I’ve been a fan of Dolly Parton since her terrific 1980 movie (and hit song) 9-5, on the struggle of working women organizing for dignity and respect—and against sexual harassment. Along with millions of others, I’m saddened by the Queen of Country’s passing.

But I’m miffed about people who opposed what Dolly stood for now trying to claim her legacy as their own.

For instance, President Donald Trump has claimed that Parton was a supporter of his, even sharing a fake AI photo of the two of them together. Dolly’s sister Stella set the record straight, calling Trump’s behavior “deranged, ugly, and nasty.”

In life Dolly Parton was the opposite of Donald Trump. She was compassionate, humble, generous, humorous (including poking fun at herself), and accepting of people from all walks of life.

She never forgot where she came from and acted on her religious beliefs of “Love your Neighbor” and “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Dolly Parton turned down the presidential medal of freedom three times, saying she didn’t deserve it. Trump brags of his own self-importance, flies giant self-portraits from federal buildings, places his picture in passports, demands the Nobel peace prize, renamed the Kennedy Center after himself, and declares he is a genius.

As a tribute to her hardworking sharecropping father who never had the opportunity to learn to read, Dolly Parton created and funded the Imagination Library, providing hundreds of millions of books to young children—my grandchildren included. President Trump, who never lacked financial opportunity, is now pushing to slash funding for education, libraries, and literacy.

Dolly Parton embraced Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI.) She was supportive of the LGBTQ community, expressed support for Black Lives Matter, and uplifted those with disabilities. Trump has attacked DEI as “woke” and un-American, ridiculed the trans community, mocked people with disabilities, and labeled Black Lives Matter protesters as domestic terrorists.

Dolly Parton appeared with PBS’s Sesame Street characters to promote values of inclusivity and equality among children. Trump defunded PBS and Sesame Street, declaring them “radical left monsters.”

Dolly Parton celebrated women workers and was a proud union member for over 60 years. Trump crushed the union rights of over 1 million federal workers, paid millions in a lawsuit for sexual abuse, and carries on with the massive cover-up of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking.

Dolly Parton donated millions to medical research, including to children’s hospitals, cancer research, and the Covud-19 vaccine. Trump threatens the existence of rural hospitals with cuts to Medicaid, slashed federal funding for medical research, and eliminated the agency overseeing patient safety.

Dolly Parton donated substantial relief funds to those in her Tennessee Appalachian region whose property and lives were shattered by natural disasters. The Trump administration has undermined, delayed, and politicized disaster relief.

Dolly Parton had empathy toward the homeless and was known to give the “shawl off her back” to those in need. Donald Trump criminalizes the homeless and sent thousands of National Guard troops to rid DC of its homeless population.

Dolly Parton empathized with the plight of migrant workers. She loved John Steinbeck’s famous book The Grapes of Wrath and covered Woody Guthrie’s song “Deportee.” Trump demonizes hardworking immigrants as rapists and criminals and has unleashed an army of violent masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to terrorize our neighbors and communities.

I don’t have to agree with everything Dolly Parton did or didn’t do over the decades to recognize that she was a generous soul. She never forgot where she came from and acted on her religious beliefs of “Love your Neighbor” and “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Donald Trump hoards his riches and uses the power of the presidency to enrich himself, his family, and oligarch cronies to the tune of billions.

The best way to honor Dolly Parton’s legacy is to counter Trump’s cruel inhumanity with generosity, kindness, compassion, respect, and unity. And while we are celebrating her life, sit back with family and friends (as I have done) and watch, or rewatch, 9-5. You will laugh, cry, and applaud!

These days, many of the things you feel you might have to do in order to get ahead are things that make you completely hated and reviled.

The post Brad Throws Down appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The latest casualty of Pete Hegseth’s disastrous tenure as Secretary of “War” is Dan Driscoll, who resigned Monday as Secretary of the Army after repeatedly clashing with the Heg.

Driscoll isn’t a liberal in lion’s clothing. He’s an old friend of JD Vance from Yale Law days. He resigned because of his concerns that Hegseth is damaging the Army’s efforts to modernize and adapt to the 21st century battlefield environment — where drone warfare is becoming increasingly important — by firing or pushing out leaders spearheading those efforts.

A defense official in Europe told CNN that even though Hegseth talks about technology reform, he’s focusing instead on “muscles, dudes in dresses, testosterone.”

Hegseth’s tenure has been disastrous from the moment he walked into the Pentagon. Even if Trump were capable of hearing sound advice, Hegseth hasn’t come close to giving it to him. Instead, he’s been pursuing grievances about DEI, promoting testosterone, and denigrating or firing women and Black officers.

The Army now has no Senate-confirmed secretary or chief of staff (George’s replacement, General Christopher LaNeve, so far doesn’t have the votes to be confirmed).

The Iran war, meanwhile, is requiring the ongoing deployment of 19 warships, air-defense units, fighter squadrons and paratroopers across the region — straining service members and their families and creating a maintenance backlog that could take years to unwind, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The Washington Post reports that multiple senior military leaders — those still left, that is — have warned Hegseth that the United States cannot indefinitely extend military operations against Iran. Even the chief of naval operations, Admiral Daryl Caudle (who campaigned for the job by signaling agreement with Hegseth’s culture-war obsessions), told Hegseth that the Navy cannot “sustain its current level of support for the Iran conflict because there is no anticipated end date.”

Hegseth’s response? He castigated the media for revealing classified information.

I’ve known many other defense secretaries, starting with Cap Weinberger, who served as defense secretary under Reagan. I can say without fear of contradiction that Pete Hegseth is the stupidest and least qualified of them all.

Hegseth’s incompetence and determination to suck up to Trump helped launch the war against Iran in the first place.

Among the regime’s senior officials, Hegseth was the only one who supported Trump’s fantasies of a quick victory. Marco Rubio was against the war as was JD Vance; even then–Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Trump that a war with Iran was not winnable.

Since then, Hegseth has lied his way through more than six months of Pentagon and Iran war mayhem.

At a press briefing in March, Hegseth complained about a CNN report that the Trump administration had underestimated Iran’s ability to disrupt global oil traffic by closing the Strait of Hormuz. “Patently ridiculous,” Hegseth told reporters, adding — even as the strait’s blockage was proving to be Iran’s most powerful leverage in the war — we “don’t need to worry about it.” It was a false and insulting claim to an American public that deserved to know what the Trump regime was planning to do about soaring prices at the gas pump, directly due to that blockage.

He also denied that the U.S. bombed the school where some 175 children were killed — a claim belied by mounting evidence that the U.S. did bomb the school. Hegseth’s further insistence that the U.S. “never targets civilians” was refuted by the U.S. military’s killing of over 200 people on small boats in the Caribbean without evidence they were “narcoterrorists” rather than civilians.

Hegseth then lied about the severity of Iranian attacks on U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf that disrupted logistical support for American forces, leading to the deprivations suffered by the crew of the aircraft carrier the USS Abraham Lincoln.

Hegseth evidently believes that his job is to cheerlead and defend Trump with absurd claims like “We didn’t start this war, but under President Trump we’re finishing it” and “America is winning decisively, devastatingly, and without mercy” and “we will show no quarter for our enemies.” (“No quarter” means kill everyone and take no prisoners, which is a war crime.)

In the days leading up to the U.S. attack on Iran, Hegseth spent his time criticizing “wokeness” at American universities and forcing Scouting America to abandon programs aimed at promoting diversity.

Last year, he didn’t just mistakenly share the military’s plans with the editor of The Atlantic; we now know he shared them with a second Signal group, including his wife, brother, and personal lawyer.

John Ullyot, who resigned as Pentagon spokesman, said Hegseth had brought “total chaos” to the Pentagon and that the Pentagon “is in disarray under Hegseth’s leadership.”

Hegseth dismisses war crimes, pooh-poohs the rules of engagement, and projects unequivocal belligerence at a time when the United States is rapidly losing whatever moral standing it once had in the world.

Pete Hegseth is the most incompetent person in the Trump regime — with the exception of Trump himself — and a clear and present danger to the security of the United States and the world. If Trump won’t fire him, Democrats should impeach him when (hopefully) they take over the House next January, and two-thirds of the Senate should convict him.

A quarter-century has nearly passed since the terrorist attack that killed almost 3,000 people in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. During the first seven years after that mass atrocity, Pentagon spending doubled. The aftermath of 9/11 was also a huge boost for “the intelligence community.” Despite—and because of—their failure to prevent the carnage on that day, the CIA and the National Security Agency as well as 14 smaller spy agencies boomed with enormous jolts of funds.

Along the way, some line items paid for torture that persisted during the George W. Bush presidency under the euphemism of “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

The most publicized location was Guantánamo on the island of Cuba. There, “the US opened the offshore detention facility in an attempt to evade the rule of law,” the London-based organization Freedom From Torture reports. “In the name of the US's ‘War on Terror,’ people deemed by the US to be ‘enemy combatants’ were detained at the facility. Many were tortured and denied basic human rights and due process… Since the first detainees arrived in 2002, Guantánamo Bay has imprisoned 780 men and boys from 48 countries…. Yet only 16 detainees have ever been convicted of a crime—just 2 percent.”

Despite public pressure, Bush vetoed a version of the Intelligence Authorization Act in March 2008 that would have required CIA interrogators to adhere to Army Field Manual regulations. As soon as Barack Obama became president, he issued an executive order rescinding the free hand for the CIA director on interrogations that Bush had reaffirmed in a July 2007 order. Obama’s directive removed the CIA’s detention power and required the agency to follow Army Field Manual rules.

Yet five and a half years went by before President Obama acknowledged, in his notable words, “We tortured some folks.” He told a news conference: “When we engaged in some of these enhanced interrogation techniques, techniques that I believe and I think any fair-minded person would believe were torture, we crossed a line.”

The acknowledgement came four months before the long-awaited release of a report in December 2014 by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. While heavily redacted, it was a political indictment of torture. “CIA personnel, aided by two outside contractors, decided to initiate a program of indefinite secret detention and the use of brutal interrogation techniques in violation of US law, treaty obligations, and our values,” wrote the committee’s chair, Senator Dianne Feinstein. Among the report’s conclusions:

• “The CIA's justification for the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness.”
• “The interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.”
• “The CIA has actively avoided or impeded congressional oversight of the program.”
• “Two contract psychologists devised the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques and played a central role in the operation, assessments, and management of the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program.”

Months later, the New England Journal of Medicine summed up aspects of the Senate committee’s findings: “Medical professionals, primarily private contractors, filled four basic roles at the black sites: clearing terrorist suspects as ‘medically fit’ for torture; monitoring torture to prevent death and treat injuries; developing novel torture methods; and actually torturing prisoners. All these actions were taken only after CIA and US Department of Justice attorneys assured the medical professionals that they had immunity from prosecution and would not be held legally responsible for violating US and international law against torture as long as they used the techniques approved in legal memos (since withdrawn) written to justify their actions. Lawyers agreed to provide immunity assurances that specific torture techniques were legal ‘enhanced interrogation’ methods only if the physicians assured them that they would be present to prevent permanent harm to prisoners. The CIA opened more than a dozen black sites around the world after 9/11, in which at least 117 prisoners were held; 39 of these prisoners were subjected to one or more torture techniques.”

At least hundreds more “suspected terrorists” who’d been captured by the US were turned over to ruthless governments. “If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan,” former CIA officer Bob Baer said. “If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear—never to see them again—you send them to Egypt.”

When shocking photos emerged of vile mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, a media uproar caused an official probe by two-star Army General Anthonio Taguba. His report, issued in 2004, concluded that “numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees." Taguba’s candor got him pushed into early retirement. In the preface to a Physicians for Human Rights report in 2008, he addressed the matter of accountability by flatly declaring that ”the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture.”

But in spite of the voluminous evidence that documented high-level approval of methodical torture, not a single US official went to prison as a result. Foreshadowing such impunity was a comment by Obama nine days before he became president in January 2009. On national television, he voiced “a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” The words that came next were even more telling: “And part of my job is to make sure that for example at the CIA, you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering.”

The lack of accountability set a template. As president, Obama continued with his theme of governance without a rear-view mirror. On October 25, 2012, he tweeted: "We don't look backwards, we look forward." Career outlooks were bright for top CIA officials who’d been implicated in Bush-era torture.

“Much has been made of President Trump’s disregard for rules and norms—boundaries delineated by ethics and morality if not written laws themselves,” Adam Serwer wrote in March 2018. “But transgressing laws, rules, and norms isn’t the only way to destroy them. Another way is simply not to enforce them. In that regard, the 44th president, Barack Obama, bears a measure of responsibility for the recklessness of his successor, in particular Trump’s decision to appoint Gina Haspel, the Central Intelligence Agency’s deputy director, to run the agency itself.”

Haspel became the CIA’s director in 2018 when confirmed by the Senate despite her key role in the CIA’s torture program. Citing declassified documents, the National Security Archive at George Washington University explained that she “personally supervised the torture of a CIA detainee in 2002 leading to at least three waterboard sessions, subsequently drafted the cable that ordered destruction of the videotape evidence of torture, and served as a senior CIA official while the Agency was lying to itself, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the Congress, and the public about the effectiveness of torture in eliciting useful intelligence.”

