing to see.

Politician, educator, community leader, friend—whoever we are—saying that we care about humanity and peace means very little unless, within whatever small sphere of influence we have, we are willing to protect those principles consistently.

So if you see me and ask, “How are you?”—this is part of my answer.

I am sad. I am tired. I am angry at how easily human suffering becomes normalized.

And while I sometimes want to put my own head in the sand too, I will continue doing whatever is within my power—peacefully—to advocate, speak, question, educate, build bridges, and push back against the idea that one innocent life should matter more than another.

No hatred. No revenge. No selective humanity.

Just the stubborn belief that peace has to mean something more than a word.s.

While Americans were celebrating this Labor Day weekend, in Magdenburg, Germany a 35-year-old neofascist, Ulrich Siegmund, told a cheering crowd that his right-wing Alternative für Deutschland party was “taking our country back.” They’d just pulled 44% of the vote in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, double what it’d been just five years ago.

Their platform was simple: Expel brown-skinned immigrants; dump the EU and NATO to instead build an alliance with Russia; and tear up the tech, climate, and energy rules so the fossil fuel and tech billionaires could take over Germany’s government like they are America’s under President Donald Trump.

It was a stunning victory for Russian President Vladimir Putin, Elon Musk, and Trump, who all went online (Putin through spokesman Kirill Dmitriev) and immediately congratulated the heirs to Hitler’s party on their showing in the election.

That same weekend, Fareed Zakaria aired a conversation with Chrystia Freeland, Francis Fukuyama, and David French about why liberal democracy is in retreat, and Freeland argued that China’s so-far-successful model of state-directed capitalism is the biggest threat to democracy around the world.

If you let the winners of capitalism write the rules of capitalism, they’ll first destroy the competition and then come for the government that hosts them.

And there’s a lot of truth in that, since China’s success proves that capitalism doesn’t need democracy to flourish and, in fact, may do even better in an authoritarian state like modern China and 1930s Germany.

But the most serious threat to American democracy isn’t coming from Beijing; it’s coming out of Wichita, Silicon Valley, Mar-a-Lago, and from Republicans in black robes who’ve been taking gifts from billionaires for years. Here’s why.

At the end of the day, capitalism is just a game we play, which is why pro football is such a good analogy. Football is a phenomenal engine for producing it’s goal—entertainment—and it works because there are rules, referees who enforce them, and a league that ruthlessly punishes cheaters.

But imagine a Trump-run NFL announcing that whichever team wrote the biggest check to the league’s head guy could put 14 men on the field, pull face masks, and throw kidney punches with no flags. The richest team would win every game, the entertainment value would ultimately collapse, and within a few seasons the game itself would be dead.

Capitalism is exactly that kind of engine. Since Deng Xiaoping opened China to markets in 1978, according to the World Bank, growth of the Chinese economy has averaged over 9% a year, lifting nearly 800 million people out of extreme poverty, the largest reduction of human misery in recorded history.

I spent the month of November, 1986 in Beijing studying acupuncture; the city was poor, the air choked with coal smoke, and capitalism was just getting off the block with experimental “special economic zones” like Shenzhen. Nobody voted for it; China was then and is now essentially a totalitarian state, proving that capitalism doesn’t need democracy to be successful.

As the Chinese figured out in the 1970s when they rejected President Ronald Reagan’s neoliberalism and instead embraced state-run capitalism (I wrote about this at length in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America), in order to work well and produce general prosperity, capitalism just requires rules that prevent the most successful capitalists from rising up and taking over the state (as is happening here).

For example, when China’s richest man (Jack Ma) started complaining in 2020 that government regulators were holding his companies back from maximum profitability, the Chinese government killed off Ma’s Ant Group’s IPO and fined his Alibaba $2.8 billion for the monopolistic behavior of forcing merchants into exclusive contracts. Ma himself vanished from public view for a few months while he was “rehabilitated.”

I’m no admirer of a one-party state, and I’d never want to live under one. But the Chinese Communist Party figured out more than 50 years ago—from watching the failures in our example—that if you let the winners of capitalism write the rules of capitalism, they’ll first destroy the competition and then come for the government that hosts them.

They instead regulated their billionaires and their companies, in other words, because they knew what unregulated billionaires typically do to whoever’s in charge.

We Americans once understood that, and had a president who spoke about it in simple, straightforward terms.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt came into office in 1933 to clean up the GOP’s mess of the Republican Great Depression; he fought back against his generation’s oligarchs, declaring in 1936:

For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things…

It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself.

FDR took on those “economic royalists” and defeated them. He explicitly called them out when the Democratic Party renominated him for president in 1936 in Philadelphia:

"These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power."

He paused for a moment, then thundered, “Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!”

The crowd roared, delighted that he’d put millions to work while stripping that day’s oligarchs of their power. And he raised the top tax rate on the morbidly rich back up to 90%, while stopping an effort to kidnap him and turn our government fascist:

“In vain,” Roosevelt said, “they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.”

Four months later at Madison Square Garden FDR named the forces of “monopoly, speculation, and reckless banking,” said they were “unanimous in their hate” for him, and told the crowd he welcomed their hatred.

He wasn’t trying to abolish capitalism. He was putting it back under control of the people’s rule book: Glass-Steagall, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Wagner Act, antitrust enforcement, a minimum wage, and a top tax rate of 90%.

Republicans fought it all, calling it “socialism” in increasingly hysterical tones, but it worked and FDR put America back together and built the world’s first middle class that was more than half of a nation’s people.

The American oligarchs of that era, in response, pulled out of politics and went back to just doing business and getting rich, until President Richard Nixon put Lewis Powell on the Supreme Court and Powell began the process—from the bench—of turning America into a full-blown oligarchy.

During FDR’s era, fascism had risen out of the ashes of the Republican Great Depression, sweeping in a few short years across Italy, Germany, Austria, and Spain.

History tells us that when ordinary people are forced to watch the rich buy their government and that government then fails to sustain them, they lose faith in democracy long before they realize it was actually unregulated capitalism that screwed them.

Invariably, that’s when a strongman shows up promising to “take their country back,” and they cheer.

Roosevelt’s answer was to make democracy deliver for the working people, and to make the morbidly rich pay for it. And it worked: Over the next 40 years America built the largest middle class the world had ever seen.

I’ve spent most of my adult life inside capitalism; over the past 55 years Louise and I have started and run five small businesses. Not once in all those years did we go to a politician with a wad of cash and ask him to change the rules so we could get richer. We were working under FDR’s rules.

Then along came the fossil fuel billionaires funding Reagan, and it all changed in a single generation. The Powell Memo laid out the plan in 1971, and Fred Koch’s sons, along with Coors, Scaife, Olin, Murdoch, and Bradley built the think tanks, the media, and captured the university chairs to indoctrinate the next generation.

What Reagan added was a new sales pitch Americans hadn’t heard before: Government is the problem, the rules are the enemy, and your real opponent is the Black family down the street or the woman you think took your promotion.

Regulation is capitalism’s immune system and works for an economy the same way the NFL’s rules work for that game.

In one fell swoop, the richest men in America dismantled four decades of FDR’s restraints and taxes while working people argued with each other about whether Reagan’s reviled “union bosses,” immigrants, “welfare queens,” or queer people were responsible for their troubles.

Then in 2010 the five corrupt Republican appointees on the Supreme Court handed down Citizens United and told the billionaires they could buy American democracy’s referees openly. Several of those justices, we later learned from ProPublica, had spent years accepting undisclosed yacht cruises, private jets, and luxury vacations from billionaire donors with business before the court while John Robert’s wife took millions from the same law firms that argued in front of her husband.

The result of this “football game” being corrupted by America’s capitalists is measurable. In the 2024 election, just 100 billionaire families spent $2.6 billion on federal races, 1 of every 6 dollars spent by anyone, and roughly 160 times what billionaires spent before Citizens United.

Virtually all of that money went to support Republican candidates who are back to Reagan’s old trick of blaming the middle class’ ills on the poorest and least powerful among us while jacking trillions into the money bins of Zuck, Musk, Trump, and Bezos.

