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

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

Scott Stantis, editorial cartoonist for The Chicago Tribune, fills in for John today.

Today we discuss:

• Cuban Gas Crisis: The Cuban economy hangs on the brink as Trump’s sanctions, including cutting off Venezuelan fuel shipments, force flight service cancellations and school closures. Russia expresses solidarity, exploring ways to ship fuel to the socialist Caribbean island. Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel says he’s willing to talk.

• It took Pima County, Arizona law enforcement officials almost two weeks to access Nancy Guthrie’s Google Nest footage from the notoriously-hard-to-reach company, revealing a creepy masked man at the door. Should Congress mandate direct phone customer service for big tech?

• The Federal Aviation Administration is closing the airspace around El Paso International Airport in Texas for 10 days, grounding all flights to and from the airport.

• After a Border Patrol agent shot 30-year-old Marimar Martinez, a US citizen/Chicago teacher assistant 5 times, Gregory Bovino, congratulated him. “In light of your excellent service in Chicago, you have much yet left to do!!” he wrote to the agent.

• As Netanyahu arrives in DC, Trump says he opposes Israel’s moves to annex the West Bank.

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The post Cuba on the Ropes | DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

For 13 minutes on the most-watched stage in American culture, Bad Bunny made the United States feel expansive, uncontained, Caribbean rhythm-centered, and alive with a sense of belonging that crossed borders without asking permission. As a Venezuelan-American, I felt chills from the very first second to the last. I was a child again, asleep across two chairs pushed together at a family party that refused to end, the music still playing, adults laughing loudly in the background, grandparents locked into a serious game of dominoes as if nothing outside that table mattered. I could feel the dancing in the living room, smell the food that took all day to make, remember that deep sense of togetherness you can’t explain or translate—you simply grow up inside it.

And then came Bad Bunny’s ending—loud, defiant, and unmistakably intentional. When he said, “God bless America,” naming Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Venezuela, Guyana, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Haiti, las Antillas, the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico, it felt like calling family members into the room, reminding everyone that America has always been bigger than the version that those in power are comfortable with, and that it has always belonged to more people than it is willing to treat with dignity.

At that very same moment, offstage, untelevised, and unacknowledged, the US government was tightening the screws on Cuba. Under Donald Trump, US policy toward the island has moved from long-standing hostility into something closer to an open siege. Sanctions have been escalated, fuel deliberately cut off, and third countries threatened with tariffs and sanctions for daring to trade with Cuba. The consequences are immediate and devastating: rolling blackouts shutting down hospitals, universities forced to suspend classes, factories and farms unable to operate, and entire transportation systems paralyzed. The US fuel blockade has grounded flights, stopped buses from running, and forced ambulances to be rationed.

The US embargo on Cuba itself is illegal under international law and is condemned year after year by the overwhelming majority of the world’s nations. Yet the United States continues to enforce it unilaterally, using its navy, its financial system, and its political power to prevent oil shipments from reaching Cuba, to intimidate shipping companies, and to punish any country that dares to trade. US pressure doesn’t stop at its own borders; it extends outward, telling the rest of the world who they are allowed to sell fuel to, who they are allowed to insure, and which economies must be starved into compliance. When ships are blocked, oil is cut off, and a civilian population is plunged into darkness, this is a blockade. And under international law, that is an act of war.

If those 13 minutes meant anything, they must move us toward demanding a foreign policy that treats our neighbors as equals.

Washington then claims humanitarian concern, offering small, tightly controlled aid packages while maintaining the very sanctions that created the emergency. The crisis is manufactured first, then weaponized as proof that Cuba is “failing.” Scarcity becomes both the method and the message. This is collective punishment, designed to exhaust a population into submission through hunger, darkness, and isolation.

We need to be honest: This is not just Trump. Trump is blunt, crude, and unapologetic, but he did not invent this. For decades, US administrations have treated Latin America and the Caribbean as a sphere to be managed, disciplined, or reordered, operating from the same assumption: that the United States has a providential right to decide who governs and who must be punished into compliance. But ask yourself, really sit with it, can you imagine the humiliation of entire nations being told, again and again, that their future will be decided elsewhere? Imagine living under the constant threat that your economy can be strangled, your leaders removed, your people starved simply for refusing obedience. Who gave the United States this right? Who decided that Latin America’s sovereignty was conditional?

Two centuries ago, Simón Bolívar warned that the United States seemed destined “to plague America with misery in the name of liberty.” His vision was not domination but dignity: nations free to determine their own paths, bound by solidarity rather than submission. Nuestra América, the America of José Martí, Simón Bolívar, Augusto Sandino, Frantz Fanon, Fidel Castro, and Hugo Chávez, is land, people, language, and resistance that still exist and insist on sovereignty.

This is the choice in front of us. You can accept Trump’s America, the America that governs through sieges, blockades, sanctions, and humiliation, deciding from afar who may rule, who may eat, and who must be punished into submission. Or you can stand with Nuestra América, the America Martí and Bolívar imagined, and that Bad Bunny echoed when he held up a football, reading “Together we are America.” This is an America that refuses domination, that believes no nation is a backyard, and that insists the future of this hemisphere belongs to its peoples, not to an empire. There is no neutral ground between those two Americas.

This is why the moment demands more than applause. It demands that we look past the spectacle and confront the systems that decide who gets to thrive and who is forced to flee. A real Good Neighbor Policy would respect sovereignty, stop weaponizing hunger and instability, and recognize that dignity does not end at the US border. Bad Bunny reminded millions of people of connection, of shared humanity, of a hemisphere bound together by history and responsibility. What comes next is on us. If those 13 minutes meant anything, they must move us toward demanding a foreign policy that treats our neighbors as equals. Because in the end, the message is simple and uncompromising: The only thing more powerful than hate is love.

If this article moved you, don’t let it end here. Right now, US policy is manufacturing hunger in Cuba and then pretending to solve it with crumbs. We can choose a different path. Join CODEPINK’s call to feed Cuba during this man-made crisis by supporting efforts that respect dignity, sovereignty, and life itself. Take action now: https://www.codepink.org/wck

This past year, our communities were hit with skyrocketing power bills as electricity prices increased at double the rate of inflation. A new Sierra Club tool shows that, to make matters worse, utility companies in the US are planning a massive gas buildout, and it’s going to cost everyday American families even more.

The Sierra Club’s new gas plant tracker shows that utilities are planning to build 271 gigawatts of new gas power plant capacity at over 480 more expensive, polluting gas plants. This is over 40% more than all the coal capacity that is still online. This level of buildout would increase currently online gas power plant capacity by nearly 50% nationwide.

These companies have drastically increased their plans for new gas in the last few years, more than doubling planned gas power plants since the start of 2020.

This is a massive proposed buildout of new fossil fuel infrastructure that stretches across the country; new gas power plants are currently planned in 42 states. Texas has the most planned gas power plant capacity of any state followed by Georgia, Indiana, Virginia, Missouri, and Arizona.

Data center developers and utilities can stop this onslaught of plans for new gas power plants and rely on affordable, available clean energy options instead.

What do these states, spanning across the country, have in common? Data centers. All of these states face major data center proposals.

Gas power plants already provide more electricity for data center use than any other fuel, and that portion is predicted to grow without more renewable buildout. In 2024 in the US, new data center demand rivaled the amount of clean energy brought online. Data center demand is set to far exceed clean energy additions in 2025 through 2028.

Data center demand projections are still highly uncertain, meaning this level of demand may not materialize. Instead of carefully assessing this uncertainty, utilities have been too quick to propose ever more gas power plants, leaving customers on the hook to foot the bill.