The Center for Victims of Torture points out that “architects and operators of the CIA torture program have risen to prestigious positions in government, the private sector, the federal judiciary and academia.” And so it was after president-elect Joe Biden nominated Avril Haines to be Director of National Intelligence. As Obama’s CIA deputy director, she had worked to impede the Senate committee investigation into torture.

“In 2015, Haines had to decide what to do about CIA officials who had hacked into the computers of Senate intelligence committee staffers who had been compiling a comprehensive report on torture, and even drummed up spurious criminal cases against them,” the Guardian reported. “She overrode the advice of the CIA inspector general and recommended against disciplinary action.” The lead researcher for that committee, Daniel J. Jones (who was portrayed by Adam Driver in the movie “The Report”), warned against Biden going through with the nomination, saying: “This is about the continuing cover-up of the torture program, the long legacy of that. And I wish I could say Haines wasn’t a part of that, but she was.” The Senate confirmed Haines to the DNI job with an 84-10 vote. She remained in the position throughout Biden’s presidency.

Three months ago, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace announced that its next president will be Avril Haines. The organization declared: “One of the most respected national security leaders of her generation, Avril brings a deep commitment to public service and the values at the heart of our mission.”

Today’s data center proponents argue such projects bring needed jobs and a boost to local economies. Rural America has heard confident pitches like these before. Nearly 40 years ago, concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, arrived one barn at a time with bold promises of jobs and a county tax base.

By the time neighbors organized, right-to-farm laws and state preemption had severed the ground from under them. All the while, manure lagoons leached into the groundwater and fouled the air, shortening the life expectancy of the farmworkers and downwind neighbors.

Organizing still won real things, to be sure, from North Carolina’s CAFO moratorium in 1997 to Chris Jones’s clean-water campaign for agriculture secretary in Iowa today. When it comes to CAFOs, the lessons came late, but in the age of artificial intelligence, those same lessons can give rural communities a leg up.

While CAFOs crept into rural America, data centers are arriving as a land rush. This speed is both terrifying and an advantage. Texas alone has some 248 proposed data center projects, even though 56% of Texans tell pollsters they do not want one nearby, which means that, unlike the CAFO era, rural communities are asking questions before the statutes are locked in. And rural people need their voices to be heard. According to Pew Research Center, of the more than 1,500 data centers proposed or under development, 67% are in rural communities.

Everything CAFO country learned, it learned too late, after the wells were ruined, after the smell lowered adjacent property values and health outcomes, after the statutes were written.

The ultimate question will be: Do rural residents have the power to say no?

The answer is playing out across the country. In November 2025, 800 people filled a board meeting to oppose a billion-dollar Meta-linked project in Howell Township, Michigan, and the developer withdrew. In February, the city council of San Marcos, Texas, rejected a $1.5 billion campus after nearly nine hours of public comment, then became the first Texas city to ban data centers through its zoning code. Fort Worth, Texas, is drafting data center zoning rules of its own.

Nationally, the poorest census tracts resist data center projects at five times the rate of the richest. Projects that meet resistance are cancelled at several times the rate of those that do not. One tracker counts tens of billions of dollars in blocked or delayed projects.

Opposition to data center projects is one of the few issues that many Americans agree on. A June Reuters/Ipsos poll found that only 14% of respondents would support a data center being built in their community. On July 18, organizers held 142 protests across 42 states in the first nationwide protest against data centers and artificial intelligence.

Data center hyperscalers are copying the CAFO playbook as best they can. West Virginia has stripped its counties and towns of the power to regulate data centers; similarly, the state’s right-to-farm law prohibits local governments from bringing civil or criminal action against an agricultural operation as long as it meets state and federal laws, permits, and regulations. When Hill County, Texas, passed the state’s first county moratorium in May, a developer sued for $100 million and the county rescinded within a week, because Texas counties can zone against neither a data center nor a feedlot. Hood County pulled its own moratorium after state Sen. Paul Bettencourt (R-7) asked whether counties even hold that power; the same senator calls the San Marcos ban illegal.

Right-wing organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), behind the pro-CAFO model legislation of right-to-farm laws since the 1990s, likewise appear intent on denying local control in the data center buildout. At its annual meeting in July, ALEC considered a model legislative framework that would undercut local bans and moratoriums and give data centers the “clear authority to secure power… subject only to objective safety and interconnection standards,” as the Center for Media and Democracy reported. The meeting featured speakers from Google and Nvidia, along with a Meta sponsorship.

The outburst of anti-data center sentiment ahead of the midterms has forced political leaders to reckon with the issue of local control. This is where data centers and CAFOs diverge. In June, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who once hailed Texas as “the epicenter of AI development,” called for a ban on AI data centers in rural neighborhoods and a cut to their billion-dollar-a-year tax exemption after facing rare bipartisan pressure. Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law to preserve local control over data centers. Michigan’s candidates for governor are split over the server halls sprouting between Lansing and Detroit. Illinois recently reversed course on its data center policy, reeling in the subsidies it had rolled out in 2019. And in July, New York became the first state in the nation to enact a one-year moratorium.

So, who hasn’t been able to say no? We pulled the locations of CAFOs and data centers in North Carolina and Texas, where the data is easily available, and—yes—got Claude to plot it for us against demographic and county boundaries.

In North Carolina the answer is pretty clear. The state’s 2,482 permitted animal operations cluster in the Black Belt coastal plain where the epidemiologist Steve Wing found hog lagoons a generation ago. Weighted by the number of permits each county holds, those counties are 46% people of color, against 34% across North Carolina’s hundred counties as a whole. Duplin County alone holds over 500 permits and 2.2 million allowable hogs in a county where almost half the population of 49,000 are people of color.

Data centers are the inverse of CAFOs. The state’s data centers sit in counties whiter than the state average, in the Piedmont towns that lost their historic furniture and textile businesses as well as in wealthy Wake and Mecklenburg counties (respectively home to large cities Raleigh and Charlotte). Two of the state’s suspended projects are in adjacent Edgecombe County and Pitt County, where residents informed their resistance based on their history fighting CAFOs.

In 1995, residents of predominantly Black Kingsboro, in Edgecombe County, successfully blocked a major meatpacker from building a 300-acre slaughterhouse in their backyard through efforts to rezone land. When a $19 billion, 400-acre data center came knocking three decades later, residents opposed it en masse. The developer Energy Storage Solutions withdrew its proposal in July and by August, Edgecombe County enacted a two-year moratorium.

In Texas the pattern is a little more complex. Rural Texas tends to be whiter than a state average balanced by majority-Hispanic cities. Yet the feedlot Panhandle is majority-Hispanic meatpacking country, with counties like Deaf Smith and Castro where the workforce lives beside the feedyards it staffs. The rural counties now hosting data centers likewise run less white than rural Texas as a whole.

Other outlier cases in the US: The world’s densest data center cluster is outside Washington, DC, in Loudoun County, Virginia, among the wealthiest counties in America, while xAI’s Colossus runs beside Boxtown, a majority-Black neighborhood in Memphis.

The patterning and the possibilities for asking questions about data centers are very different. CAFOs were put next to the disempowered by history. In most of the counties with proposed data centers, there’s no local billionaire hyperscaler whose family has been on the land for generations to champion the project, with the historical ability to make people of color, in particular, suffer the consequences in the ways that CAFOs had.

In contrast, data centers are being aimed by site selectors in a hurry, looking for cheap land and water, cheap power and thin resistance. But they don’t have their local defenders and hands on the levers of power in the ways that CAFOs do.

At this intersection of race and class is the oldest American proxy for who can, and who can’t, say no.

Here are the questions that constituents should ask their local governments about new data center projects:

1. About Water

Does the permit say the cooling loop is closed, with maximum gallons per day, public metering, and penalties? We have yet to find a binding closed-loop commitment in any permit. Who owns the aquifer data, and who pays for the test wells?

2. About Power

Electric cooperatives, unique to rural America, have long been a way for farmers and rural people to claw back some power over their destiny. These cooperatives were established with a “duty to serve” the areas that investor-owned utilities refused to serve because the load factors were low. By pooling their demand, cooperatives could connect their members to a grid and lower their prices.

In the age of artificial intelligence, public utilities—rural electric cooperatives included—face a dilemma. The more a cooperative buys from its wholesale supplier, the greater its load factor and therefore the lower the cooperative’s average cost of power. When a data center project fields new requests for power, it can be life changing. Having a client with a reliable 24-7 demand for electricity means a predictable increase in the co-op’s load factor. All that new volume could, in principle, make every member’s bill cheaper and bring new system upgrades. It’s tempting to shut up and take the deal.

But as with any gift horse, every farmer knows to check the teeth. Data centers often have greater access to capital than their would-be electric cooperative providers, and their rise as buyers means a shift in the balance of bargaining power in the marketplace. Will attitudes toward universal service obligations remain in place? Will consumer protection policies evolve? And which regulator should be responsible for developing and overseeing new industry guardrails?

Who pays for the substation and the lines? Port Washington, Wisconsin found itself on the hook for a $90 million substation it did not need. Is there a curtailment agreement cutting the data center first in a grid emergency, as Texas now requires of loads over 75 megawatts? Are residential rates fenced off in a separate rate class? And for rural electric cooperative members: Does the all-requirements wholesale contract cap the solar and wind members may build, and would a giant new load deepen that dependence? Why do big loads get lower per kilowatt prices as they increase their usage while conservation earns nothing? Will data centers inherit the same pricing structure?

3. About Money

What does each abatement cost per permanent job, when a hyperscale facility employs a few dozen people? Will advance payments be required to pay for infrastructure upgrades? Will they accept provisions for interruptible power during times of peak demand to prevent rolling blackouts? Are there clawbacks? Is there a decommissioning bond for the day the hardware is scrap, as we now demand of wind farms?

4. About Democracy

Did any utility or government official sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA)? Can our county or township legally say no, and if not, which law took the power and who voted for it?

Everything CAFO country learned, it learned too late, after the wells were ruined, after the smell lowered adjacent property values and health outcomes, after the statutes were written. Data centers are arriving early enough that the questions can still be asked in time, even as the hyperscalers find friends in Washington DC, and in statehouses around the country, who’ll say yes to them so that local communities won’t be able to say no.

If we want to stop Amazon, Meta, and OpenAI riding roughshod over our communities and land, it will be because average people, urban and rural alike, will have joined forces to stop the trillionaire class from building their wealth off our backs.

For many, Labor Day signifies a time of transition, the end of summer and the return to business as usual, whether it be school or work. But the holiday weekend was born out of a more radical past, and at a place charged with a history of protest and free expression.

On September 5, 1882, more than 10,000 workers sacrificed a day’s pay to march on Union Square and demand an eight-hour workday and an end to child labor. The success of their protest paved the way for Labor Day to become a federal holiday in 1894.

Initially a gated garden enclave for New York’s wealthiest, architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux redesigned Union Square in 1872 as an open plaza for public assembly and patriotic demonstration.

By the beginning of the 20th century, Union Square became the epicenter of radical American politics, a setting for protests by anarchists and socialists. Noted activist Emma Goldman frequently used the public plaza to challenge government censorship and advocate for women’s reproductive rights and free speech.

Fenced in by Surveillance Technology

Today, however, Union Square has been fenced in by a barricade of a different sort. Ringing the plaza is a spiky array of cameras, installed on streetlights by a New York Police Department seeking to surveil New Yorkers and anyone else who happens by the square.

The cameras include automatic license-plate recognition technology, which captures data on every car that passes the square down Broadway or across busy 14th Street.

Whether you’re driving to the grocery store for a quart of milk or attending a local No Kings protest, odds are that law enforcement has recorded, processed, and archived your activities for future reference.

Such setups are so ubiquitous to cities and major intersections that they’re easy to dismiss as normal features of a busy streetscape. But that’s changing.

The company that produces many of these surveillance cameras—Flock Group Inc.—has become a focus of concern among activists, advocates, and people of every political stripe who don’t want law enforcement documenting and archiving their every activity.

Spying on the Haystack

But Flock is not alone. Surveilling everyday Americans is now a multibillion-dollar business that’s growing fast.

Flock has struck license-plate reading camera contracts with 7,000 law-enforcement agencies, accounting for 40% of all such departments nationwide. There are more than 130,000 of these cameras deployed across 49 states, likely at a busy intersection or gathering point near you.

Whether you’re driving to the grocery store for a quart of milk or attending a local No Kings protest, odds are that law enforcement has recorded, processed, and archived your activities for future reference.

The philosophy behind such mass surveillance is that authorities need to capture data on everyone’s movements to identify those few who step out of line. It’s as though you need to know the habits of every blade of grass in the haystack to cull out the one wayward needle.

If that’s not disturbing enough, there have also been extensive reports of abuse, including local police officers deploying department surveillance technology to stalk romantic interests—including strangers—while innocent people have been thrown in jail based on a misread license plate or an inaccurate biometric scan.