Musk alone put up $278 million, then got handed the keys to the federal government so he could shut down investigations into himself and his businesses. And the man who moved JD Vance from obscure writer to vice president, Peter Thiel, wrote in 2009 that he no longer believed freedom and democracy were compatible, a perspective both Putin and Xi Jinping heartily endorse.

These men aren’t confused about how they’re trying to transform America: they’ve watched Chinese state-run capitalism produce vast wealth without elections and concluded, correctly, that the elections were the unnecessary part, if only the people can be sufficiently intimidated or brainwashed.

Europe’s been running this same neoliberal experiment since the Reagan-Thatcher 1980s, and Saxony-Anhalt is its poster child. Decades of privatization, austerity, and deregulation left eastern Germans feeling that the government in Berlin had forgotten about them.

Into that void came a party whose leading figures have been under investigation for taking money from a Kremlin-linked influence network and whose richest cheerleader lives in Texas and controls the social media outlet that was arguably largely responsible for AfD’s success.

When Putin took over the new, fragile Russian democracy at the beginning of this millennium, his first job was to get control of the oligarchs who largely owned the economy. He killed some, imprisoned others, and made those who’d swear total loyalty and fealty to him richer than Midas.

Trump appears to be following that same plan, which is why America’s oligarchs are beating a path to his door, bearing gifts.

Democracy not only isn’t necessary in the minds of these “new Republicans”; it’s there to be bought-and-sold, bent to their will with billions spent on elections and propaganda, and ultimately turned against itself to create an authoritarian surveillance state of, by, and for the wealthiest capitalists.

Regulation is capitalism’s immune system and works for an economy the same way the NFL’s rules work for that game. Antitrust laws, campaign finance limits, financial transparency rules, and progressive taxation keep the richest teams from “buying the league” and corrupting the entire system.

Roosevelt understood that the “privileged princes” would always reach for control over government, and that the only defense was a government strong enough to say no. We had that for 40 years, from the 1930s to the 1980s.

We can have it again, but only if the people who benefit from an honest game outvote the followers of the billionaires like Trump and Musk who’ve been paying to rig it.

We need a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United like I detail in Who Killed the American Dream?, real antitrust enforcement, free or low-cost healthcare and college for the middle class, more widespread unionization, rational immigration reform, and a return to high taxes on the morbidly rich: all programs the billionaires and their lickspittle elected Republicans oppose.

Check your registration at vote.org and find out who’s running for your state legislature at openstates.org, because the rule book gets rewritten in statehouses too.

And if you found this useful, please subscribe to and share the Hartmann Report, because independent media that isn’t owned by a billionaire is also a major part of democracy’s immune system.

Tag, we’re it.

This will be an account of where we stand—mostly with regard to the new and much-touted United Nations report on climate change. But since it’s the day after Labor Day, traditionally the start of fall campaigning (a quaint and lovely notion that), let’s start with the midterm elections. Where we stand is: All the polling shows Americans ready to vote out as many Republicans as gerrymandering allows. We’ve done our job over the last 22 months, driving up President Donald Trump’s negatives (with plenty of help from him) and making MAGA electoral poison.

Now we have to turn that into facts on the ground, with votes, and wins, and actually putting good people in Congress where they can begin to staunch a bit of the damage. Which means the next 56 days need to be real, practical effort. This newsletter may be a little unpredictable in its timing, because I’m going to be on the road in swing states, helping Third Act and GrayPac in close races; you can help too, by signing up to phone bank or door knock or fundraise or the other chores that add up to electoral success (and this time around, I fear you need to sign up for “election protection” chores as well, something that shouldn’t be necessary but is). If for some reason you’re finding yourself in need of words from me, you’ll be able to hear me helping out the wonderful Ayana Johnson at her podcast all fall—it’s a season totally focused on climate and the midterms, and it begins tomorrow when we talk with Leah Stokes. (I’ll send a special email in the morning, with the link).

And now on to the major climate news of the moment, which is the report from the UN detailing the fact that we’re not going to hit the 1.5°C climate target we set in Paris. I assume that this came as shocking news to exactly no one who reads this newsletter regularly; it was clear even in Paris that it represented a target that only a combination of extremely aggressive national policies and lots of scientific luck could hit, and it’s been very clear for years that we’ve been blessed with neither. I think it is very likely that we’re going to temporarily cross the 2°C line during the hottest phase of the now-developing El Niño (by some measurements now on track to be the strongest in a millennium), and as I’ve been writing for a long time, our current trajectory is taking us toward 3°C, and quite possibly higher.

The term we’ve been using for this condition is “overshoot,” and so indeed we’ve overshot the 1.5°C target. But in fact we’ve been in “overshoot” for decades now. In 2008 I helped start 350.org, which took its name from the carbon dioxide concentration—350 parts per million—scientists said was the upper limit for any kind of safety. We passed that in the spring of... 1986, which by my back-of-the-envelope calculation would be… 40 years ago.

Remember—every tenth of a degree that the temperature goes up moves 140 million people into a more dangerous climate zone.

The danger with reports like this new one from the UN is that they may shock some people into thinking we’re living in a suddenly different world with suddenly different requirements. Chico Harlan wrote a perfectly fine piece about the UN document for the Times, but he was ill-served by whoever furnished the headline:

"Climate Goals Missed, U.N. Says World Must Now Remove Carbon at Scale."

There are two problems with that formulation, and one is that it misses the thrust of the UN recommendations. As the aforementioned Ayana Johnson points out, in the most cogent summary of the document I’ve read:

CDR (planting trees + some much higher tech stuff that’s not yet proven at scale) is a big focus of this report, but UNEP is very clear that it’s not a silver bullet. And it’s certainly not a get out of jail free card for continuing to burn fossil fuels. In their words:“Overall, even optimistic CDR scaling is unlikely to deliver a temperature reversal beyond a few tenths of a degree this century. This emphasizes the importance of focusing on reducing greenhouse gas emissions now.”

And the reason that the UN is clear that it’s not a silver bullet is that “Now,” to use the word from the NYT headline, we have no idea how to do it at scale. I mean, the Netherlands yesterday announced that it had opened the “largest carbon capture facility” in Europe. Here’s how the company involved put it in a press release:

Yara Sluiskil, Europe’s largest ammonia and fertilizer plant can capture and liquefy up to 800,000 tons of CO2 annually from ammonia production thereby avoiding carbon taxation on these volumes. The CO2 will be transported by ship to Norway, where it will be permanently stored beneath the seabed by Northern Lights.

Important to note the “up to 800,000 tons,” because so far these systems have had abysmal success in meeting even their own Lilliputian goals. And for context, Europe produces 3.3 billion tons of greenhouse gases annually, and that in turn is about 6%of the world’s total, so this is a hair on a mole on the quite ugly backside of the world’s hydrocarbon system. So far, the main use of this technology is precisely to allow us to go on burning fossil fuels. As the Yara press release continued, in the measured tones of those who don’t want to quite blow their own cover:

The technology makes it possible to reduce emissions from energy intensive industries like fertilizers, ammonia, cement, and waste management while maintaining production, jobs, and value creation in Europe.

It is entirely prudent to keep researching and testing carbon capture technology—someday it may be part of the solution to the greatest problem humanity has ever faced. But as for “Now,” well, there is actually one thing we do know how to do, and that is build out lots of cheap solar, wind, and batteries. Doing this makes sense because it can displace fossil fuels (solar-heavy California is using 50% less natural gas than it was three years ago to produce electricity), and because it’s cheaper than the alternative, and because you don’t have to go to war to procure sunshine, and because wind turbines don’t fill your lungs with particulates. As the UN points out, there’s simply no way around it—net zero may be politically controversial, but it’s physically required, “an essential milestone that cannot be skipped.”

Indeed, as the UN points out:

Accelerating the renewable energy revolution is crucial. On the supply side, limited-overshoot scenarios suggest scaling renewables to 60-70% of global electricity generation by 2030, supported by grid expansion, storage, and demand flexibility

We’re already doing this to some extent, of course—a far far greater extent than we’re scrubbing carbon from the atmosphere. But we could be doing it far faster—the Chinese are closing down solar factories to raise the price of the panels, and a new study from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis finds that India is using less than half of its solar-panel factory capacity.