Southern Company, which operates electric utilities primarily in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, has the most planned gas power plant capacity of any parent company—over 20 gigawatts. This planned gas buildout is directly tied to data center proposals; for example, in Georgia, Southern subsidiary Georgia Power is planning a historic buildout of new resources specifically to serve growing demand, which is driven by data centers. What does Georgia Power want to make up the majority of that buildout? New gas power plants.

If you’ve recently looked at your utility bill and wondered why your energy costs have skyrocketed, you’re not alone. In 2025, households on average paid nearly 10% more on their utility bills than in 2024, outpacing wage growth and overall inflation. These plans to add even more gas power plants will continue to drive up our bills.

When a utility company decides to build a new gas power plant, the money it takes to build and maintain it does not come from the utility’s CEO or the Big Tech companies who want more electricity; we pay for the gas power plant in our utility bills every month. The cost of building and maintaining gas power plants has significantly and persistently increased in the US, contributing to increased prices for customers across the country. In contrast, the cost of renewables continues to fall.

When our utility companies fail to build enough low-cost clean electricity and instead increase their reliance on expensive fossil fuel power plants—as many are doing in response to data center demand—electricity prices rise.

In Virginia, for example, Dominion Energy is planning to build a massive new gas power plant that will cost Virginians at least $8 billion by the utility’s own estimates over the lifetime of the plant; the gas power plant is part of a buildout that Dominion says is necessary due to data center growth. Dominion projects that residential electric bills will more than double over the next 15 years, primarily due to data centers’ growing energy needs.

In Missouri, Ameren wants to build multiple new gas power plants to serve data centers. A single one of those gas power plants is expected to cost $900 million up front, before taking into account the volatile cost of fuel and maintenance needed throughout the plant’s lifetime. The same story is playing out across the country.

We deserve better. Data center developers and utilities can stop this onslaught of plans for new gas power plants and rely on affordable, available clean energy options instead. With proper planning, both data center developers and utilities can be part of the solution. In the meantime, we’ll continue to track utilities’ plans for new gas power plants, and you can join us to push utilities and data center developers to make better, cheaper, healthier decisions.

ICE agents and their supporters portray them as big and brave. The truth is, they’re fragile snowflakes who complain about being called names, the cold in Minnesota, and having demonstrators throw empty water bottles and snowballs at them. Most absurdly, they wear masks for fear of being doxxed, while every other state and local cop and federal LEO has their identity in open view. ICE are vicious. But they’re also cowards.

The post Snowflakes in Minnesota appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Ten years ago, the shuttering of The Tampa Tribune shocked Media World. Last month, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette disappeared, turning western Pennsylvania into a news desert. Now The Washington Post is entering a death spiral. Hell, D.C. never got over the Washington Star.

We remember what we lost recently, not what we lost in total. When Jeff Bezos bought the Post in 2013 (with promises not to do what I’m about to describe), his newsroom employed 2,500 people. Last week, there were 800. Thanks to Bezos, they’re down to 500.

The print newspaper model that drives American journalism has been in crisis all my life. I was born in 1963, the year that daily newspaper circulation peaked. It’s been all decline ever since—first due to television, then corporatization, and competition from the now-defunct alternative weeklies, bean counters’ obsession with short-term profits over long-term investment, and now the Internet.

This is a problem, partly because “democracy dies in darkness,” and also because dead tree papers generate most of the original local reporting that gets picked up online and by broadcast outlets. No print, no news. No news, and people die because they don’t get tornado warnings and businesses die because they can’t rely on accurate information when they make decisions.

So—what to do?

Most journalists devote their careers to one or two aspects of our profession. I have watched the collapse from more front-row seats than perhaps anyone else: reporter, pundit, spot illustrator, syndicated cartoonist and columnist, art director, newspaper editor, magazine editor, syndicate executive, radio and television commentator.

Everyone who works in and cares about journalism has thought long and hard about what they’d do differently (better) than the publishers and editors who’ve proven themselves unable or unwilling to steer the business of selling news, opinion and features through the shoals of the online era into the calm seas of profitability. Many of those observers are smarter than me. Few have the insight you can only acquire from having observed a situation from many different perspectives, as I have.

One of my unusual journalistic experiences was my role as plaintiff in a defamation lawsuit against a major newspaper. Cynical from birth, I was nevertheless shocked by the depth of institutional corruption I encountered at the Los Angeles Times.

In brief: I was the Times’ cartoonist. Broke and desperate for cash, the Times’ parent company sold a controlling interest in itself to the LAPD police union’s multi-billion-dollar pension fund. The police chief—effectively the boss, even though most of us at the Times didn’t know that yet—took umbrage at my cartoons about him, which portrayed him as a corrupt, mustachioed lout, which he was, and ordered the paper to fire me. They did, and tried to smear me so I couldn’t work elsewhere. I sued.

When this mess hit the headlines, one prescient commentator observed that the story was at least as much about the meltdown of print media as a story about corruption. Had the Times been profitable, he pointed out, they wouldn’t have literally sold out to the cops. Money corrupts; poverty corrupts absolutely.

            Rall v Times was a rollercoaster. All the experts said getting past the cesspool of intertwined political interests in the LA courts would be tough, but if I won, I’d be awarded millions. Maybe tens of millions.

One judge advised them to settle because “the damage award could be catastrophic.”

“Define ‘catastrophic,’ your Honor,” their lawyer asked.

“Requiring dissolution.”

During one of the high points of my battle, my team entertained what they considered a possibility: that, like Hulk Hogan and Gawker, I might get a jury verdict so massive that the Times would go bankrupt—and I would wind up owning the fourth biggest paper in the country.

I didn’t want the paper; I wanted justice. But this scenario did force me to consider, more thoughtfully than a random media nerd musing over drinks, how to save a print dinosaur.

One of my Big Ideas was unique to the Times. If the New York Times was the national newspaper of news and culture, The Washington Post was the national newspaper of politics, and The Wall Street Journal was the national newspaper of finance, The Los Angeles Times should be the national newspaper of entertainment. Movies, obviously, but also music and the gaming industry. Entertainment, along with war, is what America still does best.

My other Ideas apply to just about any major legacy paper, including LA and, the outfit currently and most disturbingly on the ropes, the Post.

Print pays newspaper owners many times more per subscriber than online, yet legacy publishers refuse to give their best customers a premium product. If you’re enough of a news junkie to still subscribe to print, you keep up with all the breaking news as it pops up on your phone—and you usually get the online edition for free, included. Stupidly, tomorrow’s print edition is today’s online paper—basically word for word.

No! Not a single article should be duplicated between digital and print. Online news should only be for breaking news—what just happened. Print newspapers should only be for long-form explainers and analysis—why what happened yesterday and last week matters and what it means. Print and online are two different media products that serve entirely discrete purposes. Your cellphone is perfectly suited for short bursts of information. When it’s time for a 5,000-word essay about the civil war in Sudan, readers prefer paper they can take to the bath.

Why don’t press barons give the people what they want? In my experience, there are people with money and people with brains and they are rarely the same. Jeff Bezos figured out how to scale a delivery business from his garage to a transnational multibillion corporation, but he couldn’t figure out how to transition a legacy institution like the Post into the 21st century, beginning by resisting the urge to interfere with its editorial alignment.

Some papers have moved from noble old Art Deco palaces to modest boxes in the suburbs, but I ask: why must a newspaper have an office at all? Production can be done in the suburbs. Reporters can write from homes and cafes and wherever their stories are; use the saved funds to hire foreign correspondents and regional reporters.