“The constant and ongoing surveillance of people in public places raises serious First and Fourth Amendment concerns,” says Jenna Ruddock, Free Press’ advocacy director. “Even decisions about where to install these cameras map onto well-established practices of racist policing, aside from the fact that facial-detection technology has an alarming track record when attempting to identify people of color.”

Mass Surveillance Is Big Business

Still, more major tech companies are getting in on the expanding surveillance business. Powerful artificial intelligence companies are marketing AI-enabled video analytics with facial-recognition capacities for real-time threat detection (think Minority Report).

And while Meta doesn’t directly market its Ray-Ban smart glasses to law enforcement, local police departments and immigration agencies have been buying them in bulk via Amazon.

For its part, Amazon is chasing multimillion-dollar contracts to provide law enforcement with cloud infrastructure for data storage, analytics, and biometric systems, including more than $250 million from the Department of Homeland Security to host many of the databases and systems used to track, monitor, and deport immigrants.

Though he once promised that he wouldn’t allow anyone to use company technology to harm people, Google CEO Sundar Pichai is now seeking to profit from mass surveillance. The company is already doing business with Immigration and Customs Enforcement while vying with Amazon and other tech giants for government cloud-computing contracts. Google is also under contract to provide the tech at the center of federal projects to upgrade the “virtual wall” that surveils US borders.

Lost to the Surveillance State

As more cameras sprout up in more locations, the movement to oppose such government spying is spreading. Dozens of cities across the country have cut ties with Flock over their residents’ data-privacy concerns. People have flocked to public hearings and city council meetings to pressure local elected officials to turn the cameras off. Some have taken matters into their own hands, covering nearby Flock and other surveillance cameras with trash bags—or even cutting down camera-attached light poles with electric saws.

DeFlock, an anti-surveillance activist group, has been mapping locations of Flock and other cameras nationwide. (This author used this tool to identify the many non-Flock surveillance cameras surrounding Union Square).

In August, privacy advocates organized the DeFlock National Week of Action, which featured a series of protests, town halls, and informational events to oppose automated license-plate readers and other mass surveillance technology.

The pushback against local surveillance cameras is occurring alongside the fast-spreading movement to stop the unchecked construction of data centers. There’s a common culprit in both popular uprisings: the unholy alliances struck between Big Tech and government. Others are rightfully suspicious of the billionaire class pushing the rapid, reckless development of advanced AI and surveillance tools without first seeking the consent of surrounding communities.

In Union Square on a recent Monday, I asked local busker Lawrence Kidwell whether he knew what all of the nearby police cameras were about. “The NYPD just wants to listen to my music,” he said.

Perhaps. But the cameras are also in place to discourage other forms of expression and muzzle voices of dissent. Something that Union Square has long welcomed may become lost to the new deprivations of the surveillance state.

This piece was originally published at Pressing Issues.

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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:

• For 24 hours after Army Secretary Dan Driscoll told Trump the US has lost to Iran and a US bomb attack killed at least 5 guests at a wedding party and wounded at least 67, Trump’s familiar playbook for his war for/with Israel was on full display. The president went from boasting that Iran was defeated militarily, a “failed nation,” to threatening an apocalyptic attack that would leave “very little left” of the country. Then he was back to trolling, asking his followers whether the United States should name the Strait of Hormuz the “Trump Strait.” Foreign policy experts say he has run out of options.

• Citing an “unprecedented lowering of standards,” a career ICE official who stepped forward as a whistleblower said that “systemic breakdowns” had allowed applicants to receive job offers before they had passed basic fingerprint, identity or credit checks in a preliminary vetting process. Political appointees had unjustly skirted background investigations and received national security eligibility.

• Global heating will reach at least 1.8C under even the most optimistic future, well beyond the Paris agreement goal of 1.5C, according to a UN report that warns every fraction of temperature rise intensifies destructive extreme weather, glacier melt, ecosystem loss, and island and coastal city submersion. The report by the Nairobi-based UN Environment Programme confirmed overshooting the 1.5C goal inscribed in the landmark Paris agreement of 2015 was now “unavoidable” and, despite some progress in addressing the human-caused climate crisis driven by burning fossil fuels, likely in the next few years. It said: “There are no good outcomes above 1.5C”.

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Three months ago, the Office of Management and Budget proposed new rule changes that would greatly politicize federal grant making, with the potential to restrict, stall, and even terminate grants to nonprofits, state and local governments, universities, and community organizations across the country at will.

Just this week, the House passed a stopgap funding bill to temporarily block the finalization of these rule changes, with bipartisan support. If signed by the president it means that federal agencies will now continue to be funded through December 11, and no changes to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) rules will take place before then.

While this funding patch is good news, come December we'll need much more than a temporary fix to address the dangerous impact these changes will ultimately have. If these rules are finalized, $1 trillion in annual discretionary grants will soon be subject to approval by a group of presidential appointees, based on alignment with the president’s extreme and erratic policy priorities. Shifting this crucial decision-making power to a small set of political appointees is highly concerning for tens of thousands of nonprofit organizations addressing public health, housing, transportation, scientific research, and more. For the survivors we serve, the consequences could be devastating.

I lead Safe Horizon, the nation’s largest victim service organization, serving 250,000 survivors of violence, abuse, and exploitation each year. We offer domestic violence shelters, criminal justice programs, case management, mental healthcare, support for unhoused youth, and expert legal advice and representation. This is lifesaving work.

A cancelled grant may mean that a woman is forced to leave emergency shelter and return to her unsafe home, or that a young person may lose their supportive housing and find themselves sleeping on trains.

Like so many of our peers in the human services sector, we rely on federal funding—through direct federal grants as well as through state and city pass-through funding—to support our clients. The proposed rule changes threaten the safety and health of our clients by adding questionable legal interpretations and ideological differences as criteria for granting funds.

Domestic violence, child abuse, homelessness, and immigration are all issues that cut across gender, race, religion, and identity. We serve ALL survivors who come through our doors, including people with marginalized identities who are disproportionately impacted by violence and abuse. Last year alone, 901 survivors of domestic violence and their 1,098 children found safety through our shelters, and we answered 93,935 crisis calls through our 24-hour hotline.

Under the new rules, federal agencies will be empowered to terminate or pause grants based on changes in agency priorities or the “national interest,” meaning grants could be cancelled at any time for any reason, disrupting critical services to those who need them. These changes will directly impact our clients’ safety. A cancelled grant may mean that a woman is forced to leave emergency shelter and return to her unsafe home, or that a young person may lose their supportive housing and find themselves sleeping on trains. A survivor of sexual violence may have no one to turn to when the hotline number stops picking up in times of crisis. Nonprofit domestic violence shelter providers across the country could be forced to pause or reduce their services, and even close their doors, leaving survivors more vulnerable to violence and uncertainty.

Beyond ideological interpretations, procedural rule changes will weaken the integrity and stability of the federal grant-making process itself. Currently, grants are reviewed by peer subject matter experts. This means independent professionals make informed decisions about which programs are most qualified to receive funding. Giving political appointees who lack this expertise the power to approve or deny grants makes grant making political, essentially reducing it to a tool of the president, instead of prioritizing the real needs of a community.

These proposed changes are alarming, and yet, we are no longer surprised. There is a pattern of manipulation at play: Just this summer The New York Times reported that the Trump administration admitted that they had canceled more than $7.5 billion in federal grants for clean energy projects, based solely on their location in Democrat-led states. We are already witnessing the misuse of congressionally approved funding for political targeting—these rule changes would hasten that process.

After OMB published their proposed rule changes on May 29, a 45-day public comment period opened during which nearly 500,000 comments were submitted by nonprofit organizations, prosecutors, law enforcement, academic institutions, and more. The majority of these comments vehemently opposed the changes.

In our work, we follow a client-centered practice model where we trust that clients are the experts of their own lives. We provide care, guidance, and options toward safety and healing, but ultimately, we listen to survivors first. I hope that after this temporary funding fix, the Senate, OMB, and this administration can follow suit, and that they won't ignore half a million voices of service leaders advocating that these proposed rule changes be withdrawn. Safety is a human right, and the well-being of our communities depends on it.

I think of Wendell Berry every time I use my chainsaw.

Berry, the novelist, essayist, and unofficial poet laureate of the sustainable agriculture movement, died this week at 92. I met him several times through my association with The Land Institute and visited their Kentucky home to write a profile of his wife, Tanya. But my main connection to Berry is through his writing.

Back to my chainsaw. I lived in cities most of my life, including when I was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. No matter what the subject of a course, I always found ways to bring Berry’s words into my lectures, both to give students examples of elegant writing and to prod them to think about what we take for granted in high-energy and high-technology societies.

Any hope for a decent future requires us to understand we don’t face discrete problems to be solved but rather a predicament to be confronted.

Berry called out the cruelty of the masters of the modern world, especially the ways they denigrated his neighbors and devalued the land in rural America. But he understood that we all are implicated in the degradation of the ecosystems on which our own lives depend. He connected the real costs of our many labor-saving and pleasure-seeking devices to that degradation. Yes, there are corrupt individuals and corrupting social systems to hold accountable, but part of the problem is our species’ acquisitiveness—what Berry’s mentor Wallace Stegner called “the things that once possessed could not be done without.”

In a 1989 essay, Berry didn’t exempt himself from this critique of the destructive habits that draw down the ecological capital of the planet.

“I still fly on airplanes, which have nothing to recommend them but speed; they are inconvenient, uncomfortable, undependable, ugly, stinky, and scary,” he wrote. “I still cut my wood with a chainsaw, which has nothing to recommend it but speed, and has all the faults of an airplane, except it does not fly.”

We need to live with less, which is surprisingly hard.

“We are going to have to learn to give up things that we have learned (in only a few years, after all) to ‘need,’” Berry wrote. “I am not an optimist; I am afraid that I won’t live long enough to escape my bondage to the machines.”

But Berry doesn’t counsel despair: “I knew a man who, in the age of chainsaws, went right on cutting his wood with a handsaw and an axe. He was a healthier and a saner man than I am. I shall let his memory trouble my thoughts.”

I live in a rural area today and cut firewood with a battery-powered chainsaw to help heat our home. I don’t kid myself that I’m environmentally friendly because my machine doesn’t run on gasoline; the mining and manufacturing that created that chainsaw are ecologically expensive. I am part of the problem, like almost everyone else.

I’ve learned that even with a chainsaw, cutting a winter’s worth of wood is hard work. (OK, full disclosure: I also have an electric log-splitter that a friend gave me and now feels essential.) But as I cut and split and stack, I think about the extra effort required by the handsaw and axe of Berry’s acquaintance. And I also think about something else I regularly read to students, his poem “How to Be a Poet,” which I told students could be titled “How to Be a Human Being.” Berry wrote about how modern life is not only ecologically destructive but also traps us in a manufactured world, cut off from other living things. He suggested we slow down and learn to be quiet, to observe: “Stay away from anything/that obscures the place it is in.”

Every time I read the next lines from that poem, I felt myself on the edge of tears: “There are no unsacred places;/there are only sacred places/and desecrated places.”

No one knows how to get there, including Wendell Berry. But his words help me face reality and live in some kind of equanimity.

We have desecrated most of the world to make possible all the things we imagine that we need, including my chainsaw and log-splitter. We’ve built a world in which our material comfort obscures the cost of that comfort. I agree with Berry: Either every part of Earth is sacred or none of it is, and the modern world treats the entire planet as either a mine or a dump.

Back to bad people and bad systems. Yes, we can point to the actions of greedy corporate executives and self-serving politicians, and to capitalism’s perverse practices that glorify consumption. Yes, the affluent do the most damage. But most of the people around the world now embrace and chase that affluence, and we shouldn’t turn away from our own role in Earth-destruction. We won’t solve the problem by pointing fingers at others. In fact, any hope for a decent future requires us to understand we don’t face discrete problems to be solved but rather a predicament to be confronted. We’ve created ways of living that can’t be sustained unless we embrace what my coauthor Wes Jackson (cofounder of The Land Institute and a longtime friend of Berry) and I call the policy of “fewer and less”: fewer people consuming less energy and stuff.

No one knows how to get there, including Wendell Berry. But his words help me face reality and live in some kind of equanimity.

One of my fondest memories from 26 years of college teaching is standing in front of students, encouraging them to appreciate the elegance of Berry’s writing and face the fear it can bring up. I will let that memory trouble my thoughts and comfort me.

On Tuesday, the US House of Representatives approved a resolution sponsored by Republican Study Committee Member Jeff Crank (R-Colo.) to condemn socialism “in all its forms.” Eight Democrats voted with Republicans in favor of this red scare tactic ahead of the November midterm elections, which accentuates the Democrat’s divide.

The ideological divide between the establishment and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is profound, and the resolution condemning socialism is indeed part of a concerted strategy on the part of the GOP to wreak further havoc on the Democratic Party.