It is therefore entirely possible to imagine a worldwide campaign, led by the UN, to double or triple the pace at which we’re putting up solar panels around the world, and coupling them with the wind turbines and batteries that make them fully functional in every season. This is in fact the one thing we could actually be doing at scale and right now that really responds to the numbers about climate overshoot. It is why we’re busy preparing for Sun Day next summer.

Even that doesn’t “solve” the problem—nothing “solves” the problem—but it would reduce the ultimate temperature we are going to hit on this planet, and it would reduce the eventual amount of carbon some future people are going to have to figure out how to pull out of the sky. Remember—every tenth of a degree that the temperature goes up moves 140 million people into a more dangerous climate zone.

Building clean energy is much more likely, and much more effective, if we’re also shutting down dirty energy. The UN, under Antonio Guterres, has been consistently and powerfully calling out banks and other investors for continuing to fund fossil fuel projects, and the new report is no exception. Again, Johnson highlights the key paragraph:

Avoiding carbon lock-in in infrastructure is central to this effort. Investments in long-lived, high-emission infrastructure, such as fossil-based power plants, transport systems, and industrial facilities, can constrain future emissions reductions and lock countries into high-carbon trajectories (Seto et al. 2016; Smith et al. 2019a). Existing and planned fossil fuel infrastructure alone could exceed the CO2 emissions consistent with 1.5°C in 2030 by 120%.

The possibilities were tantalizingly displayed in China this summer, where new data shows CO2 emissions fell 1%. As Lauri Myllyvirta pointed out:

The country’s use of oil fell by 9% overall and by 16% for transport, after the disruptions to supply from the Gulf through the strait.

But it could have been far better. As the Centre for Energy on Research and Clean Air documented last week, China has built a lot of coal power for backup, but too often they’re using it instead of the clean energy they’ve built in such abundance:

Estimated wind and solar curtailment, including both reported and unreported curtailment, reached 360 TWh in H1 2026, up 49% year-on-year. Had this electricity been absorbed, the additional power supply could have met all demand growth and allowed coal power generation to fall.

The problem in China is long-term contracts that continue to reserve a “substantial share of limited electricity demand for coal.” They’re protecting the industry, at the cost of the climate, something that should be highly familiar to Americans, because under Trump we’re subsidizing ancient coal plants instead of shutting them down, and even, as of this summer, spending big to build new ones.

And all of this brings us inextricably back to where this essay began, which is with politics. If the US is to play any kind of role (except as obstacle) in this transformation, it begins with resetting the politics around energy and climate. And that begins with the upcoming elections.

A Democratic Congress will not be able to pass important new climate programs—those would be blocked by the Trump White House. But it might be able to use its oversight and budget authority to blunt the worst of the administration’s attack on clean energy. And if the Democrats start to stabilize the country, then they can turn their attention to the next election—one where energy and climate will need to play a central role, because among other things “affordability” is a dead letter without addressing them.

Which is why the next eight weeks (precisely) are so crucial. We’ve overshot—and not just in terms of climate. We need to start reining the horrors back in, so we can go to work not on solving them but at least on keeping them from destroying all that we’ve inherited. I hope you’ll figure out ways to join me in helping make November 3 the most useful day of the last few years. Usefulness may not be sexy, but it’s what we’ve got.

Editor's Note: The following is the second excerpt from Nancy J. Altman's latest book, The Road to Medicare for All: A Call to Action (Routledge, 2026), now available for purchase wherever quality books are sold. Read the first excerpt published by Common Dreams here. As the United States continues to spend substantially more on health care than other wealthy nations but with poorer health outcomes, Altman's book analyzes the dysfunction of the current system and sets forth the solution. "Medicare for All won’t happen without a fight," she argues, "but it is a fight we can win."

Imagine having more money in your pocket. Imagine being able to see any doctor you want without checking whether the provider is in your network and covered by your insurance. Imagine having more time with your doctor and, at the end of the appointment, simply walking out the door without having to take out your wallet or even ask what you owe for the visit. Imagine being free of filing insurance claims. Imagine being able to simply get any medicine your doctor prescribes without discovering it is exorbitantly expensive and asking your doctor what, if anything, they can prescribe that is covered by your insurance. Imagine no such thing as medical debt. Imagine simply getting the care, procedures, hospital stays, therapies, and medications your doctor prescribes with your only focus and thought being on how to restore and optimize your health. That is what you will experience.

Where is that destination? It is tantalizingly close. In fact, those who, on average, have the greatest medical needs—seniors and people with disabilities—are already almost there. Medicare, having recently celebrated its 61st anniversary, is well known to Americans. Most people are either covered by Medicare or know someone who is. It already covers Americans from age 65 to the grave. To reach the destination that health care is a right, not a privilege, with all those imaginations a reality, it has to be extended back to the cradle and improved, so that its coverage is completely comprehensive and available without premiums, co-payments, co-insurance, or deductibles. (To be clear, the destination is the expansion of traditional Medicare, not privatized Medicare—the deceptively named Medicare Advantage—whose serious shortcomings are discussed throughout this book.)

As important as Medicare is... it should be improved.

Medicare, which currently covers only seniors and people with disabilities—those who, on average, have the highest healthcare costs—does so more efficiently, comprehensively, and fairly than commercial insurance does, or indeed can. Medicare is the most important birthday gift those turning age 65 get. Too many Americans in their late fifties and early sixties lack adequate health insurance and desperately seek to hang on until they reach that special birthday that brings Medicare. As important as Medicare is, though, it should be improved. As Chapter 3 explains, soon after Medicare was enacted and expanded to people with disabilities, the most powerful forces organized against it. They succeeded in stopping further expansion of its coverage and the services and treatment it provides. They also stood in the way of reducing the costs of those it covers.

On the road to Improved Medicare for All, traditional Medicare should be expanded to cover all essential services. As the nation is driving toward Improved Medicare for All, traditional Medicare should be expanded to cover all safe and effective prescription drugs, also. Under the current system, without Medicare simply covering all safe and effective prescription drugs automatically at no cost, beneficiaries must repeatedly answer the following impossible, ludicrous questions: What illnesses will you contract next year? What medications will your doctor prescribe to treat those yet-to-be-contracted illnesses? Only if you know the answers to those unanswerable questions, can you intelligently decide, in today’s dysfunctional system, which insurance plan has the right drug formulary or list of covered drugs at a price you can afford.

Expanding traditional Medicare to cover all prescription drugs will mean that people can fill all of their prescriptions without worry about their cost. In addition, Medicare should be expanded to cover long-term care—both care at home and in nursing homes.

If Medicare were expanded to cover in-home services and supports as well as nursing home care for those who had no other alternatives, people who were able could age at home, as most want, with the security to know that they would not be a financial burden to those they love. An expanded Medicare for All would meet Americans’ needs today and their unforeseeable needs in the future. As it does today for seniors who have traditional Medicare, it would pool risk among everyone so that everyone is protected; people with costly and complex medical conditions would not be saddled with huge costs.

Under today’s patchwork system, out-of-pocket costs in the form of deductibles, co-pays and co-insurance force people into the arms of commercial insurance, whether they like it or not. Those with traditional Medicare must buy, if they can afford it, private supplemental insurance, colloquially known as Medigap, since traditional Medicare lacks an overall cap on out-of-pocket expenses. Those who can’t afford Medigap may be forced to purchase an inadequate Medicare Advantage plan which includes an overall cap, one more thumb on the scale placed by those who are hostile to single-payer health insurance.

With comprehensive coverage, without co-pays, co-insurance, deductibles, or premiums, there will be no need for supplemental, so-called Medigap, private insurance. We do not pay out of pocket for public libraries, schools, fire protection, or the military. Rather, those services are paid from taxes. We should not be required to pay out of pocket for health care, either. Like those other services, we should have universal, national health insurance, paid for completely out of taxes. The United States is the wealthiest nation in the world at the wealthiest moment in its history. It doesn’t feel that way to many, because so much of that wealth is concentrated in the hands of the very few. A fairer system of taxation which finances an Improved Medicare for All would allow all of us to share the wealth that all of us have created.