Newspapers have been grappling with newsroom diversity (or lack thereof) for decades. They’re missing the perspective of the working class, which is why they were stunned at Trump’s win and still don’t understand their own readers in their own country. Readers cancel publications they can’t relate to culturally. Newsflash: a Black graduate of Harvard typically has more in common with a white classmate than with a Black high school dropout.

I’d stop requiring that new reporters have a master’s degree from top journalism schools that give little financial aid and only attract children of the wealthy, and work on socioeconomic diversity that truly reflects the demographics of the community. This may mean laying off some rich kids, but hey, they’ve got trust funds to fall back upon.

I’d learn from the Internet. It’s opinionated, profane, wild, unrestrained because that’s where the clicks—the people—are. The hoary conceit of the “family newspaper” where you can’t print an F-bomb even when the president says it is embarrassing; worse, it conveys to everyone under age 75 that your publication is not for or about their real lives.

About opinion: Social media proves that readers engage with strident, abrasive, loud, controversial expression. As if to disabuse us of any possibility that papers aren’t run by idiots, newspapers are getting rid of their opinion sections entirely, judging them to be too much for our tender little souls.

Which is why publishers won’t read this.

(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 John Kiriakou.”)

The post How To Save Newspapers appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Democrats want President Donald Trump to rein in Immigration and Customs Enforcement by following the rules that govern every other law enforcement agency in the country. But a particular sticking point has become the demand that ICE and Border Patrol officers stop wearing masks during enforcement operations.

It should be a “no-brainer.” But Republicans say it’s a “nonstarter.”

In fact, Republicans are so wedded to their objection that they’re willing to shut down other critical Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agencies, including the Transportation Security Administration, Federal Emergency Management Agency, US Coast Guard, and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Ironically, blocking DHS’ appropriation would have a minimal impact on ICE because Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” provided ICE with $85 billion—making it the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency and more than twice that of the Justice Department, which includes the FBI.

The GOP’s Specious Argument

Republicans claim that unmasking ICE would endanger the officers because protesters might learn their identities, which would threaten the officers’ safety. It’s nonsense.

Local police officers don’t wear masks.

County sheriffs don’t wear masks.

Instilling fear in the populace and avoiding responsibility for wrongdoing are not proper governmental objectives in any nation that values personal liberty.

State troopers don’t wear masks.

Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents don’t wear masks.

FBI agents don’t wear masks.

When any of these officers and agents engage in law enforcement activities, the individuals they stop can demand identification and the officers must provide it. Confirming the officers’ identities assures that they are not imposters. And it assures a path to their potential accountability.

The GOP’s Real Reasons

History is filled with notorious examples of sinister mask wearers: Terrorists who execute hostages, robbers, thieves, kidnappers, home invaders, Ku Klux Klansmen, Darth Vader and the Galactic Empire’s storm troopers.

Add ICE and the Border Patrol to that roster of villains.

With masks, identification becomes more difficult, resulting in an obstacle to accountability. At the same time, the anonymity of a mask enhances a sense of power in the person who wears one. For victims, the result is enhanced fear.

Instilling fear in the populace and avoiding responsibility for wrongdoing are not proper governmental objectives in any nation that values personal liberty. But Republicans insist that ICE and Border Patrol officers wear masks as they spread terror throughout communities.

Doxing v. Death

Dressed for combat, ICE and Border Patrol officers roam the streets; generate protests; and respond with tear gas, smoke bombs, and deadly force. Since ICE began Trump’s crackdown, their bullets have struck at least 10 people—including four US citizens. They have killed three of them.

Meanwhile, Trump, Vice President JD Vance, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and other senior members of the administration pledge to “stand behind” the shooters, wrongly claim that the officers have “unqualified immunity” (they don’t), and falsely blame the victims as “domestic terrorists” (they weren’t).

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) is concerned about doxing. Recently, Tillis asserted, “In today’s world, I could take a picture of you and I guarantee you within 12 hours, I will have facial recognition of you, and then I dox you. If you are in an active, potentially dangerous situation, I’ve got no problem with them putting a mask on.”

Unmasking ICE won’t stop the damage that Trump’s immigration crackdown is inflicting on America every day. But it would send a message of accountability to a federal law enforcement agency that is out of control.

Routinely, police officers and other law enforcement officials “are in active, potentially dangerous” situations too. But unlike ICE, those officers haven’t created those dangerous situations. And unlike ICE, they respond with deescalation strategies to defuse them.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “What I will tell you is the president is never going to waver in enforcing our nation’s immigration laws and protecting the public safety of the American people and his ardent support of ICE and Customs and Border Patrol who, unfortunately, the Democrat Party has made a decision to demonize.”

Preventing ICE and Border Patrol officers from hiding their identities as they morph into Trump’s personal paramilitary force isn’t demonizing them. It’s recognizing their danger and requiring them to function like every other law enforcement officer in the country.

Unmasking ICE won’t stop the damage that Trump’s immigration crackdown is inflicting on America every day. But it would send a message of accountability to a federal law enforcement agency that is out of control. And it just might save lives.

This week, members of Congress are negotiating funding levels for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, and Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, after public opposition soared when federal agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

As of January 25, ICE held more than 70,000 people in detention, and claimed more than 352,000 deportations. In 2025, at least 32 people died in ICE custody, and so far in 2026, at least eight people have died in the custody or at the hands of ICE and CBP, including Renee Good and Alex Pretti. ICE and CBP have targeted citizens, documented immigrants, and undocumented people alike. They have targeted adults and children. ICE is now holding an average of 170 children in detention each day.

They can do all of this because ICE and CBP are flush with money from last year’s Big Ugly Bill that stripped health insurance and food assistance from Americans while padding the budgets of ICE, CBP, and the Pentagon. The bill provided $170 billion for the Trump-GOP mass deportation agenda and $156 billion for the Pentagon, to be available through September 2029. That includes nearly $75 billion for ICE and more than $58 billion for CBP.

The “regular” annual budgets for ICE and CBP totaled about $33 billion in FY 2025. If legislators funded ICE and CBP at those levels for the current year, combined with funding from the Big Bad Bill, the annual budgets for those agencies would total $64.9 billion (assuming the Big Bad Bill funds are spent equally over the 51 months they’re available). That amounts to a 92% increase over the previous highest funding level for the agencies, which was $33.8 billion in FY 2019; a 209% increase since FY 2024; and a 441% increase since the creation of ICE in FY 2002.

(Sources: OMB, DHS, HR 1/ OBBRA)

This doesn’t even include additional funding to support mass deportations through the Department of Defense and local law enforcement agencies.

The ICE and CBP budgets are soaring at the same time that funding for legal immigration through US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) would get a 23% cut from FY 2024 to FY 2026. And the Big Bad Bill significantly increased fees across categories of legal immigration.

(Sources: OMB, DHS, HR 1/ OBBRA)

The message is clear: This regime is anti-immigrant. This was never about law enforcement, or else the legal paths to immigration would remain open. Instead, budgets for legal immigration are being cut while the Trump regime strips legal status from successive groups of formerly documented immigrants.

The danger is that large numbers of legislators in both parties appear likely to approve relatively even baseline funding levels for ICE and CBP with limited procedural safeguards, while leaving the Big Bad Bill funding intact. The deaths and violence in detention centers and on our streets mean that any additional funding for ICE and CBP will only enable more violence.

In the wee hours of Monday, January 19, US President Donald Trump sent a now-infamous text message to the prime minister of Denmark:

Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America... The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you!

Trump’s brief, belligerent message (full text and analysis here) underscores a stark reality: One man is causing an acceleration of civilizational collapse.