It is also important to take note of the fact that the resolution does not merely condemn socialism but opposes the implementation of all socialist policies in the United States. In essence, it denounces all policies seeking improvements in collective welfare.

Policies seeking improvements in collective welfare cover a wide range of objectives, like addressing massive economic inequalities, offering all people access to high-quality healthcare services, providing free public services, supporting individuals who experience various forms of income loss, protecting the environment, and so on. These policies may or may not be part of a strictly socialist agenda, but they are designed to promote economic justice and to enhance social cohesion and social welfare.

The claim that socialism leads inevitably to totalitarianism and tyranny is pure propaganda to scare the ignorant.

Indeed, many European countries have been actively pursuing policies seeking to bring about improvements in collective welfare at least since the end of World War II. The scope of some of these policies has shrunk considerably in the age of predatory capitalism, which is what the GOP anti-socialism resolution stands for, but no political party of any ideological stripe in the rest of the western world espouses the myth of social Darwinism to attack policies seeking to improve collective welfare. In fact, Europe’s far-right parties and movements advocate a strong welfare state and promise more government spending on native-born citizens (while excluding immigrants), especially in light of the ongoing erosion of social programs under neoliberalism.

There are many different types of socialism. For instance, European socialism (otherwise known as social democracy) has nothing to do with communism as the world experienced with the founding of the Soviet Union and bears no resemblance whatsoever to certain authoritarian and self-proclaimed socialist regimes that flourished during the Cold War in certain parts of the non-western world (Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Libya under Muammar Gaddafi, among others). The claim that socialism leads inevitably to totalitarianism and tyranny is pure propaganda to scare the ignorant. Socialist parties have ruled for long periods of time in most northern European countries, with those societies ranking globally at the top of major indexes for economic stability and personal freedoms while experiencing low rates of crime.

The Republican Party is by far the most reactionary party in the western world.

If anything, the argument has been that European socialist parties haven’t been socialistic enough. They pursued policies that improved without a doubt the condition of working-class people by striking a greater balance between capital and labor but did not go far enough with the mission of egalitarianism. DSA itself has been critical of the actual accomplishments of European socialism as it envisions a socioeconomic order based on democratic planning and participation whose sole purpose would be “to meet human needs, rather than to make profits for a few.”

Naturally, the GOP’s anti-socialism resolution paid no attention to such ideological and empirical nuances. It denounced socialism “in all its forms” and, by doing so, signaled its full support for an economic system based on predatory capitalism and a social order that advocates the notion that only the fittest members of society deserve to survive.

Policies geared toward universal healthcare, housing decommodification, strong worker rights and protections, strict financial regulation, environmental protection, and social justice? That’s the road to totalitarianism and tyranny, according to GOP’s anti-socialism resolution.

But there should be nothing surprising about this. The Republican Party is by far the most reactionary party in the western world. Yet, it continues to assert with confidence--and measurable success, no doubt--that its political and ideological positions represent the values and principles of the American people.

It is Trump’s fascism and the system of predatory capitalism that need to be denounced, not socialism.

However, the tide is turning. Americans are not only fed up with rising costs but with the way “democracy” works in their country, as a Pew Research Center poll revealed earlier in the summer. Support for capitalism has rapidly declined, especially among young people. Less than 10 percent of people younger than 30 have a “very positive” view of capitalism, according to a recent CBS/YouGov poll.

The idea propounded by the likes of Milton Friedman and implemented by Ronald Reagan and virtually every other US administration since have created one of the most unequal societies in the world while plutocrats are in control of the political system. US democracy is essentially a sham. But Trump and company have gone even further by advancing a 21st century version of fascism. It is Trump’s fascism and the system of predatory capitalism that need to be denounced, not socialism. In one of the most unequal and brutally unjust societies in the world, policies geared toward the improvement of the collective welfare represent the only realistic and humane alternative. And it appears that more and more Americans are beginning to realize that socialism is the only way out. So much so, one might add, that if Vladimir Mayakovsky were alive today and living in the United States, he might conceivably have said “Socialism is the youth of the world.”

Ever since Hugo Chávez became Venezuela’s president in 1999 and initiated the Bolivarian Revolution, the country has been under siege by the US. The aggression escalated with the kidnapping of its lawful president, part of a larger and accelerating assertion of US imperial power worldwide. The Bolivarian Revolution survived but is in a forced tactical retreat.

For progressives outside Venezuela, this presents a difficult question. How should we respond when a government resisting US domination makes compromises that we may oppose, but does so under conditions largely imposed by Washington?

This article argues that criticism has its place. But it also needs to be contextualized in the larger struggle over Venezuela’s sovereignty and the consequences of weakening a government confronting overwhelming US power.

Chávez: Founding of the Bolivarian Revolution

Tension between solidarity with an actually existing revolutionary process and criticism of its compromises has recurred throughout the Bolivarian Revolution. Among the first on the left to part company with the Chavista government were anarchists, who proclaimed that they were second to none in supporting revolutions against imperialism—until those projects succeeded in achieving state power.

We can all agree that the Rodríguez government faces demands backed by overwhelming US power and unite to oppose the continuing imperialist siege. Those of us living in the imperial core must aim the main blow at the conditions that have necessitated such retreats.

This tendency still affirmed their abstract solidarity with “the people” but not with their chosen representatives. They felt betrayed because the Bolivarian leadership failed to fulfill their expectations to build a workers’ state on a suitably expeditious timetable.

Riding a global commodities boom, the Bolivarian Revolution funded major social welfare programs, prioritizing poor and working people. To finance these measures, over half of Venezuela’s oil exports and 60% of its overall exports were sold to the US. Dependency on oil sales deepened, with oil accounting for over 95% of the country's foreign earnings.

Chávez proclaimed the goal of a socialist future, although he pardoned the unsuccessful 2002 coup plotters in an effort—perhaps mistaken—to encourage a cooperative domestic business class. He pragmatically sought opportunities to negotiate with them.

Maduro: Intensification of the Imperialist Siege

When Chávez died in March 2013, his chosen successor Nicolás Maduro won the snap presidential election. Maduro carried the Bolivarian project forward but under geopolitical conditions markedly different from his predecessor. Venezuela scholar Steve Ellner argues that there were no substantive political differences between the two leaders.

During Chávez’s illness, economic problems had accumulated (e.g., a dysfunctional currency exchange system). Maduro was under intense pressure from the moment he entered office.

Immediately, the US-backed and funded opposition started the guarimbas, demonstrations intended to accomplish by violence what they had failed to achieve at the ballot box. Washington, meanwhile, stepped up its hybrid war. Soon oil prices crashed and the US, under President Barack Obama, initiated ever more punishing sanctions in 2015.

Under these coercive measures, the Venezuelan economy by 2019 was in free fall with inflation over 100,000%. Never had an economy contracted so much in modern peacetime.

At this time of maximum weakness, a faction of the Venezuelan Communist Party developed a strategic disagreement with the governing coalition. It argued that the revolution should confront its class enemies more aggressively and expropriate major corporations, rather than seek a temporary rapprochement.

The nearly overwhelming task of righting the economy was ultimately achieved under Maduro's leadership. After precipitous economic contraction, Venezuela has experienced positive economic growth since 2021. Never had a petro-economy achieved such a turnaround, which included near food sovereignty. To do so, the government relied foremost on the strong Chavista base. It also had to appeal to nationalistic elements among the bourgeoisie and offer them economic incentives to secure their cooperation.

Venezuela was not unique in making such accommodations. During this period, Cuba and Nicaragua—the two other Latin American countries striving for socialism—also introduced market-oriented reforms. With all three countries, the measures were pragmatic adjustments to a world economy dominated by the US and hostile to socialism.

Kidnapping of Maduro

The events leading up to Maduro’s abduction on January 3 involved an ever-intensifying regime-change campaign by the US in concert with its allies: asphyxiating sanctions, stolen assets, diplomatic isolation, cyberattacks, assassination attempts, mercenary invasions, among other measures. The last two months saw a total naval blockade on Venezuelan oil shipments, cutting the country’s economic lifeline.

Regardless, Maduro repeatedly maintained his longstanding willingness to negotiate with Washington. Just two days before his abduction, Maduro outlined a program of accommodation in his annual New Year’s interview with Ignacio Ramonet. This is the program that his successor Delcy Rodríguez has followed, including the amnesty and hydrocarbons laws.

The Bolivarian Revolution persevered. Its accommodations may be understood as tactical responses to unfavorable conditions rather than as a full abandonment of the project.

The fact that Maduro did not waver and the Bolivarian Revolution did not break presented a dilemma for Washington. The US—especially as its aggression against oil-rich Iran was heating up—needed access to Venezuelan oil. Neither country benefited by keeping the oil in the ground.

Yet the US had painted itself into a corner. The Trump administration had demonized Maduro as a narco-trafficker. Even though Maduro was more than willing to negotiate, the US had precluded that option. The kidnapping followed.

Rodríguez: Negotiated Sovereignty

The US invasion of Venezuela on January 3 demonstrated to both the leadership and the Venezuelan grassroots that they were alone—no country came to their defense. Whatever guardrails had existed before on the hegemon were down.

Yet the Bolivarian Revolution did not collapse. The highly polarized nation did not fall into civil unrest between Chavistas and opposition—if anything, it unified. The far-right María Corina Machado did not make her triumphal return to Caracas. Instead, that part of the opposition found itself discredited and in disarray.

In a seamless constitutional transition, Maduro’s vice president was sworn in as president. The Chavista movement united behind Acting President Delcy Rodríguez. Venezuela’s national recovery continues under a negotiated sovereignty where the US now bargains—with the ever-present threat of an even more lethal military action—over matters that should be the sole purview of Venezuelans.

Finding a way forward

The Bolivarian Revolution persevered. Its accommodations may be understood as tactical responses to unfavorable conditions rather than as a full abandonment of the project.

For international solidarity activists, the central question is how to forge a stance that advances the anti-imperialist struggle under these conditions. Those of us who support national sovereignty and self-determination should understand that what Venezuela is suffering relates to our failure to constrain our own imperialists.

Aiming the punch at the target. We can all agree that the Rodríguez government faces demands backed by overwhelming US power and unite to oppose the continuing imperialist siege. Those of us living in the imperial core must aim the main blow at the conditions that have necessitated such retreats.

We can all unite on actions to demand freeing President Maduro and “First Combatant” Cilia Flores from jail in New York City, ending sanctions, and returning stolen assets.

Differences among progressives. A useful distinction can be made between disagreements within the “left camp” and the fundamental conflict with imperialism. This does not mean suppressing differences or assuming that they are unimportant. Rather, it suggests approaching tensions among forces resisting imperialism in ways that seek common ground and avoid turning secondary differences into antagonistic ones.

Contextualizing criticism. Under pressure from Washington, the Rodríguez government deported former Venezuelan diplomat and minister Alex Saab and has established consular relations with Israel. These are among the bitter pills to swallow. Criticism of such actions may be entirely warranted, but should be assessed in light of the extraordinary constraints under which the Rodríguez government is operating.

A related example is Cuba, which is forced to tolerate a US military base and torture center in Guantánamo, has had the indignity of having the US secretary of war and the commander of the US Southern Command visit, and has introduced pro-capitalist economic reforms. Those reforms should be understood as “strategic adaptation” according to an article in Black Agenda Report. While not welcoming these accommodations to the US siege, international solidarity activists still unite with and defend Cuba.

Considering the alternatives. For example, the US and its allies waged wars of aggression and deposed Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in 2003, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad in 2024. There were left critiques of these leaders but, in all instances, there were no viable left alternatives to them; nor were conditions for their people improved by their removal. There is no “third way” in a war.

This suggests that the relevant question is not whether a preferable government can be imagined, but what forces actually stand to replace the existing government. For Venezuela, if not the Rodríguez government, what is the actual alternative?

After 26 years of siege and domestic polarization, the Venezuelan people yearn for peace, reconciliation, and reconstruction—more so than ever after the devastating twin earthquakes on June 24. For those of us abroad, we can only imagine the difficulties of life under sanctions from the US and its allies.

Regional trends. Developments in Venezuela reflect a broader shift in Latin America under the “Donroe Doctrine,” where Trump’s reactionary wave has flooded the former Pink Tide. Venezuela should therefore be understood in the context of this region-wide sea change.

Not since Maduro’s election in 2024 has a leftist won in the region. We have witnessed a succession of far-rightists replace center-left presidents in Latin America. Last year, Nasry Asfura replaced Xiomara Castro in Honduras, José Antonio Kast replaced Gabriel Boric in Chile, and Rodrigo Paz replaced Luis Arce in Bolivia. This year, Abelardo de la Espriella replaced Gustavo Petro in Colombia. Coming up in October is the Brazilian presidential election pitting Flávio Bolsonaro against incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, with Trump actively interfering as he did in the other contests.

In all cases, the incumbents faced considerable criticism from the left. Yet whatever their shortcomings, the alternatives have been, or would be, less desirable.

Conclusion

Venezuela is not an isolated case. How progressives weigh criticism against solidarity, assess governments operating under US pressure, and consider the actual alternatives is increasingly relevant throughout the region.