We do not pay out of pocket for public libraries, schools, fire protection, or the military. Rather, those services are paid from taxes. We should not be required to pay out of pocket for health care, either.

The nationwide network of Improved Medicare for All providers, which would likely cover all doctors and hospitals nationwide, would ensure that people can continue to get care from the doctors they know and trust. Everyone would be free to see doctors and use hospitals anywhere in the nation. There would be no restrictive networks that keep people from using centers of excellence and seeing the doctors they want to see, including the best specialists. Improved Medicare for All would ensure that everyone—people with costly and complex conditions, people who want good specialty care from doctors and hospitals they know and trust, people who need continuity of care, and those who are currently in excellent health—could get needed health care without financial stress or anxiety.

Improved Medicare for All is fully affordable. Given the unsustainability of the current system, as described in the last chapter, the wrong question is how can we afford Improved Medicare for All. Rather, the right question is how can we afford not to enact it. Relatedly, Improved Medicare for All will cost less than we pay currently. Consequently, the other correct question is not how are we going to pay for Improved Medicare for All, but, rather, how should we divvy up the savings!

Improved Medicare for All will save the nation trillions of dollars while covering everyone comprehensively. In addition to money saved, Improved Medicare for All will save lives. It will result in a higher quality of life for individuals and also a healthier population overall, generating greater productivity for the nation as a whole. Doctors will have more freedom and flexibility. They will be free from the micro-management of commercial insurance companies, concerned about turning a profit.

An Improved Medicare for All system will provide dependable income to healthcare providers. They can count on their bills being paid in a timely manner without the need to chase patients or, even more dispiriting, seek the assistance of loan collection agencies.

Part of the savings should go to doctors, nurses, and other providers to ensure that they are well compensated. They should do better under Improved Medicare for All, not just financially, but also in terms of job satisfaction and time to focus on healing, not paperwork.

Hospitals and those they serve will do better, as well. Improved Medicare for All can reduce physician shortages in underserved areas, often described as healthcare deserts, and help to reduce shortages in areas of medicine where they exist now or are projected to exist. Rural hospitals too often have limited staff without backup. The loss of a surgeon can cause the surgical unit to close, which, in turn, can have a cascading effect, ultimately resulting in the inability to receive care close by, quickly, in an emergency.

Despite all the advantages, Improved Medicare for All won’t happen without a fight.

Like the need to reimburse doctors fairly, in a timely manner, hospitals must be, as well. Whether for-profit, nonprofit, or governmental, hospitals want to remain state-of-the-art, with the latest equipment, and be fully staffed. Consequently, they need to cover their costs and ideally, maintain reserves. Under Improved Medicare for All, hospitals will have reduced costs along with more certainty and dependability of payments, free from charitable cases, which will become a thing of the past. In addition to fairly reimbursing hospitals and other facilities, the costs of maintaining, updating, and constructing them should be a priority, so that all communities are adequately served. At base, under Improved Medicare for All, hospitals, physicians, nurses, and other practitioners should be paid generously. They can and should be paid fully and on a timely basis for care given to every patient. Improved Medicare for All can and should be structured to ensure that providers have the ability to spend the time required to see patients.

In addition to all of the health and health-related advantages that Improved Medicare for All will bring, it can also usher in improvements unrelated to health care. They include a fairer federal tax system, together with reduced income and wealth inequality; more revenue for Social Security; an improved system of workers’ compensation, and more funds for state governments. Improved Medicare for All will provide intangible benefits for everyone, including reduced stress, less paperwork with the accompanying added free time, and, most importantly, greater peace of mind. All of those byproducts are explained at length in the book. They are just some of the fortuitous byproducts that will accompany the enactment of Improved Medicare for All.

Despite all the advantages, Improved Medicare for All won’t happen without a fight. The special interests will fight ferociously, but they will be no match for the hundreds of millions of Americans who will be benefited, as long as the public is engaged and active.

Twenty-five years ago, 19 hijackers took control of four American airliners and crashed them into symbols of American power, killing upwards of 3000 people. The American population watched the events unfold in real time. It was an emotionally jarring event that changed the country.

In some respects, the events of 9/11 needed no explanation. The destruction of the World Trade Center buildings and the massive, and random, loss of life were horrifying to all. The meaning of the attacks, however – and the motivations of the hijackers – were less clear.

The effort to explain the motives behind the attack, and to understand “why they hate us,” brought a pre-existing debate over Islamist militancy to the center of American public life. In the decade leading up to 9/11, the Washington policy community had been divided over how to deal with the Islamist movement and particularly those extremists who sought to use violence to impose a narrow vision of religious orthodoxy upon reluctant societies.

At the heart of the 1990s policy debate was a dispute over causation: are religion and ideology the sources of violent extremism, or are poverty, marginalization and authoritarian misrule to blame? Commentators and politicians on the political right viewed the issue in terms reminiscent of the Cold War. The conflict with Islamism (or “Islamic fundamentalism”) was ideological in nature and, like international communism, had to be confronted with force. Hence, American foreign policy should prioritize security and support our regional allies in their efforts to eradicate both the Islamist opposition and violent extremists.

Those on the other side of the debate rejected this vision of a new “green peril” and saw the underlying claims as inaccurate and misleading. To operate from such flawed assumptions, it was argued, would result in a foreign policy that served neither American interests nor those of the Arab (and Muslim) populations most directly affected. The best strategy for dealing with both militant violence and the non-violent opposition was economic development and political reform.

Both the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations sought to find a common ground between these two perspectives, one that addressed both security concerns and the need for reform. The terrorist attacks of 9/11, however, upended this balance. The shock and horror of that day provided the George W. Bush administration a free hand to reshape American foreign policy. In doing so, the second Bush administration embraced the security side of the argument and the corresponding policy prescriptions. What motivated the administration was a view that this new war on terror was – like WWII and the Cold War – an existential “conflict between freedom and tyranny.” In the face of such a dire threat, the “gloves come off.”

Many experts now recognize that the militarized response to 9/11 was counter-productive. In the two decades that followed, the number of groups and fighters that claimed allegiance to the jihadist cause increased, as did their geographic areas of operation. Even as U.S. forces made gains against al-Qaida, new groups such as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) emerged that were even more extreme and violent. The precipitous demise of the Afghan government in August 2021 – and the return of the Taliban to power – further illustrated the limits of American military power.

All of this occurred despite the concerted effort by the U.S. government and others to rein in Islamist militancy and counter the ideology of violent extremism. The problem, in short, got worse, not better.

Misdiagnosing the problem

The failures of America’s war on terror were rooted in a misdiagnosis of the problem. The Bush administration promoted the idea that the 9/11 hijackers were motivated by their hatred of American values and rejected any notion that U.S. policies contributed to either anti-American sentiment or violent extremism. “They” hated us for who we are, it was argued, not what we do.

By framing the challenge of Islamist militancy within a discourse of terrorism and civilizational struggle, governmental leaders embraced a belief common on the political right that “the application of [military] power is the most important thing in winning the war on terrorism.” American policy makers subsequently pursued a military strategy to effect political change in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa at the expense of diplomatic, legal and other alternatives. The 1990s debate was effectively over; those arguing for a policy of confrontation had won.

While the intent of the American military strategy was to deny terrorist groups safe havens, the practical effect was the opposite. American military interventions destabilized entire regions and created the kind of lawless anarchy in which militant groups proliferated. U.S. interventions also exacerbated anti-American sentiments and allowed militant groups to portray themselves as nationalist defenders fighting an occupying enemy.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq exemplified this trend, with the American occupation becoming a “‘cause celebre’ for jihadists” and inadvertently breathing new life into the militant movement. American policy in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, and Yemen paint a similar picture. In each instance, military intervention created the conditions in which Islamist militancy flourished. This, in turn, justified further U.S. interventions, creating a vicious cycle of perpetual conflict.