Only hours later, at the annual gathering of world political and financial leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, a general sense of fear and dread enveloped the proceedings. Even Trump’s half-hearted announcement that he wouldn’t use force to acquire Greenland couldn’t lift the gloom. The most memorable speech was that of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who began by saying:

Today, I’ll talk about the rupture in the world order, the end of a nice story, and the beginning of a brutal reality where geopolitics among the great powers is not subject to any constraints... But let’s be clear-eyed about where this leads. A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile, and less sustainable...

Systems scientists have been warning for decades that the current growth-based world economic order is unsustainable, and that it will inevitably become smaller and more simplified during the remainder of the 21st century. This downsizing is likely to be messy and sometimes violent. Meanwhile, observers who focus on geopolitics have argued that the US, which built a global empire during the 20th century, is already showing signs of decline in several respects, and that China is poised to become the next global superpower, if only briefly (that is, until the viability of global superpowers is itself outworn).

What is surprising is that this unraveling of the old order is accelerating so suddenly—and doing so largely thanks to just one man. During the last couple of decades, experts on societal collapse discussed whether the “Great Unraveling” would be a slow erosion over decades or a fast disintegration over mere years. The latest evidence (including Trump’s Greenland text) tips the scales toward a faster collapse scenario.

Since this shift is being driven largely by Donald Trump, it’s natural to wonder whether international calm could be restored simply by shunting him aside. There is, after all, growing concern over Trump’s health. (His sleepiness during daytime, his slurred speech, and his frequent frustrated fumbling for the correct word—in his Davos speech he called Greenland “Iceland” four times—have raised questions about his fitness for the job). The US Constitution provides two methods for removing an unfit president: impeachment, and the invocation of the 25th Amendment. Few informed observers of the American political scene expect either of these remedies to be implemented soon. Even if they were, Trump’s actions in the past year have irrevocably undermined stability in the US and globally. If his second presidency were to end tomorrow, Trump likely will have had as decisive an influence on history as pivotal world leaders like Winston Churchill, FDR, Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, or Joseph Stalin.

In this article we’ll explore how and why the march toward collapse is hastening, and what this trend has to do with Trump’s failure to understand social power. We’ll also explore what individuals can do in response to increasing signs of societal instability.

Three Elements—and Three Tools—of Social Power

The conclusions about Trump and accelerating societal unraveling stated above are rooted in my studies of the nature of power (see my book Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival and its related limited-run podcast). Every large society, from ancient kingdoms to modern industrial empires, has had to master three elements of social power—i.e., the ability to get other people to do things. The essential problem for would-be leaders of large societies is to enlist the populace to fight wars, build pyramids (or other significant structures and institutions), and increase economic activity. But what motivates people? Typically, they respond to coercion, enticements, and persuasion. If these are the three elements of social power, then it follows that the three main tools of social power are weapons, money, and communication technologies. In the book I trace the development of these tools, and the social consequences of their progressive development and use.

In Power I also point out that there are two basic types of social power—vertical and horizontal. Vertical power is top-down, exercised through threats and punishments: “You must do this, or else,” or “If you do this, I’ll give you that.” Horizontal power is mutual and cooperative: “We can do this together”; it arises through inspiration and negotiation. Democracies tend to rely more on horizontal social power, and autocracies more on vertical power; but durable large societies seem to demand both.

When we see the military of Canada (CANADA??!!) modeling war plans for inflicting maximum casualties on US troops in the event of an invasion, it’s fair to conclude that old alliances are coming unglued fast.

Trump seems reflexively to rely solely on vertical social power—the use of threats and bribes. With such means, he has taken control of the Republican Party, won the presidency twice, and dominated Congress to the point that it has become virtually inert. He has been successful largely because horizontal power relationships in the US have been under increasing strain during the last few decades for several reasons, notably fast-rising economic inequality. From one perspective, his achievements are remarkable. Trump seems to understand power better than any other leader on the national stage. But his understanding of power is one-dimensional.

Trump seems profoundly ignorant of, or indifferent to, horizontal power. He has squandered the goodwill of allies and needlessly created international enemies. Again, Carney at Davos:

The multilateral institutions on which the middle powers have relied—the WTO, the UN, the COP—the architecture, the very architecture of collective problem solving are under threat. And as a result, many countries are drawing the same conclusions: that they must develop greater strategic autonomy, in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance and supply chains... Call it what it is—a system of intensifying great power rivalry, where the most powerful pursue their interests, using economic integration as coercion.

Even authoritarian nations, if they’re to outlive their leader, need buy-in from citizens and allies. Chinese citizens, for example, expect stability and predictability while rapid economic growth improves their economic prospects. They also know that they will face severe penalties if they speak out against the regime, and they (mostly) willingly comply. Americans, however, thanks to Trump’s poor understanding of power, can now expect much less stability and predictability amid economic stagnation or even reversal. And many will be increasingly unwilling to comply.

Vertical Power Alone Is Fragile

Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller recently told CNN’s Jake Tapper,

...[Y]ou can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world... that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.

Trump is not the first world leader to rely almost exclusively on vertical social power. History is replete with authoritarian regimes and tyrants. Here’s an excerpt from a 3,000-year-old cuneiform text from the Assyrian Empire:

I am Tiglath Pileser the powerful king, the supreme King of Lashanan; King of the four regions, King of all Kings, Lord of Lords, the supreme Monarch of all Monarchs, the illustrious chief who under the auspices of the Sun god, being armed with the scepter and girt with the girdle of power over mankind, rules over all the people of Bel; the mighty Prince whose praise is blazoned forth among the Kings...

Pileser sounds positively Trumpian.

But vertical social power, on its own, often tends to lead to revolution, coup d-état, assassination, or war. Some historical authoritarian dynasties lasted centuries (China offers several examples). However, the lifetime of many modern authoritarian regimes has been brief (for example, Pol Pot ruled Cambodia for only four years). Concentrating the power of the state in one man often makes the glue that holds the nation together more brittle. What does the future hold for Russia after Putin? Why is the post-Gaddafi regime in Libya so frail? Strongmen tend to leave power vacuums in their wake, along with weakened social institutions. The fall of a strongman doesn’t always make way for a vibrant democracy; more often, it leads to chaos and a string of other short-term strongmen. In the case of Trump, the strongman is already old and (in many observers’ opinions) infirm. He’s not overwhelmingly popular, and his likely successors are even less so. The inevitable end of Trump’s rule, whether it occurs in days or years, will leave the US far more polarized and unruly than it was in 2016 when he was first elected.

Internationally, the US system of alliances that was patiently built over seven decades has not adapted well to Trump’s style of threats and bullying. When we see the military of Canada (CANADA??!!) modeling war plans for inflicting maximum casualties on US troops in the event of an invasion, it’s fair to conclude that old alliances are coming unglued fast. And that means global peril for both peace and trade. Trump is not a solely American problem.

Power Tools as Engines of Destruction

In Donald Trump’s hands, the perennial tools of power are becoming engines of destruction.

• Weapons and coercion: From the earliest kingdoms to today’s modern states, it is men with weapons who have conquered or defended territory and countered domestic unrest. Trump’s use of the military, and threats of its use, are not just turning away allies, but also presenting his officers with intractable moral and strategic problems. Meanwhile, he is deploying troops to US cities against the wishes of governors and mayors. The possible results are explored in an article by Claire Finkelstein ominously titled “We Ran High-Level US Civil War Simulations. Minnesota Is Exactly How They Start.” Finkelstein writes, “The core danger we identified is now emerging: a violent confrontation between state and federal military forces in a major American city.”