Remarkably, given the intense pressure from the imperialists, the core Chavista leadership, the Socialist Party (PSUV), the civil-military union, the high courts and legislature, and the communes and grassroots organizations have all remained unified. Preserving that unity is particularly important; Bolivia’s experience of left fragmentation offers a cautionary example.

Our tasks are to educate the broader public about what is happening in Venezuela under extreme duress and to take collective action against the imperialist siege.

Between the Rubio State Department and corporate media, on one hand, and rejection of the Rodríguez government by some on the left, on the other, there is a vast intermediate terrain that needs to have a voice.

Whatever disagreements progressives may have with decisions made in Caracas, those decisions belong ultimately to Venezuelans. Our first responsibility is not to prescribe Venezuela's political course, but to challenge the coercive power our own government exercises over it. The Venezuelans have not told us how to make our revolution; we should do the same for them.

Our tasks are to educate the broader public about what is happening in Venezuela under extreme duress and to take collective action against the imperialist siege. The Bolivarian Revolution has not failed. But the project urgently requires relief.

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:

• Far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos said he is “very ashamed” for supporting Trump after ICE thugs deported him back to the UK. Yiannopoulos called his experience “humiliating and disorienting.” He said he experienced “brutality.” “It was physically degrading, it was frightening,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been frightened like that before … And I was weeping like an old woman for an hour. He reflected on being “a little bit blasé” and “cavalier” about when people shared their traumas. “I wouldn’t wish it on anyone,” Yiannopoulos added.

• German officials blamed Russia for an attempted drone attack last month at Leipzig/Halle Airport, close a Russian consulate and take other measures in response. A drone stacked with military-grade explosives was found Aug. 4 next to a Ukrainian cargo plane at the airport. Security camera footage appeared to show the weapon striking the plane’s wing before falling to the ground without exploding. Later that day, a second drone collided with a cargo plane in flight. Ten days later, a third drone was found with traces of military-grade explosives in a field near the airport. Germany has concluded the attack was plotted by professionals working for the Russian state, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said.

• Pierre Damas Bel, a 20-year-old Haitian student at Wright State University, struggling mentally and emotionally with the shame of being forced to wear an ankle monitor by ICE, said he had been bullied at school and felt “humiliated” by the device. Bel committed suicide by walking into Interstate 70. His family blamed the humiliation brought on by the ankle monitor.

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For nearly three years, foreign ministries in Washington, London, and Brussels have debated arms embargoes on Israel in committee rooms, largely without result. Meanwhile, a much less formal network of ordinary people has been trying to accomplish the same goal from the ground up—one factory gate, one shareholder register, and one pension fund at a time.

Palestine Action, the direct-action network founded in the UK in 2020 by Huda Ammori and Richard Barnard, is built on a simple theory of change: If governments won’t stop arming Israel, activists will go after the companies that do it for them. Its central target has been Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, which supplies the bulk of the drones, munitions, and surveillance equipment used in Gaza and the West Bank.

But the network’s real innovation is how it maps the entire supply chain—not just Elbit’s factories, but the banks that hold its shares, the recruiters that staff it, the cleanroom contractors that service its subsidiaries, and the local landlords who rent it space. Every link has become a pressure point.

How the Network Actually Works

Palestine Action isn’t a single organization so much as a constellation. Its hub-and-spoke structure includes a UK core, plus franchises, affiliates, and offshoots that have adopted its name, its tactics, or both. These affiliates include Unity of Fields, formerly Palestine Action US, and sympathetic cells in Canada, France, and Germany.

A war sustained by a transnational arms and finance network, in other words, is being contested by an equally transnational, but far more improvised, citizen network.

Tactics range widely. Some are the kinds of action that make headlines: blockading factory entrances, occupying rooftops, spray-painting military aircraft. Others are quieter and far more replicable by an average person—researching a company’s supply relationships, showing up to a shareholder meeting, filing a public-records request on a pension fund’s holdings, or simply refusing to bank with an institution that finances the war.

This second track has produced some of the most durable wins. In 2026, for instance, Urbana, Illinois became the first Illinois city to bar its pension investments from the top 100 global arms producers; Burbank, California divested from Caterpillar and Honeywell after a local coalition campaign; and the state of Maryland’s pension fund sold off 85% of its Israeli bond holdings—about $62 million—after more than a year of sustained pressure. None of those campaigns required anyone to climb a fence.

Palestine Action’s campaign against Elbit’s UK operations has been credited with forcing the closure of the company’s London headquarters, the cancellation of Ministry of Defence contracts, and the loss of its UK recruitment partner. Barclays bank—long a target of Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s parallel boycott—stopped holding shares in Elbit in 2024, something campaigners point to as evidence that sustained pressure, even short of full divestment, moves institutional money.

None of this has stopped the war. But it has made doing business with Israel’s arms industry measurably more expensive and more reputationally toxic, which is precisely the mechanism that sanctions and embargoes are supposed to achieve when foreign ministries won’t act.

The Safety Question

In July 2025, the UK government proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organization under the Terrorism Act 2000, making membership or expressed support punishable by up to 14 years in prison. A High Court panel ruled in February 2026 that the ban was disproportionate and unlawful, noting that only a small fraction of the group’s actions met the legal definition of terrorism, and that ordinary criminal law was already available to prosecute any violence. The government appealed, and in June 2026 the Court of Appeal reversed that ruling and upheld the ban. More than 1,600 people have been arrested in the UK simply for expressing support for the group since the proscription took effect, and four activists convicted only of criminal damage at an Elbit factory were sentenced on the basis of a “terrorist connection.”

That is a genuinely severe legal environment, and it is specific to the UK. Direct action involving property damage or blockades carries real prosecutorial risk anywhere, including the United States, where Unity of Fields and similar groups are not proscribed but individual activists can and do face criminal charges for actions like the 2023 blockade of Elbit’s Cambridge, Massachusetts office.

The boycott, divestment, and shareholder-pressure (BDS) track—writing to a pension board, organizing a bank boycott, supporting BDS-endorsed campaigns—carries none of that risk and remains fully legal free speech and civic organizing in the United States and most of Europe. The two tracks get conflated constantly, including by the UK government itself, but they are not the same thing. This kind of conflation is exactly what makes proscription such a blunt instrument: it criminalizes a banner alongside a blockade.

One Person Still Matters

Much of this network’s actual leverage comes from single, unglamorous decisions. Huda Ammori didn’t wait for a government to act; she and a handful of others started a campaign against one company in 2020 that has since reshaped how a much larger movement thinks about supply chains. The Boycat app, the closest thing the BDS movement has to an official target list, exists because someone decided that consumer choice needed better information, not more slogans. A single city council member willing to bring a divestment resolution to a vote in Urbana did something no protest outside a factory could: moved actual pension dollars.

None of that required anyone to risk a UK terrorism charge. It required deciding that a supply chain is not too complicated, or too far away, to trace and interrupt.

A war sustained by a transnational arms and finance network, in other words, is being contested by an equally transnational, but far more improvised, citizen network. The citizen network’s most effective tool so far hasn’t been confrontation, it’s been documentation. Knowing exactly which bank, which pension fund, which subcontractor is implicated—and saying so publicly and persistently—has moved more money than any single blockade. This tactic is the most likely one to still be legal, and successful, in the near future.

Established by Congress in 1984, with legislation signed by Ronald Reagan and funded annually by Congress, the United States Institute of Peace, or USIP, was a well-respected, authoritative, independent, officially nonpartisan, nonprofit organization, until it was eviscerated by President Donald Trump early last year.

Its purpose was to promote conflict prevention and resolution worldwide and to provide analysis, research, and training in diplomacy, mediation, and peace-related activities. In 2011, the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs wrote that USIP “helped to build the conflict management and resolution field, both as an area of study and as an applied science.”

The institute had a staff of 300 professionals; a budget of $55 million; published numerous research reports on peace issues around the world; and trained 65,000 professionals. Although the institute’s extremely useful database was wantonly destroyed, one can see the breadth and depth of its important work by sampling some of its publications here.

The Demise of the US Institute of Peace

Construction of an impressive $153 million building near the State Department was completed in 2011 but confiscated by the Trump administration in March 2025 with the help of the institute’s former security vendor, the FBI, and the DC Metropolitan Police. A few months later, it was renamed the “Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace” and has since become the home for his “Board of Peace.” An account of the events leading to this outcome explains the shameful way in which this was carried out:

The lesson from these two tragedies—the demise of the US Institute of Peace and the likely failure of the Board of Peace—is that voters must, in the future, avoid electing someone to a position of great power who doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.

One month after assuming office for the second time, on February 19, Trump signed an executive order calling for the elimination of USIP. The next day, USIP was contacted by a representative from the newly established “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), set up by Trump under Elon Musk—allegedly to reduce government expenditure, but actually to eliminate institutions that Trump and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 didn’t like. In a virtual meeting a few days later, USIP’s president-CEO and lawyer explained to three DOGE representatives that the institute was an “independent, nonprofit corporation outside the executive branch.”

When, on March 8, USIP’s president learned that DOGE had inquired about the status of the organization’s security arrangements, its lawyer contacted DOGE to explain that unauthorized personnel would only be admitted to the building with a valid court-issued warrant.

On March 14, all Biden-appointed members of USIP’s Board of Directors were fired by Trump. Three ex-officio members—Marco Rubio; Pete Hegseth; and Peter Garvin, president of the National Defense University—remained on the board.

The same day, a representative of DOGE and a State Department official arrived at USIP and requested entry, but were denied. That evening, two DOGE members arrived with FBI agents and a directive signed by Rubio, Hegseth, and Garvin to remove the president, naming a new acting president. They were again denied entry, with the USIP lawyer declaring the directive illegal.

The next day, the lawyer learned that two FBI agents had visited the home of USIP’s security vendor to discover how to gain physical entry to its headquarters; it was later reported that they threatened the vendor by warning that, if he didn’t comply, he would lose all government contracts. The lawyer contacted the FBI agents to inform them that all inquiries about USIP should be directed to him. Subsequently, the FBI also contacted USIP’s chief security officer to discuss the institute’s security procedures and threatened that he was the subject of investigation by the Department of Justice into denied entry.

Later that day, the US attorney for the District of Colombia Criminal Division Chief called the USIP lawyer, requesting access to the headquarters by Rubio and Hegseth to inspect records and books. The lawyer said he would provide access with a written request. The US attorney informed him that there was suspicion that USIP was engaging in criminal behavior. He also said that representatives would be sent to USIP headquarters the next day and that they would criminally investigate anyone who obstructed access.

USIP then suspended its security vendor’s contract, and its chief security officer deactivated the vendor’s staff badges and retrieved all physical keys except a master. But the next day, four security vendor employees arrived at USIP HQ and attempted to enter the building. They were ultimately admitted, but informed by the lawyer that they were trespassing. The chief security officer called 911 and reported them as intruders.

Armed Metropolitan Police officers then arrived at the USIP HQ and escorted the chief security officer, the USIP lawyer, and other staff from the building and turned the building over to DOGE.

Although members of the former Board of Directors contested the takeover in court, citing the agency’s independent status—and a first court ruling ruled in the institute’s favor—a federal court of appeals stayed the lower court’s ruling and, after a short reprieve, the building was returned to DOGE, which then took down USIP’s website, containing years of work.

It was later reported that DOGE’s physical occupation of the building led to thousands of dollars in damage, leaving the facility in disarray and littered with drugs and cockroaches.

The building and USIP’s assets were transferred to the General Services Administration and Office of Management and Budget Director, Russell Vought (who was involved in Project 2025) signed off on the transfer. On December 3, 2025, the State Department had “The Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace” inscribed on the outside of the building.

The Formation of Trump’s Board of Peace

The Board of Peace (BOP) was established to implement Trump’s “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict,” a 20-point plan drawn up by Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff and subsequently negotiated with Israel and Hamas with input from a number of Arab and Muslim countries. The agreement was signed on October 9, 2025 and came into force the next day. It was endorsed by United Nations Security Council Resolution 2803 on November 17, with 13 members of the council in favor and Russia and China abstaining.

The first phase of the plan began before the BOP was formed and involved the initial withdrawal of Israeli troops to agreed-upon deployment lines (although this did not hold and almost daily ceasefire violations ensued). It also involved the return to Israel by Hamas of all living hostages, as well as the remains of those deceased. This was followed by the release by Israel of a large number of Palestinian prisoners, including remains of those deceased. Humanitarian aid was gradually reintroduced by UN agencies and their partners, although needs continue to be extensive and restoration of basic services is far from complete. The Rafah border crossing was also reopened, although sporadically closed again.

On January 15, 2026, Trump announced the formation of a Board of Peace whose charter (drawn up by his administration) named Trump as its chairman for life and gave him extensive unilateral powers over the board. In his usual self-congratulatory style, he wrote on Truth Social, “I can say with certainty that it is the Greatest and Most Prestigious Board ever assembled at any time, any place.” He added that it “would be the most consequential international body in History.”