American military strategy also relied upon regional autocracies to prosecute the war on terror. This aspect of American policy represented a key paradox. While U.S. actions were said to be defending freedom, the reality is that U.S. government agencies prioritized support for the militaries and security services of authoritarian allies. Little was done to promote democratic accountability or protect civilian populations from abuses inflicted by these same governments. The prosecution of the war on terror, thus, meant diminished freedom for populations living under authoritarian rule and failed to address the relationship between government repression and radicalization.

The failure of America’s military strategy reflected a tendency to focus on symptoms, rather than causes. While the budgets of the Department of Defense, various intelligence agencies and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) expanded dramatically in the post-9/11 period, similar investments were not made in other aspects of American power. There was no corresponding expansion of the mission or budgets for the U.S. Department of State or for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Funding for democracy promotion, moreover, paled in comparison to military spending and little was done to address the economic stagnation and marginalization that fueled extremism.

While this lopsided approach to counterterrorism was, in part, a continuation of past American policy, it was also due to the wartime paradigm that prioritized military power over all else. The result was “indiscipline and disappointments” as military operations failed to fix problems and Americans tired of the country’s wars.

As we reflect on the terrible events of 9/11, we can honor those who perished by learning the central lesson of the war on terror: the overreliance on military power to accomplish political objectives does not serve American national security interests. As in the current war with Iran, the U.S. military has consistently demonstrated that it can secure tactical victories while still failing to achieve strategic ends.

What is needed is not just a change in policy, but a shift in the way that the United States political leadership thinks about the problems that it is trying to solve. We owe it to those millions of Americans who have grown up in the shadow of 9/11 not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Live at 9 AM Eastern & Streaming 24-7 Thereafter:

Editorial cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM Eastern time.

Today we discuss:

• There are major anxieties about interference in the 2026 midterm elections. Will the Trump administration use executive orders or declare a national emergency to sow confusion? Will there be federal agents at polls, ballot seizures, and restricted mail-in voting? Gerrymandering and eroded trust compound fears that results could be delegitimized or overridden. Investigative journalist Greg Palast joins Ted and Jamarl to tell us what fears are real.

Greg Palast is an investigative journalist and author whose reporting for the BBC, Guardian, and Rolling Stone has exposed voter-roll purges, Crosscheck programs, and suppression tactics since Florida’s 2000 election. His bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, plus films like Vigilantes Inc., document how officials and contractors have disenfranchised millions, especially voters of color.

• Middle East Escalation: A wave of Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia wounds more than 70 people and ignited fires at several oil facilities and utilities in the kingdom’s southern region, raising oil prices and threatening to squeeze shipping through the Bab al-Mandeb strait. Iran plans to announce an “exclusion zone” outside the Strait of Hormuz aimed at vessels it believes are attempting to transit the waterway. The United Kingdom is expected to announce trade restrictions on illegal Israeli settlements, the latest sign that UK-Israeli relations have taken another downturn. And Israel orders settler outposts removed in the West Bank.

• The centrist-conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) was defeated by the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in a Saxony-Anhalt state election. Friedrich Merz’s party lost more than half of its seats in the state parliament, while the AfD increased its count from 23 to 39.

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On September 1, a US airstrike hit a family compound in Kuhestak, southern Iran, as women and children gathered for a wedding celebration. At least five people were killed and dozens more injured. Associated Press reporters who visited the town documented extensive damage and civilian suffering. Reuters later reported that imagery, debris, and weapons assessments were consistent with a direct hit by a US munition, while US officials said the incident was under review. The immediate facts matter. But the larger question is already unavoidable: What happens to the laws of war when civilian spaces repeatedly become part of the battlefield?

The significance of Kuhestak extends beyond the number of casualties or the identity of the weapon. The deeper danger is what incidents like this can do to the norms meant to limit warfare. If homes, schools, hospitals, wedding gatherings, or refugee sites are repeatedly treated as tolerable consequences of military necessity, the distinction between battlefield and civilian life begins to lose practical meaning.

International humanitarian law was designed precisely to prevent that erosion. Its rules do not make war safe, and they do not prohibit every attack that may harm civilians. They do, however, require parties to distinguish between civilians and military objectives, prohibit attacks expected to cause excessive incidental civilian harm in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated, and require feasible precautions to minimize civilian loss. The principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution are not political preferences. They are the legal architecture intended to preserve a minimum boundary between military necessity and human life.

International law rarely collapses in a single dramatic moment. More often, norms weaken when exceptional conduct is repeated, defended, or left without meaningful scrutiny.

That distinction matters when assessing the US position as well. Washington says it does not target civilians and that its operations in southern Iran were aimed at military infrastructure, including air-defense, communications, and maritime assets. The Associated Press reported those stated objectives alongside the civilian toll in Kuhestak. Under the laws of war, the existence of a legitimate military objective can matter greatly. Civilian casualties, by themselves, do not automatically prove an unlawful attack. But that is precisely why transparent investigation is essential: Was the target properly identified? Were the expected civilian risks assessed? Were feasible precautions taken? And was the anticipated military advantage sufficient to justify those risks?

Kuhestak is especially troubling because it follows another catastrophic episode in the same province. On February 28, a strike hit a school in Minab. In March, Amnesty International said its investigation found US forces responsible for the attack, which killed 156 people, including 120 children, and concluded that the United States had failed to take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian harm. Amnesty called for a transparent and thorough investigation and accountability for those responsible. Minab therefore cannot simply be treated as an unresolved rumor in the background of the current war.

Seen together, Minab and Kuhestak raise a deeper concern. One catastrophic civilian strike may be explained as a failure of intelligence, targeting, weapon performance, or judgment. A pattern of incidents, however, raises a different question: whether civilian protection is being pushed too far to the margins of operational decision-making. The danger is not only the immediate loss of life. It is the gradual normalization of exceptions.

If civilian protection becomes a principle honored only when convenient, the damage will not stop with one town or one conflict.

International law rarely collapses in a single dramatic moment. More often, norms weaken when exceptional conduct is repeated, defended, or left without meaningful scrutiny. Each time a serious civilian-harm incident is absorbed into the routine language of war without transparent findings or accountability, the practical force of the rule diminishes. What is described today as an exceptional mistake can become tomorrow's accepted risk.

Some will argue that this concern overstates the implications of incidents that occur in a high-intensity conflict. War is chaotic. Military assets may be located near civilian areas. Information can be incomplete, and even precision weapons cannot eliminate human error or unintended harm. Those points are real, and international humanitarian law itself recognizes that civilian casualties can occur even in attacks directed at lawful military objectives.

But acknowledging the realities of war is not the same as accepting the erosion of its limits. The law matters most precisely when military pressure is intense and operational decisions are difficult. If the protections owed to civilians become flexible whenever the strategic stakes are high, then their universality becomes conditional on power, geography, and political convenience. A rule that constrains only weak states, while powerful ones receive the benefit of endless exceptions, is not a universal rule for long.

The consequences would reach far beyond Iran. The laws of war function only if states expect them to apply across conflicts and regions. A standard weakened in the Middle East will not remain neatly contained there. Future belligerents in Europe, Africa, or East Asia can point to conduct tolerated elsewhere and demand the same latitude for themselves. Selective enforcement does more than produce unequal justice; over time, it changes what governments believe they can do.

A rule that constrains only weak states, while powerful ones receive the benefit of endless exceptions, is not a universal rule for long.

The appropriate response, therefore, is not to prejudge every disputed strike or to assume that every civilian death proves a war crime. It is to insist on independent, transparent, and verifiable investigations; publication of meaningful findings; and accountability wherever violations are established. The United States should be held to the same standards it expects other states to observe. The same standard must apply to Iran, Israel, and every other party to an armed conflict. Universality is the point.

The question raised by Kuhestak is ultimately larger than one wedding, just as Minab was larger than one school. It is whether the international community still believes that even in war there are people, spaces, and rules that military necessity cannot simply sweep aside. If civilian protection becomes a principle honored only when convenient, the damage will not stop with one town or one conflict. What will have been weakened is the boundary that keeps war from becoming limitless—and once that boundary disappears, no nation can assume that its own civilians will remain safely on the other side of it.