• Money and enticements: All organized societies gather and exert social power through their control of currencies and trade. Early in his second term, Trump announced hefty tariffs on imports from nearly all nations. While he has waffled on the percentage amount of those tariffs, they are still in effect and having a chilling effect on global commerce. In April, in response to tariffs, Canadian prime minister Carney announced that the 80-year period of American economic leadership was over. The US dollar, which has been the world’s reserve currency since 1946, is now increasingly perceived as toxic. A stampede to ditch the dollar would impoverish all who are invested in it; instead, countries seem to be quietly exiting dollar-denominated holdings. The inevitable result will be a decline in the value of the dollar and in US living standards.

• Communication technologies and persuasion: From the invention of writing in ancient kingdoms to the spread of social media and AI deepfakes in the present, communications tools have been used to induce large numbers of people to think and behave in ways leaders (or “influencers”) want them to. Inspiration, threats, promises, and warnings motivate voting, fighting, and buying. Democracies typically value science and unfettered fact-based journalism. Autocracies usually spew propaganda. The Trump administration has been labeled a tabloid presidency by Timothy L. O’Brien, who worked with Trump for the 2006 biography, TrumpNation, and who compares the president’s leadership style to tabloid magazines like the Weekly World News, with its focus on “dubious,” “trashy,” and “lunatic” stories designed to “knock readers back on their heels.” The administration has attacked mainstream news outlets that have been critical of it, sometimes employing the government’s regulatory powers as a cudgel. Trump’s false claims are so frequent that professional fact-checkers are employed by mainstream print and broadcast news organizations solely to spot, count, and refute them. Meanwhile, through a combination of verbal threats and funding cuts, the Trump administration is assaulting science, medicine, culture, and education. For example, the administration no longer gathers or publishes information about climate change, including both raw data and scientific research.

What to Do?

As I explained at some length in a recent article (which includes lots of resources and advice), local action to build community resilience is the antidote to national and global unraveling. Notice the persistent bonds of horizontal power holding your community together and engage in activities that build social ties. Strengthen local institutions, from credit unions to food co-ops. Identify and participate in international networks of trust and mutual aid, such as the Global Democracy Coalition. And learn from people in other parts of the world who have lived through authoritarian takeovers or successfully opposed them.

Build community resilience wherever you are. My organization, Post Carbon Institute, has produced books, articles, reports, and podcasts—as well as webinars and an online course—to help, and there are other organizations working along complementary lines. Our friends at Shareable have developed a fantastic set of guides (Mutual Aid 101) for anyone interested in starting a mutual aid initiative in their own community.

Collapse is accelerating. So must our efforts to build personal and community resilience. Don’t cower in front of your screen. Get out and join with others in projects to make your town stronger and more socially and environmentally sustainable.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

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

Today we discuss:

•  Will a raging measles outbreak in South Carolina, which has infected more than 900 people and become the largest U.S. outbreak in recent history, become another pandemic?

•  Tech is messing with the search for Nancy Guthrie: Before AI, proof of life could be established by having a hostage take a picture holding a newspaper or talking on the phone. Now you can mimic someone’s voice or image in photos, videos and audio, known as “deepfakes.” You can also devise fake documents, like passports.

• A U.S. immigration court terminated the Trump administration’s attempt to deport Tufts University student and pro-Palestinian activist Rümeysa Öztürk, a Ph.D. student from Turkey, for her essay criticizing Israel. Meanwhile, ICE is arousing the ire of judges across the country for willfully defying their orders.

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When Bad Bunny took the Super Bowl halftime stage, he performed one of the most beautiful examples of refusal I have witnessed in a long time.

In a moment when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are conducting mass raids in American cities designed as a spectacle for social media, when families are being torn apart and warehoused in cages in hastily constructed concentration camps, when President DonaldTrump calls Somali immigrants “garbage,” Bad Bunny showed up as the embodiment of flourishing. Vibrant. Alive. Unapologetically present, resulting in the most watched Super Bowl halftime in history.

And that presence, those enormous ratings, and that contagious joy was too much for some white supremacists to bear. I do not recommend you waste your time on Trump's knockoff social media to understand his eugenic ideology. You know what he wrote without looking, and Fox News will parrot it for him anyways.

As a psychologist who studies the roots of my discipline in eugenics, I recognized immediately what made this performance so threatening, so necessary, so brilliant. While Bad Bunny was leaving us speechless at America's most-watched sporting event, he was refusing the fundamental premise of a resurgent eugenic ideology that has always been about one question: What should America look like?

Trump Is a Knockoff Eugenicist

The resemblance between our current moment and the height of the eugenics movement is striking, and it is very intentional. Donald Trump is driven by the same goals as those who shaped American policy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Eugenics was a pseudoscientific movement aimed at "improving" the human population by deciding who was worthy of reproducing and who deserved to live in America. Through forced sterilizations (that famous Buck v Bell case that you may have heard about allowed for this), immigration restrictions, and pseudoscientific classifications, eugenicists worked to eliminate people they deemed genetically inferior, always targeting immigrants, people of color, the disabled, and the poor. The movement operated by equating non-white and certain immigrant groups with violence and insanity.

In the US, the struggle to fuse whiteness and being American has been central to our national politics.

In the 19th century, academic psychiatrists shamefully claimed that Black people were psychologically unfit for freedom. Medical journals described "drapetomania" as an alleged illness that caused enslaved African Americans to run away from their white masters. Another fabricated condition, "dysaesthesia aethiopica," was characterized as a form of madness manifest by "rascality" and "disrespect for the master's property," supposedly cured by "extensive whipping."

Today, we see carbon copies of this dehumanization. Trump shares videos depicting the Obamas as monkeys. His administration unconstitutionally deports our neighbors to Venezuela, treating human beings as disposable contaminants. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem stages photo ops at concentration camps, transforming sites of human suffering into backdrops for political theater.

Manufacturing Exclusion Through "Science"

My discipline of psychology, under the guise of rationality and objectivity, has been able to cause tremendous harm. This is the trick of eugenic projects: By cloaking racist ideology under the seemingly objective rubric of biological science, it becomes nearly impossible to discern or critique. Psychology created the institutional infrastructure that made them policy. IQ tests are one of these manufactured tricks. In 1912, immigrants arriving at Ellis Island became the first group to have these tests administered to them. And like today, different classes experienced different encounters with justice, as the Epstein Files make so palpable for us. Back in 1912, only those in steerage were subject to examination; those who could afford more posh accommodations were exempt. According to the supposed "scientific" results produced by psychologist Henry Goddard, over 80% of all Jewish, Polish, Italian, Hungarian, and Russian immigrants were "feeble-minded defectives."

Carl Brigham, one of these eugenic psychologists, went on to develop the SAT. The direct line from eugenic IQ tests to college gatekeeping runs straight through to today. Current "merit-based immigration" proposals echo this same logic: using supposedly objective measures to determine who deserves to be American, who gets to stay, whose children get opportunities.

And these psychologists have frequently collaborated with the US government, including in recent decades when they helped the government devise the most effective torture methods, breaking many ethics codes along the way. Lewis Terman, a psychologist who worked on the Army intelligence tests in the early 20th century, bragged that the exam "enabled psychology to become a beacon of light in the eugenics movement" and was especially proud of how these tests could be used to reshape national policy on immigrants. Terman’s wish was unfortunately granted, and these eugenic legacies were braided into the fabric of American policy including immigration law, education, criminal justice, voting rights.