In the future, the pursuit of international peace and security must be left to the United Nations, which represents the entire world; is backed by the force of international law; and has extensive experience.

Trump invited some 60 countries to join his BOP, including Israel, although no sub-Saharan African country was invited. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu initially refused because invitations had not been coordinated with him and he disapproved of invitations to Türkiye and Qatar. After further discussion with Trump, Israel agreed to join—along with 27 other countries. More than half of those invited, however, declined, concerned that its new charter was an attempt to establish a “Trump-dominated alternative to the United Nations” and could undermine the role of the UN and other multilateral organizations. Countries that agreed were appointed for a three-year term with those wanting lifetime membership required to contribute $1 billion.

It was also announced that Bulgarian Nikolay Mladenov, the former UN special coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, would become director-general of the board and high representative for Gaza. As well, General Jasper Jeffers, was appointed commander of the planned International Stabilization Force.

A nine-member Executive Board was formed with seven who have close ties to Trump. The eighth member is Indian-born Ajay Banga, also a US citizen, who is president of the World Bank Group. Tony Blair is the only non-American.

Amid much fanfare, the BOP was officially launched on January 22, 2026 at the 56th World Economic Forum in Davos with Trump signing its charter in the presence of 19 new members.

After the signing, Jared Kushner made a presentation of plans for a “New Gaza,” using AI-generated slides, showing gleaming skyscrapers, deluxe hotels, and luxury villas lining Gaza’s Mediterranean shoreline, “reserved for coastal tourism.” Entirely new cities with multistory apartment buildings for Palestinians were also shown, as well as schools and hospitals, with sports facilities and parks breaking up industrial complexes, data centers, and advanced manufacturing facilities, as well as a new airport and port.

Kushner’s presentation was in stark contrast to the current reality of Gaza, where 2 million Palestinians live in tents and bombed-out buildings, amid 90,000 tons of rubble, with vastly insufficient food, water, electricity, fuel, healthcare, and medicine. The plans, which seemed more suited for wealthy tourists than for poor Palestinians, apparently had no Palestinian input and were coordinated with an Israeli real estate billionaire (later invited by Kushner to be on the BOP’s Gaza Executive Committee). They also seemed totally out-of-touch with the current or past crowded demographic situation in Gaza and appeared designed to enrich opportunistic developers.

The first and only meeting of the BOP was held on February 19 at the newly named Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, designated as the seat of the board. There have been no further meetings—presumably, because Trump has been consumed by his war with Iran which he initiated nine days later.

At this meeting, nine members (Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, the UAE, Morocco, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, and Kuwait) pledged $7 billion for the reconstruction of Gaza, and Trump announced a $10 billion pledge, although without consulting Congress. FIFA, which also attended, pledged $50 million for football facilities. It is estimated that $70 billion is required to rebuild the territory.

Five members (Indonesia, Morocco, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, and Albania) agreed to provide troops for the temporary International Stabilization Force (ISF), which the Security Council had authorized the BOP to create. It is intended to work with a newly trained and vetted Palestinian police force to oversee the ceasefire; monitor the security environment and borders; decommission weapons; destroy terrorist infrastructure (e.g., tunnels); and protect civilians and humanitarian operations.

Also at this meeting, Egypt and Jordan committed to training the police force. The plan is to deploy 20,000 ISF troops and 12,000 police. However, to date, neither the ISF nor the police force has deployed.

A National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG) was also formed of Palestinian technocrats under BOP supervision, led by Dr. Ali Shaath, a civil engineer from Gaza who held senior roles in the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority. But the NCAG has not been able to enter Gaza, because the ISF meant to disarm Hamas and secure parts of Gaza has not materialized—so it remains in Cairo, unable to exercise any authority in Gaza.

More recently, on July 30, a 15-point “Roadmap for Completing the Implementation of President Trump’s Comprehensive Peace Plan in Gaza” was published. Hamas agreed to the road map and announced that it would dissolve its government in Gaza and disarm, appealing to the international community to push Israel to allow the NCAG to enter Gaza and take over.

Until now, Israel has refused to agree to the road map, arguing, in contradiction to the road map’s prescription for a phased Israel Defense Forces withdrawal from the parts of Gaza where Hamas disarmament has been completed and verified, that it won’t withdraw its troops at all until Hamas has totally disarmed everywhere.

There is, of course, always the possibility that things will change, if Trump can persuade Netanyahu to comply, or if the upcoming Israeli elections change the situation. But for the moment, things appear deadlocked.

There are also questions about BOP finances. When Marco Rubio recently requested that Congress transfer $50 million to the BOP from the State Department budget for international organizations (from which it has not yet paid its 2026 UN dues), Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md), ranking member of the House Committee on the Judiciary, and Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), ranking member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, called for Rubio to “answer basic questions about the board’s structure, funding, and oversight, nine months after its creation.” In a confronting letter that can be read here, they write:

We thus have a profusion of questions about this mysterious operation: What is the Board of Peace? Is it a public or private entity? International or domestic? Is it registered as a corporation in the United States or abroad? What kind of corporation is it—for-profit or not-for-profit? Who controls the funds in its J.P. Morgan bank account? In what countries are those accounts located? Who will audit those funds and conduct oversight of the Board? What does President Trump intend to do with this vast slush fund while he is in office—or after he leaves? Can anyone assure Congress that billions of dollars from US taxpayers and foreign governments will not be flowing into the pockets of President Trump, members of his family, corrupt or incompetent contractors or business partners, or political allies and foot soldiers of the President?

The bottom line is that realizing the aspirations of the Comprehensive Plan with BOP oversight is an exceedingly tall order, given the utter devastation of Gaza, its infrastructure, and its people—and the extremely fraught political difficulties of getting Israel and Hamas to adhere to what they have agreed. Implementation of this process has been incremental, slow, and is at a virtual standstill. Although members of the NCAG have begun work in Egypt, they have not been able to deploy to Gaza. Although some funds have been pledged, most have not materialized. The same is true for pledges of ISF troops.

It will be exceedingly difficult for a new organization without full-fledged international support and clout, and without sufficiently experienced staff to know what approaches are most effective in peace building, creating new governance structures, and carrying out disarmament. At the moment, the whole endeavor looks more like a slow-motion train wreck than the effective implementation of a viable peace process.

As Mladenov warned at an August 26 meeting of the Security Council, called to discuss the obstacles—if the ceasefire is allowed to collapse, “There will be no road map to return to, there will be no administration to deploy, and there will be nothing left on the ground to rebuild... It would be a point of no return for everyone.”

The lesson from these two tragedies—the demise of the US Institute of Peace and the likely failure of the Board of Peace—is that voters must, in the future, avoid electing someone to a position of great power who doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and who has the hubris to create his own half-baked, cobbled-together international Board of Peace to try to resolve one of the world’s most intractable conflicts, allegedly in the hope of being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize—just like Barrack Obama.

Trump has even implied that somehow the BOP could replace the UN, saying, “Well, it might.” But what he doesn’t understand is that the legal foundations of the two are totally different. “The Security Council derives its authority from the UN Charter, a treaty ratified by UN Member States that explicitly assigned it primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security. That mandate was conferred collectively by the international community and cannot be replicated.” Also, there is the question of binding authority: “UN Member States are obliged to carry out decisions of the Security Council. The Board of Peace has no comparable mechanism.”

Thus, in the future, the pursuit of international peace and security must be left to the United Nations, which represents the entire world; is backed by the force of international law; and has extensive experience in preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, peacekeeping, and post-conflict peace building.

In the case of Israel, however, the UN has been effectively sidelined, since the Israeli administration, and even much of the Israeli public, harbor a deep antipathy for the UN because of its past condemnation of Israeli behavior, which is nearly always vetoed by the US in the UN Security Council.

This means that the Comprehensive Plan and the BOP are “the only game in town.” Given that winter is on its way and 2 million Palestinians who are already in grave danger will once again be exposed to its ravages, it leaves one hoping against hope, in spite of major concerns about the BOP, that there is some way to salvage the Comprehensive Plan, so that the tremendous suffering by the people of Gaza can finally be lessened.

The escalation of the current crisis-ridden conditions in the areas of climate change, the economy, international security, and the development of democracy—leading to dystopian future scenarios—need not occur in this form. However, there is a real possibility that they could occur if humanity fails to bring about a paradigm shift, makes the wrong decisions, and continues its destructive behavior toward the planet.

Learning from the ‘Anticipated Danger'

The construction of negative scenarios in the sense of an anticipated possibility of dystopian development can certainly serve a constructive purpose.

In his book The Imperative of Responsibility, the philosopher Hans Jonas developed what he called a “heuristics of fear,” by which he meant that potential undesirable developments should be recognized in all their severity and menace and described in drastic terms commensurate with their presumed magnitude. According to Jonas (1979/2015, 7), this enables a society to look the potential risks squarely in the eye and thereby resolve to acknowledge its own responsibility for the planet and the fate of future generations:

What can serve as a compass? The anticipated danger itself! In its flash of lightning from the future, in the foreshadowing of its planetary scope and its human depth, the ethical principles from which the new duties of new power can be derived first become apparent.

Of course, this negative vision must be compatible with the developments already analyzed; it must not, therefore, be plucked out of thin air, even if not all the information needed for an assessment is yet available. Heuristics is a creative thought process based on estimates, assumptions, and calculations.

Immersing oneself in a likely future situation and sensing the potential of a future catastrophe can provide insights for preventive action. It is possible that the fear of a catastrophic planetary scenario could lead to a systemic shift in course and to responsible decisions.

The Inadequacy of the Paris Climate Agreements

From the spectrum of multiple crises—which are certainly interconnected—this article will focus on the disrupted relationship between humanity and nature and heuristically develop it into a negative scenario.

David Spratt and Ian Dunlop (2019, 6) predict that even if the 2015 Paris Climate Agreements were fully implemented, stable climate conditions would still not be expected. In particular, climatic feedback effects would render the Earth largely uninhabitable for human civilization by the end of the century. Even if the Paris climate targets were met, a warming of 5°C would be expected by the year 2100, with devastating consequences for life on Earth.

It must also be taken into account that not all countries have accepted the Paris Agreements or, in some cases—such as the U.S. under Trump—have since withdrawn from them.

Fires, Storms, Overheating, and Floods

A worst-case scenario for such an increasingly hot biosphere must anticipate a rise in wildfires. Vast areas of the Earth will begin to burn. Fire walls driven by massive gusts of wind will devour everything in their path: trees and bushes, houses, animals, and people. Such firestorms are beyond human control and cannot be fought; they depend on heavy rainfall, and it is unclear whether such rain will fall in the burning regions at all due to climate shifts. The result will be the desolation of entire regions, leading to humanitarian, ecological, and financial problems on a global scale. The fires of 2025 and 2026 are already offering a glimpse of what lies ahead for humanity.

Future average temperatures in the Persian Gulf are projected to reach 50-60°C, meaning that for the average person, human life here will no longer be possible—or will only be possible in artificially cooled spaces. Even in the countries of the Global North, mass mortality is beginning due to overheated living environments. Initially, this will affect older people and those who are already ill, and will then spread to people who would otherwise be considered healthy. Circulatory shock, overheating, and dehydration will then also affect younger people.

It is undisputed that sea levels will rise due to the melting of the poles, the warming of seawater, and the accompanying melting of Arctic ice.

However, a potential average rise of 2.5 meters by 2100 does not represent the extreme level of sea-level rise. During storm surges in particular, the rise in sea level can be several times this value and lead to flooding deep into continental areas. This will also affect the Global North.

Islands, coastal regions, and low-lying inland areas will be flooded, destroying living conditions there and, in turn, triggering migration. Not only will island groups disappear, but large parts of countries such as Bangladesh and India will also be flooded, triggering mass exoduses. In this context, the rise in sea level, combined with the monsoon rains in this region—which are already becoming increasingly devastating—will have a particularly dangerous effect.

The thawing of Arctic and Siberian permafrost, through the associated release of carbon dioxide and methane, will lead to a massive increase in global warming and abruptly intensify all related processes.

In other parts of the world, climate shifts are causing air masses with extremely different temperatures to collide, resulting in devastating storms such as tornadoes and hurricanes. Houses, cars, animals, and people are swept up into the air and smashed to pieces. Skyscrapers collapse, and the infrastructure—including electricity, water, and gas lines, as well as the internet—is irreparably destroyed. Radioactivity is released from destroyed nuclear power plants; it circulates in the Earth’s atmosphere, falls as rain, and will lead to increased rates of cancer and birth defects in humans and animals.

Catastrophic Impact on Social and Political Development on a Global Scale

Massive migration—in the form of mass exoduses or mass migrations—will be triggered by climate change. Migration to date should be viewed, at best, as the tip of the iceberg in this context, as billions of people will set out as refugees if global warming continues unchecked. It is not difficult to imagine the conflicts—including military confrontations—that will arise from these upheavals in the struggle for ecologically intact regions.