My mom worked harder than anyone I know. She wanted a good life for us. It was a hard life—I remember the Christmas she had to pawn our gifts to pay the light bill—but she made it special for us.

Now I have two kids of my own, and I want them to have every opportunity that other children have.

The landscape is tough out there. Like many Americans, I can’t afford childcare, and finding work that accommodates my need to care for my young children is hard. With inflation, the little income I have doesn’t go nearly as far as it used to.

I’m grateful to have assistance with food, housing, and healthcare through our social safety net programs.

Food programs like SNAP (also known as “food stamps”) and WIC (that’s the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children) have literally saved our lives when we’ve been hungry. I wouldn’t be able to feed my children without them. And thanks to Medicaid, we have healthcare.

But I’m sick with worry about the cuts to SNAP and Medicaid that are barreling my way. The so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” slashed these programs last year so lawmakers could slash taxes for corporations and the wealthy, and some of the worst cuts will take place after this year’s midterms.

The uncertainty is causing so much stress. The first change I noticed is they cut off my eyeglasses subsidy. What’s next? Meanwhile, the cost of living keeps going up and up, outpacing wage gains for me and countless others. Our SNAP benefits cover much less than they did a year ago, and that’s before potential cuts take effect.

I feel like I’m waiting for a bomb to drop on me and my kids, and I’m not the only one.

“The average minimum-wage worker must work nearly 116 hours per week, nearly three full-time jobs, to afford a two-bedroom rental home,” the National Low Income Housing Coalition reports. That’s the truth—my own sister works three jobs and still has to live with roommates.

Lawmakers are telling us we can’t have healthcare now unless we work, even in areas with low wages. Yet those making the laws enjoy free government-socialized healthcare and high wages.

They say SNAP benefits can’t be used for a cake or soda for my child’s birthday. Yet no one would stop the wealthy from using their $1 trillion in tax cuts under the “Big Beautiful Bill” to buy their kid a yacht.

Poor and low-income people deserve to be happy too. We deserve healthcare, food, housing, and even a child’s small birthday party. It feels like we’re being punished for working regular jobs—and like lawmakers want to keep us down so we don’t fight back against this inequality.

But we are fighting back.

I’ve started attending our local town hall meetings and hearing the stories of injustice and poverty. I started volunteering with a non-profit organization in my community. I help get goods to people in need, even as I am also in need, because that’s what we do. Poor and low-income people help each other out, because we understand what it’s like to see our kids go without while we work our fingers to the bone.

But we can’t do it alone. We need to demand from lawmakers that instead of cutting our healthcare, food, and housing benefits, we need to expand them to meet the great need in this country. We need a livable wage so we can afford market rent and rising food prices.

And we need to hold lawmakers who make working people suffer to enrich the already wealthy accountable.

A familiar spectre is haunting the nation—that of communism. Or so one might conclude from the Republican Party’s increasingly frantic rhetoric.

Following a string of wins by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in congressional primaries from New York to Colorado to Michigan, even reaching as far as Florida, the GOP is dusting off an old refrain.

“Communism is on the ballot this November,” warned House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) at a press conference. President Donald Trump has gone further still, calling communism “the biggest threat to our nation there is, maybe since our founding.”

At first glance, this reads like little more than election-year theatrics. The candidates provoking such alarm are, on the whole, hardly the revolutionaries their critics imagine.

But, try as they might, no amount of fearmongering, surveillance, or censorship will dampen the working person’s dream for a more dignified life, one where their labor is compensated fairly, their dollar stretches further, and their children inherit a secure future.

Many of the policies promoted by today’s democratic socialists fall comfortably within the lineage of the New Deal: strengthening labor protections, expanding access to healthcare, greater investment in public infrastructure, and so on.

That House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) would liken their ascendance to “a nightmare… a trail to certain death,” ought to strike any person of sound mind as patently absurd.

Yet dismissing such a frenzied reaction as mere campaign-season hyperbole risks overlooking what it actually reveals: staggering insecurity.

If the political establishment had any real confidence in their track record, they wouldn’t need to manufacture so much anxiety around their opposition.

It is precisely because they can feel their grip on the public’s trust slipping that they have resorted to reviving the McCarthyist witch hunts of yesteryear—an effort that extends well beyond incendiary speeches.

Last year, President Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), directing federal agencies to expand policing of social movements linked to “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” among other ideological strains, ostensibly to “identify and prevent potential violent activity.”

NSPM-7 has, in turn, become the legal backbone for an aggressive crackdown on dissent, seen in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issuing “warning notices” to those who have criticized the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), whether that be through social media posts or email correspondence.

Recent reporting even uncovered a sweeping probe, dubbed “Operation Puppet Master” by DHS, into a number of left-wing groups in Minnesota after the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti by ICE and Border Patrol agents, respectively, earlier this year.

The probe included, among other things, the subpoenaing of financial records from various labor unions and nonprofits, as well as “spying operations conducted by undercover agents who posed as activists and surveilled community activities.”

It is little wonder that such egregious actions have since been compared to COINTELPRO, J Edgar Hoover’s illegal pet project designed to infiltrate, surveil, and discredit civil rights and anti-war activists who caught the ire of the federal government.

This, paired with the White House creating its own blacklist of journalists and influencers on its official “Media Offenders” page, many of whom are cited for such severe transgressions as “Left-Wing Lunacy,” suggests that the hysterical talking points GOP leadership have taken to heart are the vehicle for a broader crusade of political repression.

Such heavy-handed surveillance is undoubtedly born out of a deep-seated panic among those in power. This latest Red Scare is, at its core, a reaction to the working-class rightfully demanding its fair share of the economic pie.

The rise of the DSA, and of the left-wing ideas it propagates, owes much to the fact that its members speak plainly about the financial woes of the everyday person.

Take, for instance, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has striven to take an honest accounting of the financial hardship faced by New Yorkers, and in turn offer tangible remedies like free childcare and a rent freeze.

In contrast, Trump administration officials are desperate to pull the wool over the eyes of the people, with Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, recently claiming that the economy “looks amazing,” despite nearly 80% of voters feeling otherwise.

In fact, public confidence in capitalism broadly has fallen to 54%, according to Gallup polling released last year, the lowest level since the organization began tracking the question. At the same time, socialism commands comparatively steady support, especially among Democratic voters, roughly two-thirds of whom view it favorably.

The generational divide is even more striking. A survey conducted by YouGov and the Cato Institute found that 62% of Americans under 30 hold a favorable view of socialism, while 34% say the same of communism. Of course, each of these labels mean different things to different respondents, but the overarching trend is difficult to ignore.

For many Americans, especially those on the younger side, capitalism is synonymous with constraint, and it’s not hard to see why.

While billionaires’ assets have surged to preposterous heights, the cascading inflationary shocks of war have steadily eroded workers’ purchasing power.

Cornerstones of the American Dream have been priced out of reach for working families, with 62% of Americans now viewing homeownership as unrealistic.

Meanwhile, more than 40% of American households have persistently struggled to cover the cost of basic necessities on their current income.

Yet, rather than confronting the economic frustrations driving millions of Americans to question the status quo, the Trump administration has chosen to paint a target on the backs of those who offer the public a meaningful alternative.

But, try as they might, no amount of fearmongering, surveillance, or censorship will dampen the working person’s dream for a more dignified life, one where their labor is compensated fairly, their dollar stretches further, and their children inherit a secure future.

And it is for this reason that yet another Red Scare is an altogether futile, albeit dangerous, distraction meant to blind us to the real struggle of our time: the fight against a rigged economy.

If those in power must conjure ghosts to terrify the people, it is surely because their earthly defenses are failing.

This Labor Day, workers across the country are sending a clear message: They want a greater voice on the job. A near-record 71% of Americans approve of unions, and surveys show over 50 million nonunion workers would join a union if they could.

At a time when many are struggling to afford basic necessities, it’s easy to understand why. Through unions and collective bargaining, workers have more power to win higher wages, better benefits, safer working conditions, and a fairer share of the wealth they create. Unions help build a strong middle class, reduce inequality, narrow racial economic disparities, and boost participation in our democracy.