Deportation as Eugenic Self-Defense

Between 1875 and 1924, Congress entertained many immigration bills and if we study them we can see the strategies that are playing out today with more clarity as well. For instance in 1915, Assistant Attorney General LE Cofer was openly advocating deportations on eugenic grounds. Another legislation in 1917 allotted a five-year period for deportation of immigrants who were later found to be in "excludible classes." Deportations were considered by these eugenicists as self-defense. In 1928, Eugenical News listed as a priority "the deportation of all aliens illegally entered." They wrote: "The man whose introduction to American life comes through breaking the quota act is prima facie an undesirable."

The eugenic resurgence fueled by the terror of losing dominance fuels the crises we are living through today.

This is sounding eerily familiar, isn't it? Listen to current administration officials. Trump. Pam Bondi. JD Vance. Karoline Leavitt. This exact rhetoric is being repeated today. Equating people from other countries with criminals is a basic eugenic principle. Today's "border crisis" framing, the claims that undocumented immigrants are inherently criminal, the mass deportation plans, these are old-school eugenic principles with a fresh coat of white paint.

In the US, the struggle to fuse whiteness and being American has been central to our national politics. Immigrants during the height of eugenics were viewed as interlopers; along with Black Americans, they were seen as less pure bodies polluting the well-being of the entire country. Psychologists and other supposed experts made these sentiments appear scientifically valid and politically viable by arming themselves with photographs, charts, statistics, and quantified statements.

The Great Replacement, Then and Now

The goal of these eugenicists was "bettering and protecting the white race," the same obsession we see in the Great Replacement Theory today. This is not fringe conspiracy anymore. In 2022, a white supremacist murdered 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket, explicitly motivated by Great Replacement ideology. In 2019, another killed 23 people at an El Paso Walmart, targeting Latinx shoppers with the same beliefs. Tucker Carlson promotes this theory every chance he gets. Congressional Republicans now use this language openly, warning about "demographic replacement" and the need to preserve "Western civilization."

History has taught us that progress toward justice can be met with pushback, and the burden of this pushback is often heaviest on those who for various reasons have fewer resources to defend themselves. Eugenics never left us. It transmuted, it became absorbed into insidious institutions, into redlining, into the school system, into the carceral state. But there were also real movements toward justice, civil rights organizers, community activists, families, and advocates who fought for decades to untangle eugenic legacies from our policies and institutions. They won important victories. And it is precisely these gains that white supremacists cannot bear. When the status of their imagined racial hierarchy is questioned, when their power is genuinely threatened, they respond with violence and state power. The eugenic resurgence fueled by the terror of losing dominance fuels the crises we are living through today.

Economic Scapegoating as Eugenic Strategy

Eugenicist Robert Ward, influential in getting the Immigration Act of 1924 passed, said with awful transparency: "We constantly speak of the need of more hands to do our labor. We forget that we are importing not hands alone but bodies also." Eugenicists repeatedly claimed to champion American workers while actually protecting white supremacy. It was never about labor, it was about bodies, about whose body was to be protected and whose body was to be disposable.

Where Trump represents all-consuming exclusion, Bad Bunny embodied refusal, joy, and reunification.

Today's anti-immigrant rhetoric follows the same script. Trump campaigned on protecting working-class jobs from immigrant "invasion," despite no evidence of that happening. But his administration's actual policies tell a different story: Mass deportations intensify the already overwhelming labor shortage in the construction industry, creating labor shortages that hurt local economies as farms and business are forced to close. Meanwhile, the administration busts unions, enriches billionaire donors (under Trump billionaires have gotten $1.5 trillion richer in the past year) and himself, and imposes tariffs that drive up prices for working families.

Many voted for Trump because they desperately wanted someone to address economic inequity. Instead, they got eugenic scapegoating, blaming immigrants for problems caused by the wealthy and powerful. The claim is protecting American workers. The reality is a war on poor and working people of all backgrounds, while the rich face zero accountability for devastating our communities.

Bad Bunny's Counternarrative

Which brings us back to the Super Bowl halftime show. The great American sport. The NFL. And there, at the center of it all, was an unabashed celebration of the Americans who are very much the target of ICE's raids today.

Bad Bunny didn't offer a speech or a slogan. He offered his entire being. The visual references to Hurricane Maria were unmistakable, the storm that killed nearly 3,000 Puerto Ricans while Trump threw paper towels and claimed they "want everything done for them." The ongoing refusal of statehood. The deliberate undercount of the death toll. This is eugenic neglect: the decision to let "undesirable" populations suffer and die because their lives are deemed less valuable.

The whole performance was dynamic, alive, vibrating with joy. It refused the fusion of whiteness and American identity that eugenics has always demanded. This is resistance through presence braided with brilliant critical analysis. Resistance through flourishing in his full humanity, in the full humanity of his community, on the biggest stage in America. Where Trump represents all-consuming exclusion, Bad Bunny embodied refusal, joy, and reunification. Not just saying but doing. His presence was an embodiment of flourishing that the eugenic imagination cannot accommodate.

The only thing stronger than hate is love.

What This Moment Demands of Us

Understanding eugenics helps us understand the present. It reveals that what we're witnessing is not an aberration but a recurrence, a resurgence of an ideology with a long life, an ideology that has been picked up by many political agendas over the decades. Trump has never been original once his entire life.

In my studies, I look at who is considered criminal or immoral. It has always been the immigrant. The disabled. It has always been Black people and people of color. Studying eugenics teaches us that policies presented as common sense, as economic necessity, as protecting American workers, as maintaining order, they are often merely covers for racial elimination.

He showed up and said: This is America too.

Our communities cannot be eliminated. "Seguimos aquí"—we are still here—Bad Bunny ended the performance with those words. Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio refused to be erased, refused to shrink, refused to disappear. Showing up with joy is indeed a form of power, and gorgeous, infectious resistance. While the administration builds concentration camps, rips apart families, and unleashes violence against communities exercising their constitutional rights, Bad Bunny danced, swaggered, made us all fall in love with freedom itself. He showed up and said: This is America too.

That kind of presence, that kind of refusal, that kind of joy, it's too much for the eugenicists to bear.

Let's do more of this, America.

Last week, the US government announced it would be sending $6 million in aid to Cuba, on top of the $3 million it sent in January after Hurricane Melissa. This aid package might appear contrary to the significant escalation of the 66-year-long US criminal blockade, which has expanded to an all-out fuel blockade since December, with attacks on Venezuela, but it is in fact a core tenet of it.

This maneuver seeks to exploit the US-manufactured energy and fuel crisis to bolster opposition groups, substantiate propaganda against the Cuban government and revolution, and force the island into total dependency and submission to the United States. This frankly genocidal strategy closely mirrors that of the US and Israeli “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation,” and the weaponization of starvation and aid for colonial and imperialist ends. In both Cuba and Gaza, this is a deliberate strategy by the US to make people suffer from its actions, then place blame on the governing authority to justify regime change.

In November of last year, the US first announced an aid package to Cuba in response to Hurricane Melissa. While the hurricane hit the east of the island with force, Cuba did not suffer mass casualties and crisis because of the people-first policies of the Cuban government, which continues to distribute resources and prevent casualties from natural disasters, despite US suffocation.

Hurricane Melissa killed over 54 people in Jamaica, at least 43 people in Haiti, four in the Dominican Republic, yet only one person in Cuba. The success of the Cuban government’s response is not only totally ignored by the US organizations, but also used to justify operations and propaganda. For instance, the Archdiocese of Miami said about its aid distribution: “Dozens were killed, mostly in Jamaica and Haiti, but Cuba’s weakening economic situation prompted action from a small group of donors.” Surely, when a country’s response to a natural disaster is to successfully evacuate 735,000 people, prevent a major death toll, and prioritize people’s survival, it is worthy of praise. Of course, this would be in total opposition to the US propaganda line that Cuba is a “failed state.”