Global warming will lead to massive crop failures and associated famines. The global agricultural food system will collapse. The struggle for food and survival will lead to massive price increases, looting, and military conflicts. The call for a heavy hand, for authoritarian leaders, and for police-state methods will grow louder even in democracies.

Far-right governments will attempt, in the interests of their constituencies, to deny climate change and continue to rely on the exploitation of fossil fuels.

The struggle for drinking water will intensify, on the one hand due to increasing periods of drought and, on the other, due to the growing trend toward profit-driven privatization of water sources. Privatized water sources will be guarded by militarized security forces against raids by groups of thirsty people. In drought-stricken areas, people will die of thirst—especially those who no longer have the financial means to purchase water, a scarce and therefore increasingly expensive commodity.

Spratt and Dunlop (2019, 9) describe the societal consequences of climate change even at the 3°C level. States and societies will be overwhelmed and will face extreme collective stress:

The flooding of coastal communities around the world—particularly in the Netherlands, the United States, South Asia, and China—has the potential to call regional and even national identities into question. Armed conflicts between nations over resources such as the Nile and its tributaries are likely, and a nuclear war is possible. The societal consequences range from heightened religious zeal to utter chaos. In this scenario, climate change triggers a lasting change in humanity’s relationship with nature.

Furthermore, if a UN in need of strengthening fails to dissuade unscrupulous governments from the generationally selfish destruction of the rainforest for the purposes of livestock ranching, soybean cultivation, the search for mineral resources, or land speculation, then this, too, will not only destroy the Earth’s lungs but also bring about a drastic climate shift.

Wars raging globally and emissions from explosions and fires exacerbate climate change while simultaneously preventing the affected regions from taking effective measures against this climatic dystopia. The military in active service is becoming the largest institutional global destroyer of the climate.

These are just a few of the developments addressed so far. Threats such as temperature changes and the resulting diversion of the Gulf Stream, the narrowing of the temperature difference between the North Pole and the equator—which leads to a weakening of the jet stream—the release of methane trapped in the seabed, insect die-offs due to the increased use of pesticides in agriculture, the destruction of clean drinking water due to overfertilization of fields, as well as plastic pollution in the oceans and the demise of all life in increasingly larger marine regions are likely to represent additional ecological tipping points that will further exacerbate the massive problems already mentioned.

When Will the “Point of No Return” Be Reached?

The question is when the global situation will reach a point from which there will be no return to ecological balance for many generations to come.

The progression of overpopulation, coupled with unchecked economic growth and rampant consumerism, leads to increased ecological exploitation of the Earth system under the conditions of an increasingly overcrowded planet.

However, it is to be expected that population pressure is not primarily responsible for environmental destruction, but rather, in particular, the irresponsible consumption of resources by the wealthier segment of the world’s population (Roettig 2021).

The “point of no return” is likely to be crossed soon. Once the biosphere’s planetary responses develop an uncontrollable momentum of their own that turns against human civilization and the conditions necessary for all life on Earth, it will be too late—both for prevention and for mitigation.

Over the past 20 years, the planet’s resilience has reached its breaking point; in some areas, it has demonstrably been exceeded.

The Doomsday Clock makes this clear. According to the Doomsday Clock—founded and calculated in 1947 by Albert Einstein, among others—we are already 85 seconds away from the destruction of the planet’s foundations as of February 2026. In 1991, we were still 17 minutes away from destruction.

Eco-Imperialist and Systemic Causes

Violent competition over the use of resources is intensifying as more people’s basic needs—and, in particular, their luxury needs—must be met. Not only the struggle for clean drinking water and food, but also the struggle for lithium, cobalt, uranium, etc., is leading to violent conflicts between different groups of people and regions. German political scientist Hans-Jürgen Burchardt criticizes the fact that the rich industrialized nations are the main contributors to climate change, yet the Global South bears the brunt of its consequences.

Thus, following the phase-out of nuclear power, Germany’s energy transition is also made possible by cheap coal imports from Colombia. There, mining takes place in highly environmentally damaging open-pit mines; entire communities are forcibly displaced for this purpose, and human rights violations are commonplace. Even the much-lauded green economy, which relies on electric mobility, would not be possible without the lithium reserves in the Andes. Locally, however, lithium mining robs residents of their livelihoods.

The war in Ukraine, too, must be viewed not only from a geostrategic perspective but also through an eco-imperialist lens, in which Russia and the US are attempting to divide up Ukraine’s natural resource deposits among themselves.

Conclusion: The Need for a Positive Vision of Social Development

The outline presented here of a dystopia of planetary development—based on a negative ecological scenario—should have made it very clear: If the right decisions are not made in the coming years and drastic systemic changes are not implemented, the destruction of planetary habitats can no longer be stopped. If, in addition to a biosphere in decline, further stressors arise—such as potentially runaway generative AI, authoritarian and aggressively acting nation-states at war with one another, and the threat of a nuclear inferno—this will likely spell the end of humanity. No more and no less.

The ecological dystopia outlined here does not have to come to pass. Everything depends on how responsibly and competently the current generation—which is currently active in the global centers of power—will act, and on the corrective influence that civil society resistance can exert in this regard.

Why would the same government that doesn’t allow a 17-year-old kid—or even an 18-year-old—to rent a car or order a beer at a bar allow them to enlist in the United States military and carry a gun into combat, where they can kill and be killed? Shockingly, there’s no contradiction at all.

The post No Judgement appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

If you think the Langtang Lirung glacier disaster on the Tibet-Nepal border was bad, wait for Lake Sarez.

There is no reason to downplay the August 26th catastrophe, when a large section of glacier and underlying rock at 17,000 feet of elevation failed and plunged almost 4,000 feet into the valley below. The impact registered as a magnitude 5.2 seismic event. Thousands of people died.

Himalayan glaciers have been melting at an accelerating rate due to climate change, causing ice avalanches, rockfalls and glacial-lake outburst floods. And the worst is yet to come.

A thousand miles northwest across the Alpine-Himalayan orogenic belt from Langtang Lirung in the Pamir mountains of Tajikistan is Lake Sarez, 10,700 feet above sea level. Experts call it Central Asia’s Sword of Damocles.

Lake Sarez formed in 1911 when a massive earthquake (estimated at 7.7) triggered a massive rockslide that blocked the Murgab River, creating the Usoi Dam—at over 1,500 feet high, the world’s tallest natural dam. The lake has backed up, deepened and lengthened over the past century.

I trekked up there in 2007 to research an article for Men’s Journal. Sarez was 37 miles long, a mile wide and 600 feet deep. As in the Himalayas and in mountains around the planet, glaciers in the Pamirs that had been frozen solid for thousands of years are melting away. The lake is now about 40 miles long, more than 1,600 feet deep, and holds four cubic miles of water.

Water wants to come down.

A lot of water.

At high altitude.

Usoi Dam has held for more than a century. It even survived a 7.2 earthquake in 2015. The big worry is that a major landslide from the unstable slopes around the stunning, bright blue lake falls into the water, generating a displacement wave capable of overtopping the dam (a similar scenario to the failure of levees during Hurricane Katrina) and releasing a destructive flood beginning as much as 1,000 feet high down the narrow Bartang, Pyanj and Amu Darya river valleys.

Such a A worst-case flood would sweep through Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

I wrote from a cliff overlooking the Murgab River in 2007: “Looking back down the valley, it was easy to envision floodwater gushing toward Barchadev and beyond, turning south at the Murgab’s confluence with the Bartang River. The 75-mile Bartang Valley, cultural and spiritual heartland of the Ismaili Muslims, would lose 30 villages and 7,000 people. The Bartang empties into the Pyanj, a large river that marks the border with northern Afghanistan, then Uzbekistan, then Turkmenistan. Six hundred miles downstream from Lake Sarez, the flood would cross into another time zone. Even this far downstream, Scott Weber of the U.N. Department for Humanitarian Affairs told New Scientist in 1999, ‘the wall of water would still be as high as a two-story house.’”

I described the worst-case scenario: “The city of Termiz in southern Uzbekistan is home to 140,000 people, the Uzbek-Afghan Friendship Bridge that the Soviets used to invade Afghanistan, and currently a German airbase with 3,000 NATO troops. Termiz would be obliterated. The water would keep going. The Pyanj is a tributary of the Amu Darya, which Alexander the Great knew as the Oxus. The flood path would continue along the Amu Darya, roughly marking the border between Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, before emptying into the shrunken Aral Sea, 1,200 miles downstream of Sarez. The flood would actually do the Aral more harm than good, dredging up heavy metals and toxic sediments currently locked in the dry seabed. The ancient Silk Road cities of Khiva and Turkmenabat (100,000 people total) would be destroyed, as would most of the arable land in Central Asia. Five million people—mostly residents of landlocked deserts that routinely reach 125°F—would be drowned by snow melt.”

A tunnel mitigation project to slowly lower the level of the lake, tap its hydroelectric power and/or bottle its crystal-clear water would eliminate the threat. But the site would be expensive to reach. There is no proper road. Tajikistan is a poor, remote and mountainous country that can neither finance a multi-billion-dollar high-altitude construction job nor attract international attention, much less donors. (I sent my 2007 story to the UN and other international entities; no one ever replied.)

Other than a primitive monitoring system that may or may not get warnings out to lower altitudes,, nothing has been done. Meanwhile, Sarez is warming even faster than the global average. More extreme freeze–thaw cycles, less snow cover, and thawing ground are loosening rock and debris on the lake’s banks. The landslide threat is more pronounced than ever.

Yet the world has no interest in dropping the $4 billion—what it costs the U.S. to fight Iran for four days—that it would cost to avoid a Sarez dam collapse. Fatalistic Tajiks wait to die in a natural disaster so predictable that the earliest prediction models date to the Soviet era.

In the high Andes of Peru, Lake Palcacocha poses a similar threat to 900,000 people living below in Huaraz. Tibet and Nepal must still worry about Sarez-like lakes including Cirenmaco, Galongco and Gangxico.

From the Texas Hill Country disaster of 2025 to last weekend’s fatal inundation of the Grand Canyon, Americans are not immune from climate change-related flash floods.

The world has decided not to try to arrest or reverse human-caused climate change. Anyway, it’s probably too late. The question for us has become: will we act now in order to mitigate the damage and death tolls from the inevitable catastrophes we see coming?

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

 

The post Death From Above appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Wendell Berry, who died Monday at the age of 92, was such a great man that I hardly know where to start. He was on the very short list of the best writers of our time: His essays on rural America were the words that launched 10,000 farmers markets; his poems, the staple of many happy weddings (and I’ve peed in a dozen different bathrooms where the Manifesto of the Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front was framed above the toilet). If you’ve never read his short stories of the Port William Membership, or his finest novel, Jayber Crow, you can count yourself lucky that you’ll get to encounter them for the first time.

Berry was also, of course, politically engaged. I remember standing with him 20 years ago, at a protest against the Capitol Hill power plant that I’d asked him to attend. It was a bitterly cold day, and at one point he turned to me and smiled and said, "Do you think maybe they’ll arrest us soon?" He didn’t particularly like movements, but he understood the power of moral witness; he occupied the Kentucky governor’s office, in a protest against mountaintop removal coal mining, with a toothbrush and volume of Shakespeare in his pocket.

And, perhaps above all, his life was a work of both art and politics—his decision to give up a New York lit’ry career and to return instead to the Kentucky of his boyhood, settling along the Ohio River where he and his wife Tanya farmed and he wrote, embodying the commitment to place and community that animated his writing. (His family is asking that in lieu of flowers people might send a donation to the Berry Center that is carrying on his agrarian work).

I was very lucky that my wife handed me a copy of his essay collection Home Economics about 40 years ago, when we were still courting. If I hadn’t fallen under his spell I’m not sure I would have spent my life in rural America, red state and blue; I know that he taught me how to see my town and my county, and my country and my species, in new-old ways that have undergirded all my work. And I’m very glad that we became friends, visiting and writing back and forth. His droll good humor rarely faltered, in my experience. I did not agree with him at all times, nor he with me—though he had solar panels behind his house, for instance, he didn’t think they belonged on farmland, while I think they’re a boon to both farmer and planet. But we agreed on most things of real dimension, and I was always delighted to see in the mailbox a letter with the return address of Port Royal Kentucky. He was one of the last people with whom I had a true written, as opposed to electronic, correspondence. Sometimes he’d tap things out on a manual typewriter, but more often it would be in pencil, on lined yellow paper.

The most recent arrived in July, and after news about grandsons and granddaughters it contained his newest discovery, a 1940 volume titled Stops, A Handbook for Those Who Know Their Punctuation and Those Who Aren’t Quite Sure. He was recommending it to me on the grounds that it is the “only book of my acquaintance that makes grammar delightful,” but also because he’d noted that it was published by the press (now defunct) at Middlebury College, where I teach. So while the rest of us were figuring out how to enlist Claude to help with our composition, one of the best writers of our age was still enjoying sharpening his prose, just as he enjoyed sharpening the tools of his work in field and forest. “I’m writing this on the porch of the ‘camp house,’ still unwired, built, I think, in 1964, in the woods between the river and the road.” He died on that farm on Monday, surrounded by family.