Yet only 1 in 10 US workers are in a union today—a sharp decline from the more than 1 in 3 workers who belonged to a union in the 1950s. That drop did not happen because workers stopped wanting or needing unions. It happened due to relentless attacks on unions and collective bargaining, and lawmakers’ failure to fix the broken labor laws that have allowed those attacks to succeed.

The consequences have been enormous. As union power has declined, workers have seen less of the gains from the economic growth they have helped create. Since 1979, productivity (how much average value workers produce in an hour of work) has grown 2.8 times as much as pay for typical workers.

This Labor Day, let’s recommit to putting more power in the hands of working people.

New Economic Policy Institute research makes clear just how much working people stand to gain by rebuilding union power to 1950s’ levels.

Tripling union membership would raise the pay of the median worker by more than $7,700 a year, or nearly $270,000 over a 35-year career. That’s enough to more than cover the cost of sending two children to a four-year public university, for example. Crucially, both union and nonunion workers would see these gains because stronger unions raise standards across the labor market.

Scaled across the workforce, tripling union membership would shift an estimated $1.2 trillion to the pockets of working people every year. This is enough to reverse roughly one-third of the increase in inequality since 1979.

Stronger unions are also good for businesses and the broader economy. When workers earn more, they have more money to spend in their communities, strengthening consumer demand. Businesses would benefit from lower worker turnover, higher productivity, and workers who have a greater stake in the success of their workplaces.

Tripling union membership won’t be easy, but it’s far from a nostalgic pipe dream. It will take continued nationwide organizing and decisive policy action that makes it easier for workers to unionize. Federal lawmakers can start by passing legislation that expands collective bargaining rights, closes loopholes in existing law that allows employers to suppress worker organizing, and holds employers accountable when they violate workers’ labor rights. Further, state lawmakers should provide all public-sector workers with collective bargaining rights and repeal so-called right-to-work laws that weaken workers’ ability to organize and bargain collectively.

This Labor Day, let’s recommit to putting more power in the hands of working people. That means giving more workers the freedom to organize. And it means setting an ambitious goal worthy of the moment: tripling union membership and building an economy that works for working people.

Last March, I wrote an essay providing evidence of the inherent exploitation and undemocratic constructs in our economic model burdening working people.

This essay compliments that work and will show a fundamental reason why our economic model is structurally limited by attempts to reform it.

History

Our economic model is plagued with a history of periodic recessions and depressions.

That history is recorded by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Recessions and depressions are clinically presented as normal components of the “business cycle.” The NBER does not report the chronic instability and destruction of communities and working people’s lives by the “business cycle.”

Political democracy demands economic democracy. We have statutes, laws, regulations, and rules to protect the common good. Why not apply the same principles to the relations of production?

Many economists, psychologists, and journalists have attempted to rationalize the chronic crisis in our economic model. These fanciful assertions are thoroughly inadequate. As Leo Huberman chronicled in Man’s Worldly Goods, some experts actually attributed the chronic crises to radiation from the sun or the path of the planet Venus.

Despite rapid advances in technology and financial instruments, chronic crises remain inherent in our economic model.

Competition is a significant component that contributes to these crises despite the stifling dominance by a few giant corporations in most industries. That structure contains one essential component which plagues all businesses.

It is the tendency of the profit rate to fall.

Profit Rate Basis

The tendency of the profit rate to fall is the basis of why our economic model cannot be meaningfully reformed.

The owner of a business must convert the expenditures that initiate and maintain the business into a profit. Profits are what remains after a business pays all of its costs.

Simply, the profit rate shows how many cents of profits are retained from every dollar earned. It is more important than aggregate profits because it measures efficiency of a company in comparison with other businesses.

A decline in the profit rate forces businesses to close doors and decimate the lives of their employees across states and communities.

Business Basics

The following is a simplified explanation of why profit rates tend to fall:

The process begins by establishing a business. The owner must allocate resources for primary expenditures (CapEx) to acquire space, a plant, machinery, tools, hardware, software, technological advances, and raw materials. This includes legal registrations, licenses, permits, and financial services.

The business owner must then add another cost which are secondary expenditures.

Secondary expenditures (OpEx) consist of wages or salaries paid to the employees who do the mental or physical work with their labor power. This creates profits for the owner including extra profits. Extra profits are what remains for the owner once wages or salaries are paid to the employees.

It is imperative that the owner continually spend more resources in primary expenditures for the business. This is due to competition with other business owners.

Primary Expenditures Increase

For the owner, the cost of primary expenditures usually increases as costs for goods and services increase. These increases can be the result of monetary policy, growth of the economy (GDP), corporate price gouging, misplaced tariffs, or a scarcity of certain goods.

Some products may even see a temporary drop in prices due to technological advances.

However, the supply of goods and services that comprise primary expenditures invariably rises to the dismay of business owners.

Cost of living calculations also present data that strongly supports the assertion that primary expenditures for owners will never decrease in our economic model.

Primary expenditures are required to increase the amount of the product or service created by the employees.

The owner might consider borrowing funds from a financial institution to pay for primary expenditures. This can be problematic because financial institutions may decline to lend the money or advance at a glacial pace to finalize a loan.

The reason why the owner must continually increase spending on primary expenditures is directly related to the profit rate.

Profit Rate

The profit rate is obtained by dividing the total primary and secondary expenditures by the extra profit. (Multiplying by 100 converts a decimal into a percentage).

Example: Suppose the employees created $100 worth of total profit and are paid $40 in wages. That means the extra profit is $60.

Add the primary expenditures to the secondary expenditures and divide by the extra profit. In this example, the profit rate is 60%.

Now to show the tendency of the profit rate to fall, increase the primary expenditure to $60. Suppose there was a sale on tools at Home Depot and the owner purchased $10 worth of tools by transferring funds from the secondary expenditures to the primary expenditures.

The profit rate is now 55%. This is a significant drop despite the profit amount remaining the same. The owner increased the primary expenditures by transferring funds from the secondary expenditures.

The owner’s increased spending on primary expenditures in the form of new tools or machines may maintain the extra profits. They may even increase the production of each employee. The product or service may then be sold as less expensive. This is wonderful for the owner, but the crisis remains driven by competition.

Temporary Remedy

Other business owners are captured in this business model. Competition from other businesses drives the accumulation of primary expenditures and a decrease of secondary expenditures. This decrease results in cuts to employees’ wages, salaries, or job losses. A falling rate of profit means outside investment is less likely to occur signaling a crisis for the owner.

The owner must either increase primary expenditures to increase profit rates to compete with other businesses or increase secondary expenditures to allow employees to maintain themselves and their families.

The owner cannot do both. It is an inherent contradiction.

The remedy for the owner is to freeze or offer insufficient wages or salaries in order to maintain extra profits for the business. Without a militant union to fight with the employees, owners will deny employees’ requests for fair compensation and benefits.

The tendency of a profit rate to fall leads to the eventual closing of the business or the business moving to a location without employee rights, union rights, or environmental regulations.

Real Remedy

Thus, our business model results in chronic exploitation, deprivation, and immiseration that cannot be eliminated by reform. Working people's lives and their families are severely damaged, often forever.

The organization, production, and distribution of goods and services must be transformed into a democratic model.

One version of this model can be seen in the Mondragon Corporation in Spain. It is a highly successful conglomerate created in 1956 by a Roman Catholic priest. It is based on democratic principles that are agreed on by the employees.

Economist Richard Wolff wrote that the important questions of what and how we produce are fundamental to the economy of any country. “Where” to produce as also a question within the organization of an economy. The employees who create the profits must have a voice in the production process. A democratic construct can vary according to the model selected but must begin at the ground level.

Transition to a Democratic Economic Model

There are several methods that might serve as a guide to how such a transition may be realized in our economic model:

New companies may be based on the principles of worker cooperatives. Also, when a company fails, it must first offer the employees an option to purchase it. Lastly, owners who are retiring must offer the employees the first opportunity to purchase the business.

A transition to a democratic economic model must begin by political parties actually representing working peoples’ interests. Many progressives assert that democratic socialists must win elections as the way to dominate governments at local, state, and federal levels. They assert that democratic socialism may be realized by means of evolution, not necessarily revolution.