In Cuba and Palestine, the US is manufacturing a crisis in order to push blame onto the governments that the imperialist power seeks to topple.

When Hurricane Katrina hit the US in 2005, Cuba offered a medical brigade of 1,586 doctors and 37 tons of medical supplies. The US refused outright. The hurricane and lack of response led to the deaths of over 1,800 people, many due to a lack of medical assistance and supplies, some of which Cuba could have provided, and 1.5 million people were displaced—many have never returned. The US government was happy to let people die rather than to accept the unconditional help of a Cuban medical brigade, which underscores its willingness to sacrifice its own population to pursue its aggression against Cuba. The stark difference between the US and Cuba in responding to natural disasters is at its core the polarity between a war economy based on extraction and profit, and a peace economy based on solidarity and common well-being.

Siege on Cuba, Siege on Gaza

The same genocidal motivations for the US-Israeli siege on Gaza have been imposed to isolate and suffocate Cuba. The US has banned the entry of goods into Cuba, imposed a total blockade on oil, and increased sanctions, which cause billions of dollars in losses each year, which is impoverishing the country. While it suffocates the infrastructure of even and efficient food distribution in Cuba, the US aid is being given only to the Catholic Church and US-backed NGOs, specifically to bypass distribution through the state. This is eerily consistent with the US and Israel’s horrific and deadly “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).” In Gaza, they laid a total barbaric siege on Gaza, refused the entry of any goods and aid, and banned international aid groups in order to justify US mercenaries providing meager amounts of aid between firing bullets. The US and Israel massacred at least 2,603 people and wounded 19,034 more at GHF distribution points. There was absolutely no accountability for or action against these barbaric killing fields.

In both Palestine and Cuba, the US is overtly and brazenly violating the humanitarian principle of working with governments in affected countries. It is using the same propaganda lines to do so. For Cuba, the US says it is “bypassing regime interference, and ensuring transparency and accountability” and that the aid is “part of a broader effort to stand with the Cuban people as they seek a better future.” For Gaza, the US says it is “the only viable way to get aid into Gaza without empowering Hamas” and “is a results-focused alternative to a broken aid system.”

In both places, the US openly claims it is undermining governments and organizations that it claims “steal” the aid. This accusation is a confession. Israeli occupation forces (IOF) set on fire, burnt, and buried more than 1,000 trucks of aid in Gaza as Israel manufactured a famine that killed at least 10,000 people, and for which the United Nations described as the “failure of humanity itself.” An IOF reservist said he “accompanied aid convoys supplying a militia in Rafah” and Israeli security added “closed boxes with unknown contents” to justify lies that Hamas was weaponizing aid. Israel also funded and coordinated militia groups in Gaza to loot aid, and protected Israeli settlers looting and destroying aid from trucks. Not to mention the many videos of IOF soldiers gleefully and jeeringly consuming this food aid. All of these actions, with the brazen refusal to allow passage for thousands of aid trucks in Gaza, provided the conditions to justify the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” and its killing fields.

Similarly, it is the United States that is stopping goods from entering Cuba. Since 1962, the US has imposed a blockade that bans all trade and economic activity with Cuba. This is banned outright in the US with severe consequences, and spans the entire world, as the US imposes secondary sanctions, tariffs, and other punitive measures against any country, organization, company, or individual that does not comply with its blockade. In recent weeks and months, this has been tightened further. No oil has entered Cuba since December, and the government has rolled out a plan to ration limited energy for only the most urgent uses, such as hospitals, schools, and food. Cuba can no longer fuel airplanes, which may halt all air travel. The US, on one hand, is threatening tariffs and sanctions on any country that tries to trade oil and goods with Cuba, and on the other, it is pushing propaganda that the country is not able to feed and provide energy for its people. In Cuba and Palestine, the US is manufacturing a crisis in order to push blame onto the governments that the imperialist power seeks to topple.

Made in Israel and Miami

The aid is also political at its source. All supplies through the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” were from Israeli suppliers, directly creating profit for Israeli venture capitalists, tech investors, and other occupation personnel like Michael Eisenberg, Liran Tancman, and Yotam HaCohen. It also funneled public funds into private and shady mercenary companies, UG Solutions and Safe Reach Solutions. This strategy utilizes aid as a weapon of colonial regime-change efforts, with the US aiming to install its proxies firmly in power in Cuba and Palestine, in opposition to the interests and will of the people.

For those of us invested in a better world based on humanity, it is imperative we stand steadfast with Palestinians and Cubans as they struggle against the most barbarous face of the US empire.

The US aid supplies to Cuba originate in Miami, Florida, long known as the site of the most vocal and brazen pro-US, fascist sentiments in the Cuban diaspora. The aid is being distributed by the Catholic Church and Caritas, a US-funded NGO set up in 1991 during the ‘Special Period’ in Cuba, which has funded regime-change operations on the island. Catholic Relief Services, one of the three organizations in Caritas North America, receives over half of its funding ($1.5 billion) directly from the US government. The other organization involved is the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Miami, which was the architect of the covert CIA “Operation Pedro Pan,” where over 14,000 Cuban children were taken from their homes to the US in the years after the revolution. Also included on the board of the charity is Justice of the Supreme Court of Florida, John Couriel. The headline $9 million figure of aid to Cuba is being absorbed by organizations like this. In fact, in 2024, over 72% of all US aid to Cuba went to US organizations. This must pose the urgent question of how much of this aid is a way to direct resources to opposition groups in Cuba under the guise of sending food.

Gathering Intelligence

The strategy of deploying aid also pertains to a significant element of covert surveillance and intelligence. At the end of January last year, the US deployed around 100 mercenaries, mostly former US Special Forces soldiers, to patrol Gaza and set up the deadly “aid hubs.” US soldiers shot and killed starving Palestinians seeking aid while cheering and ordering Domino’s Pizza. These sites were death traps, used to lure Palestinians into an area where they were surveiled and shot at. People risked their lives to receive a meager amount of aid that was often rotten. It has been revealed that a significant element of this operation was surveillance. A UG Solutions contractor revealed that American and Israeli soldier-spies are using facial recognition software “on top of real-time footage of distribution sites” from CCTV and aerial surveillance footage. This was beyond merely a method of massacre, but of surveillance through the proxy of “aid.” The US and Israel confirmed there was surveillance after specifically recruiting intelligence operatives.

Similarly, the State Department announced that US government officials have been “making sure that the regime does not take the assistance, divert it, try to politicize it.” They went on to explain that “we have been watching” and “speaking with everyday Cubans…understanding the challenges they have been facing, both in the wake of the hurricane and due to the broader humanitarian crisis in Cuba.” This is worrying, as it is clear the US is using this as an opportunity, in tandem with NGO networks, to collect intelligence and push pro-US propaganda and lies across the country under the guise of “aid.”

In both Cuba and Palestine, the United States is deploying its barbaric methods of producing mass suffering in order to bring about political and economic submission. The tactics being used in distributing aid in Cuba now are a softer model of the killing fields in Gaza that seek to force the entire population into submission and occupy the entirety of Palestine.