I got the news about his passing even as I was trying to grapple with the latest from a man who will attract more notice when he dies, but less affection. Elon Musk is always advancing his own vision of the world, of course—in fact, he’s just pledged to spend $100 million helping Republicans this fall. Or maybe $200 million—neither would be a noticeable sum to a trillionaire, of course. Whatever good he did with his early advocacy for electric vehicles has now been undone 100 times over with his advocacy for the people who hate EVs and all the other things we need. (He’s, as of last week, building gas turbines to make more electricity for his right-wing Grok AI project, already polluting the air of Black neighborhoods in Memphis).

He offers the Nazi salute; we are at his behest settling thousands of refugees from white South Africa (and no others) in our country; his rancid racism has destroyed Twitter. It would be a pleasure never to think of him again, but because he’s the richest man in the world, one has to monitor what he says. And here’s Monday’s installment, from of course his own social media site:

Extremely severe extinction events happen every 100M years or so and just switching to sustainable energy will not be enough to stop them.

Space satellites to control temperature and massive geo-engineering will be needed or it will be game over.

The disingenuousness of this is remarkable. Extremely severe extinction events have indeed happened just five times in the last half-billion years, which means it would be extremely unlikely we’d spontaneously come across one any time soon: Human civilization is, after all, just 10,000 years old. And yet of course we face one, not because of anything nature has done, but because we’ve filled the air with carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuel, which his allies wish to continue indefinitely. “Just switching to sustainable energy” is in fact the one good, scalable weapon we have to fight that, but since he’s a part of the political movement against this idea, he is now backing an alternative: “space satellites to control temperature,” which he further explains will be accomplished by a “super-intelligent swarm” of “sentient satellites, launched into Earth-Sun Lagrange points by mass drivers on the Moon.”

This is the kind of fantasy that drove Berry to distraction (and to work)—all about control and domination, all done by the few to the many, utterly ignorant of context. Immodest in every way.

But in Musk’s case it was accompanied by another revelation that began to emerge over the weekend. It turns out that the human toll of the horrific rampaging floods on the Nepal-Tibet border may well have been exacerbated by Musk’s decision to destroy the US Agency for International Development early in the DOGE assault on our government. USAID, in collaboration with NASA, helped maintain a network of monitors high in the Himalayas and Hindu Kush. Musk, in February 2025, “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.” One casualty was apparently this network. As Jeremy Konyndyk, who oversaw America’s response to the 2015 Nepal earthquake, wrote this weekend on (ironically) X:

DOGE famously used keyword searches for terms like "climate" to terminate federal grants. Among the victims: a collab between USAID and NASA for flood prediction, early warning, disaster readiness, glacier inventories, and mapping dangerous glacial lakes in Nepal.

As Konyndyk added:

Could these programs have helped foresee or mitigate this week's glacial flooding catastrophe? Hard to say with an outlier event like this. But that was their purpose.

Sadly, it's hard to anticipate or mitigate climate hazards which your ideology has decreed do not exist.

Musk’s victims already number in the millions—a Lancet study predicts 14 million by 2030 as the indirect results of shutting down America’s humanitarian work, which puts him up there in the Stalin-Mao category, and almost certainly the most deadly human of this millennium. So maybe a few thousand more people hardly matter.

But contrast what Musk did with the actions of a principal at a school along the river. When a friend upstream phoned one of his teachers a blurted warning, he immediately evacuated the entire student body, saving at least 900 lives. Given a warning, he acted (precisely what the world has not done with climate change). “I thought that even if the warning turned out to be wrong, the worst it would cost us was one day of study,” Rajendra Dawadi said. “But taking it lightly could mean the loss of hundreds of lives.”

Principal Dawadi will spend the rest of his life going to the weddings of the students whose lives he saved, and I imagine there will be no small number of babies named in his honor. Elon Musk’s name will be cursed—the richest man in human history, who used his wealth and power to kill the most vulnerable people on the planet.

Here is a recent poem of Wendell Berry’s, published in The New Yorker less than a year ago and titled "The Loved Ones":

The loved ones we call the dead
depart from us and for a while
are absent. And then as if
called back by our love, they come
near us again. They enter our dreams.
We feel they have been near us
when we have not thought of them.
They are simply here, simply waiting
while we are distracted among
our obligations. At last
it comes to us: They live now
in the permanent world.
We are the absent ones.

A new University of Massachusetts-Amherst opinion poll, conducted August 21-26, finds profound American disillusionment with President Donald Trump, with his Iran War, and with its economic fallout in their lives.

Apparently the Ellison family’s attempt to drum up support for Donald Trump and his Iran War by buying up CBS News and gutting it as a respected news organization was a costly failure. Likewise, Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp and his various pro-Trump organs, from Fox Cable News to The Wall Street Journal, have not pulled the wool over the public’s eyes in the ways that Murdoch hoped. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted of the effort he expended convincing the American people to go to war with Iran, saying he had a thousand hours on US television , but while he may have prevailed on the gullible and avaricious Trump to fall on that country like a ravenous wolf, he did not succeed in altering the views of the American public on the desirability of such a war. The only significant impact of Netanyahu on most Americans has been to convince them that the Israeli government is a combination of genocidal maniacs and welfare queens that Americans should cut off economically and perhaps even militarily.

The UMass poll asked a weighted sample of respondents how well Trump has handled his Iran War. The response of 55% of those asked this question was “not well at all.” Ouch. Another 13% replied “not too well.” So 68%, over two-thirds, think he has done a piss-poor job on his Iran War, which was his war of choice. Two-thirds is the percentage needed in the Senate to impeach and remove a president, so if our representatives actually mirrored public opinion, Trump would be toast.

That question had to do with Trump’s handling of the war. Asked whether they approved of the war on Iran, a majority, 54%, said they strongly or somewhat disapproved, and another 20% were noncommittal, which I would interpret as not actively supporting the war even if they didn’t particularly oppose it. Those statistics yield a picture of a war that nearly three-fourths of Americans either oppose or about which they just don’t care. It isn’t what the commander of a war would want to hear from his own public.

Trump and the Republicans are always campaigning on being the party of business and therefore the party that knows how to handle the economy, but only a tiny minority, 7%, think Trump is handling the economy very well.

A majority think the war was a mistake and question whether it has made the US safer or forestalled an Iranian bomb.

Another way of putting it is that only about a quarter of respondents think the US should have gone to war with Iran, and that the US is winning.

The UMass report on the opinion poll noted that Raymond La Raja, professor of political science at UMass Amherst and co-director of the poll, said, “Americans are overwhelmingly negative about Trump on the Iran situation.” He continued: “Only 1 in 4 Americans thinks he is handling Iran well. The real divide is increasingly between Trump’s hardcore MAGA base and almost everyone else. Among Republicans who identify very strongly with MAGA, 87% approve of Trump’s handling of Iran. But that falls to 58% among Republicans who are ‘somewhat MAGA’ and just 30% among Republicans who say they are ‘not MAGA at all.’ The more loosely attached Republicans are to the MAGA identity, the more skeptical they are of the war.”

Conducting a war in the Middle East, as even the cowboys in the G. W. Bush administration recognized, requires at least some allies. But Americans don’t think Trump plays well with other children. Asked how he has handled working with allies in global affairs, 52% say “not well at all” and 12% say “not too well,” showing that nearly two-thirds view his foreign policy performance negatively.

Based on this sounding, we can further project that Americans are even more angry about the main fallout of the failed war on Iran, which is high inflation. Fully 80% of respondents said that the Iran War has increased the cost of gasoline and groceries. Asked about how Trump has dealt with inflation, 57% responded, “not well at all.” A further 18% said “not too well.” That is 75%, fully three-fourths, who disapprove of his handling of inflation. Trump and the Republicans are always campaigning on being the party of business and therefore the party that knows how to handle the economy, but only a tiny minority, 7%, think Trump is handling the economy very well, and I presume they are wealthy investors in Trump’s casino stock market. The tech-heavy Nasdaq is up 14-16% so far this year.

Cuba is starving. Iran is being economically cut off from the world. And Russia is the target of a sanctions regime unlike any that a major nation has ever faced.

The US secretary of state has abandoned his post to play viceroy of Venezuela, and his role has been filled by the amateur team of Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. American evolution has favoured the Pentagon and Treasury, while the State Department has gone extinct. Coercion is America’s only foreign policy strategy, and bombs, sanctions, and tariffs are its only tools. The US “will negotiate with bombs” and with “economic statecraft.”

Canada, previously America’s closest ally and its second largest trading partner, is now feeling the weight of that coercion in an economic assault unimaginable for most of the modern history of Canadian-American relations. The relationship changed at the start of President Donald Trump’s second term when he announced that he was prepared to use “economic force” to absorb Canada into the United States. “You’re at war when you get attacked,” Canada’s Prime Minister, Mark Carney, said. “We got attacked.” Canada has been subjected to economy-crushing tariffs and warned to “fall in line or, the consequences for Canada will be far WORSE!”

The punishing 50% tariffs are meant to coerce Canada into surrendering aspects of its sovereignty. Part of what caused the latest round of trade talks to explode was demands that made Canada “a subsidiary of the United States” and “compromise[d] Canada’s sovereignty.”

The US is no longer a hegemon that leads for the mutual benefit of the West. It is a bully that coerces its former friends to “fall in line” for the singular benefit of America.

The US reportedly demanded compromises on the protection of French language and culture that is essential to Canadian federalism and unity. The US wanted Canada to repeal laws that promote French language shows to Canadian subscribers of streaming platforms and wave requirements that package labeling be in French as well as English (a demand the US now seems to have dropped).

They also demanded fealty on crucial trade decisions. The Trump administration demanded that Canada comply with American demands on what tariffs it places on other countries and what countries it trades with. Negotiators went so far as to insist on the right “to review and potentially dictate the terms for Canada’s trade agreements with other countries.” American dominance would be enshrined with the prerogative “to change tariff policy against Canada at any time, irrespective of the agreement.”

The US had already set the precedent for this imperial strategy in other countries. In March, Trump declared that he “will be having the honor of taking Cuba.” Toward that end, he cut Cuba off, mandating that “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA—ZERO,” adding that “I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.” He then signed an executive order imposing tariffs on any country that sends oil to Cuba.

Despite the devastation that embargo has caused the people of Cuba, the Trump administration has continued to tighten its stranglehold, ever increasing the sanctions. “We have a pretty deep toolbox, especially when it comes to sanctions and enforcing them,” a senior administration official told Axios. “More is on the way.” On August 20, the US announced further sanctions.

The same playbook is being employed in Iran where Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has become Trump’s chief executioner, has boasted of America’s ability to starve people into the streets and countries into submission. “President Trump ordered… maximum pressure on Iran. And it’s worked,” he said, “because in December, their economy collapsed... and this is why the people took to the street. This is economic statecraft.” Bessent told the Senate Banking Committee that “what we have done is created a dollar shortage in the country… The Iranian currency went into free fall, inflation exploded, and hence we have seen the Iranian people out on the street.”

But neither the people in the streets nor the brutal bombing campaign accomplished America’s goals in Iran. So, Washington turned to intensified economic warfare. Bessent has threatened the “toughest sanctions in history.” Trump called it “economic D-day,” "Economic Warfare and Isolation on an unprecedented scale.”

But the coercion extended beyond Iran. Trump warned that “ANY country that… provide[s] any type of lifeline to Iran will itself face TREMENDOUS Economic Consequences.” Bessent provided the details, announcing “an economic onslaught against Iran’s financial connections around the globe.” He said, “Our objective is to sever every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime until it stands alone.” He then threatened that “any economic engagement of any kind with this murderous regime will expose those responsible to the full reach of American power.”

That global coercion is being challenged. China called the US threat “illegal unilateral sanctions” and promised that it will “take all necessary measures to firmly safeguard its own rights and interests.” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian said, “Cooperation between China and Iran has always been conducted within the framework of international law and should not be interfered with or disrupted."

Shockingly, like Cuba, neither Russia, Iran, nor Canada have backed down. Though Canada can hardly be called a fellow traveler of Russia or Iran, it has learned similar lessons and come to similar conclusions.

Like Russia, Canada has learned that, in the face of tariffs or sanctions, it must rely less on the US and more on itself. Russia has tried to substitute lost American business with domestic replacements. “Building at home,” Carney said, is “our plan A.” He says that Canada is “focused on building strength at home…. Launching big nation-building projects…. And… building Canada strong.”

Like Iran, Canada has learned that America’s “signature [is] written in pencil” and that countries negotiating with the US need to call “into question the reliability of any deal.” Like Iran, Canada has learned that deals with the US can be broken, like the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear agreement and the US-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement. Like Iran, Canada has learned not to make any concessions in exchange for future promises but to get everything guaranteed up front because the US can change the terms any time, irrespective of the agreement.

The US is no longer a hegemon that leads for the mutual benefit of the West. It is a bully that coerces its former friends to “fall in line” for the singular benefit of America. Its former friends follow, no longer out of partnership, but out of fear.