If progressive critics are able to dominate the government, it could pave the way for a transition to a democratic socialist model with American characteristics. Since our history is replete with democratic goals and objectives; a transition would be less problematic.

Political democracy demands economic democracy. We have statutes, laws, regulations, and rules to protect the common good. Why not apply the same principles to the relations of production?

Implementing a democratic model will be met with an avalanche of ruthless, corporate lies to deceive and frighten working people.

Progressives have historical lessons to learn from the failures of countries that attempted a form of socialism to replace the miserable economic conditions inherent and inevitable in our economic model.

There are many forms of socialism that can be realized.

The former USSR is a petri dish of such failures. Government must work to organize economic production democratically from the ground up, not from the top down that doomed the Soviet model to largely failure.

The government under democratic socialist control will transition to a new economic model that will facilitate the positive development of various components of our culture. The voice of working people will make the economic decisions rather than a handful of spiritually vapid, wealthy oligarchs. These oligarchs ignore Christian, Jewish, Islamic and Buddhist literature that advocates for various forms of democratic socialism.

Polls from The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Gallup, and Fox News demonstrate that Americans are increasingly discontented with our economic model.

Working people can and must do better for themselves and their families. Recognizing the limits of economic reform is a beginning.

It’s a good thing that labor journalist and author Matt Witt was not running for governor of Wisconsin this year like Democratic Socialists of America candidate Francesca Hong.

Democratic primary rivals and Republican opposition researchers would have badly distorted the message of Witt’s new book Make Holidays Your Own (Common Ground Press). It encourages creative rethinking of family gatherings and community practices on major holidays.

In their effort to discredit Hong, her foes in both parties created what The New York Times called a “social media kerfuffle” over old posts dissing Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and Halloween.

The outspoken state legislator and former restaurant owner from Madison lost her August 11 primary despite polling very strongly beforehand. Given the annual sense of foreboding that overtakes millions of Americans when tense family reunions draw near in late November, Hong’s past call for Thanksgiving to be “canceled”—because of its connection to “colonialism”—probably had its local fans.

Sometimes the development of alternative celebrations—such as the reclaiming of May Day by the modern day, more immigrant-influenced US labor movement--can lead to two opportunities to picnic, protest, and march, rather than just one!

Under fire on the campaign trail, Hong did concede that bringing people together around a table can be “a good thing.” But, according to the Times, she also courted controversy by “questioning the value of Valentine’s Day and Christmas trees.” So not only Wisconsin turkey farmers, but gift card sellers and Christmas tree growers—if sufficiently miffed—might have voted instead for the moderate Democrat from Milwaukee, David Crowley, who won the primary.

And even if Hong had prevailed, according to the Times, she faced the challenge of winning over voters like John Wilson, a 61-year old pharmacist from Platteville, Wisconsin, who usually “leans Democratic.” However, when asked whether he favored Hong or US Rep. Tom Tiffany, the Republican running for governor, Wilson chose the latter because “you have to take people at their word” about serious matters like Thanksgiving.

Tiffany has strong views on holidays too; in 2021, he was one of 14 House members who voted against making Juneteenth Day a federal holiday, which won’t be popular with African-American voters statewide.

Just A Few Days Off

In the future, left-leaning candidates can avoid even momentarily distracting flaps like this by reading Matt Witt’s book—hopefully, before pulling the trigger on Twitter, in a moment of pique. The few paid days off that most Americans get to enjoy should not be cancel culture targets, when, as the author argues, they can be celebrated in ways “more historically accurate, meaningful, inclusive, and fun,”

In Make Holidays Your Own, Witt offers much creative advice about dealing with Turkey Day, Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, Veterans Day, the Fourth of July, and eight others; his focus is on countering their crass commercialization, historical baggage, stultifying traditionalism, or exploitation by the right.

See, for example, the garish 250th birthday party staged on July 4 of this year in Washington, DC by the White House and its corporate funders. While no doubt critical of that, Abdul El-Sayed, the successful Democratic Senate primary winner in Michigan is definitely tip-toeing around the issue of fireworks on the Fourth.

As the Times notes, “He has deleted a number of videos and posts where he floated the idea of abandoning fireworks on Independence Day.” El-Sayed’s press spokesperson is now reminding voters that he “is the former captain of his high school football team, loves Michigan football on Saturdays, and celebrates the Fourth of July with fireworks like the next Michigander.”

In other words, he’s an all-American guy! As Witt explains: “In every culture, holidays matter. They come with a message and symbols—with a story that reinforces a certain way of looking at society and passes on certain values to the next generation.” According to the author, what’s good about remaking holidays, in ways that send a different message, “is that you don’t have to convince everyone in your community who doesn’t agree. They can celebrate however they want and so can you.”

A Labor Day History Lesson

And sometimes the development of alternative celebrations—such as the reclaiming of May Day by the modern day, more immigrant-influenced US labor movement--can lead to two opportunities to picnic, protest, and march, rather than just one!

As a former communications director for the United Mine Workers, Teamsters, and Service Employees International Union, the author delves, most informatively, into the political agenda behind the creation of Labor Day, as a counter to nascent working-class internationalism in the late 19th century.

Readers will learn that it was a corporate Democrat president—rather than any anti-union Republican—who first tried to erase the memory of May 1, as an international workers holiday born in the USA, and replace it with an end of summer day off out of step with the rest of the world.

To add insult to injury, May 1 then got officially rebranded, during the McCarthy era, as Law Day—although nobody, even corporate lawyers, get time off for that. Yet, thanks to multiple MAGA threats to the “rule of law” since President Donald Trump got reelected, more than 1,000 California bar members used their lunch hour to stage a first-time ever May Day-style protest in downtown San Francisco.)

As Witt recounts, massive demonstrations seeking shorter working hours occurred in Chicago and other US cities on May 1, 1886; when repeated on May Day four years later, workers in “dozens of countries in Europe and Latin America also held rallies and marches to support the eight-hour day demand.”

Thereafter, much to the alarm of “robber barons” here and abroad, May 1 protests became “an annual event for workers all around the world” and an expression of cross-border solidarity between labor radicals of varying stripes.

Forget May Day?

By 1896, however, a business-backed resident of the White House named Grover Cleveland needed a “sop to unions.” He had, after all, just called out federal troops to crush the Pullman strike organized by the American Railway Union, a pioneering alternative to craft unionism led by future Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Victor Debs (who was jailed for his role in the strike).

At Cleveland’s request, Congress declared that workers should be given a day off, every year, on the first Monday in September so, as Witt notes, “Actions taken by US unions would not be coordinated with their counterparts in the rest of the world.”

“Today, Labor Day is a paid holiday for about 3 in 4 workers in the US. Ironically, the lowest paid workers are the least likely to have the day off with pay. That includes non-union workers in food service, retail, hotels, agriculture, delivery, and janitorial services, as well as part-time workers, or those whose companies claim are ‘independent contractors’ rather than employees.”

On the holiday counterprogramming front, the good news is that May Day (as noted above) has made a major comeback over the last two decades. There is also “the shining example of the transformation of Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day as now observed in many cities and states.”

Thanks to the efforts of progressive veterans’ groups like Veterans for Peace and Common Defense, at least some commemorative events on Memorial Day and Veterans Day now focus on peace and justice issues, rather than uncritical celebration of past wars.

In his chapter on Martin Luther King Day, the author suggests a range of activities that “can be about the movement and not just the man.” (This is advice that venerators of Cesar Chavez are taking, but only belatedly, after recent revelations about his history of sexual abuse while president of the United Farm Workers.)

Witt reports that all proceeds from his book are going to Rethinking Schools, a “national nonprofit organization that supports social, economic, and environmental justice teaching at a time when the very idea of public education is under attack. Rethinking Schools’ materials have been used by tens of thousands of educators and have reached millions of students.”

Let’s hope that Make Holidays Your Own also gets into the hands of many educators who have to come up with fresh ideas for in-school celebrations of holidays, that cannot be cancelled even in blue states. But, of course, don’t want their personal creativity in the classroom (or pet peeves) unleashing a conservative backlash of the sort that did not help Hong.