Beyond this playbook, it is important to recognize the historic connections between Palestine and Cuba, particularly as they resist the violence of the US empire that seeks to starve them into submission. Cuba was one of 13 countries to vote against the UN partition of Palestine in 1947; in the months after the triumph of the revolution, Che Guevara and Raúl Castro traveled to Gaza; they were one of the first to recognize the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1964; they severed all ties with Israel in 1973; and labelled Israel’s action a genocide in 1979. Since 1982, Cuba has been providing education for Palestinian students in Cuba; it helped to get Palestine observer status at the United Nations in 2012; it supported South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice in 2024; and has been one of Palestine’s staunchest supporters diplomatically and materially.

This historic friendship and solidarity are what the United States fears. This is why it is hellbent on destroying the Cuban Revolution and its continued ability to provide for its people, while refusing to let US companies pillage and extract from the island and its inhabitants. For those of us invested in a better world based on humanity, it is imperative we stand steadfast with Palestinians and Cubans as they struggle against the most barbarous face of the US empire. The situation is urgent and requires action. Like Fidel Castro said to the UN in 1979: “If we do not resolve today’s injustices and inequalities peacefully and wisely, the future will be apocalyptic.”

Right now, Americans are rightly alarmed by profound assaults on our democracy. Less in the limelight, but of critical importance, is the substantial backsliding and ongoing procrastination on the climate crisis. While the broader anti-democracy movement and stalling climate policy are both being driven by a highly destructive Trump Administration, too little attention has been devoted to exploring their common roots. Indeed, these issues may seem, at the surface, to be unrelated, or so vast that they require their own solutions.

However, if we want to make progress on either front, we need to understand just how deeply our climate and democracy crises are connected. They not only share roots but also feed into each other.

One of the most impactful threads tying these crises together is the misuse of corporate-led lobbying, Super PAC donations, and dark money groups. The biggest aggressor here is the fossil fuel industry. In 2022, companies including Exxon Mobil and Shell spent $124.4 million on lobbying. In 2023, the Congressional Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC, received nearly $1 million from oil and gas companies. Plus, organizations like Republican Attorney General Association (RAGA) and other political advocacy groups are funded largely by dark money and corporations. RAGA, for example, received nearly $6 million in donations from gas and oil companies from 2020-2024.

Likewise on the individual level, Kelcy Warren--whose company is behind the Dakota Access Pipeline--donated around $18 million across Trump’s three campaigns. CEO of one the country’s largest oil companies, Timothy Dunn shelled out $5 million to Trump-backed super PACS in 2024.

All this private influence overpowers the will of American voters. Over half of us want a shift to clean energy, with even young Republicans supporting investing in clean energy and funding states to address the climate crisis. Despite this clear consensus, little progress has been made because of our campaign finance laws.

Disinformation is another powerful shared root of our climate and democracy crises. It threatens our democracy: Fake news stories have had real political consequences in our elections. In 2024, for example, we saw how destructive narratives surrounding undocumented immigrants eating pets and receiving hurricane relief funds had real sway on voters.

When it comes to the climate crisis, the same issues persist. A meta-study conducted by the International Panel on the Information Environment found that corporations, conservative politicians, and even national governments have contributed to rampant climate misinformation. It's not news that Trump is a key contributor here, having “called climate science ‘a giant hoax’ and ‘bullshit.’” And, too, it’s well documented that oil companies such as Exxon Mobil have for decades deliberately “led a coordinated effort to spread disinformation to mislead the public and prevent crucial action to address climate change.”

Election and climate disinformation feed off of our declining trust in each other and institutions that serve the common good. A 2025 Partnership for Public Service survey found that only a third of Americans trust the federal government, for example.

We can see the cycle of disinformation and distrust play out among climate change skeptics. A Pew Research Center survey found that many feel apprehensive when faced with “alarmist” facts about the climate. Participants feel suspicious that climate change advocates have a secret agenda—a problem fueled by a lack of trust and disinformation which only further perpetuates the issue. But here’s the kicker: This dynamic has opened the door for fossil fuel companies to control narratives about the climate crisis.

Absent fact-checking tools and coupled with the unregulated rise of generative AI, mis/dis-information will continue to circulate online with significant impact on how people vote and understand of key issues including the climate crisis.

Addressing these deep issues—from money in politics to waning trust—takes work. But he stakes are high and the harm to communities are real, so we must tackle these roots.

It comes as no surprise that climate chaos disproportionately impacts marginalized communities including people of color, low-income communities, children, the elderly, and those who reside in coastal communities. An uneven distribution of resources needed to prepare for climate disasters and recover from them is also a key part of the problem.

It’s no coincidence that the populations most impacted by the climate crisis are the same communities that have been systemically disenfranchised in our democracy. Take the disenfranchisement of Black voters: laws preventing felons from voting are one of many tactics used to stifle the Black vote. Note our prison population is notably disproportionately Black due to decades of discriminatory mass incarceration practices including over policing. This systemic exclusion means that citizens—particularly the most impacted—are denied a voice on the very issues that most harm them.

Clearly the playing field is deeply uneven: Corporate powers wreak havoc on our communities all while undermining the democratic process through campaign financing and misinformation. Meanwhile, as Trump violently deploys ICE agents to wreak havoc in Minneapolis and beyond, he pillages the woods next door (note Congress’s revocation of a 20-year mining moratorium in Minnesota’s boundary waters this January).

There’s no denying that climate chaos and democracy are deeply interrelated. The task at hand is substantial, but by digging to these shared roots, we can form the broad coalitions and solidaristic networks of cross-issue advocates that we need to build a more just and democratic world for all.

News broke this week that President Donald Trump was conditioning approval of an infrastructure spending bill on renaming New York City’s Penn Station and Washington’s Dulles Airport in his honor. It was unsurprising because there’s a disturbing pattern in Mr. Trump’s approach to governing that includes the glorification of the leader, the erasure of norms, the use of threats of retribution to stifle critics, and a reliance on “alternate facts” to keep the faithful in tow.

Because I am once again writing about President Trump, I know that some will accuse me of having what the president calls “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” I confess to being obsessed with his incendiary speech, his behavior, and the movement he has inspired, precisely because of the danger they pose to American democracy.

During Mr. Trump’s first term we dreaded turning on the news each morning and learning about the threatening tweets he had posted overnight. But because there were guardrails in place—senior staff who would slow walk his demands or simply refuse to act on them, or Congress or the courts that served as a check on his behavior—most often the threats turned out to be hollow.

As has been noted, in his second term, because the guardrails are gone, the president has become emboldened to move beyond empty words to actions which his minions faithfully attempt to execute. As a result, we are entering uncharted waters in which an imperial presidency is testing the resilience of our system of “checks and balances.”

Entering the second year of his second term in office, the pattern is clear. He employs bullying tactics to get his way—with other individuals, institutions, or countries. He “floods the zone,” disorienting opponents by daily confronting them with a barrage of new challenges. And following lessons learned from his mentor, Roy Cohn, he always attacks, never admits mistakes, and always claims victory.

In just the past few weeks, Mr. Trump has undertaken several deeply disturbing initiatives. Individually, each pose a problem, but when viewed collectively they suggest something far more ominous.

He ordered the FBI to seize the 2020 election ballots from Fulton County, Georgia, presumably because he still believes he was cheated out of victory—even though the official who controlled the Georgia balloting in 2020 was a Republican. It is unprecedented for a president to take an action of this sort and to accompany it with a statement saying:

"Remember, the states are merely an 'agent' for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes…They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”

In this one statement, the president calls for violating the Constitution and the prerogative it gives states in running elections. And by equating himself with the federal government and saying that when he speaks, he does so on behalf of and for the good of the country, he is laying the groundwork for an imperial presidency.

The president also made what appears to be a spur of the moment decision to shutter the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He said that the reason for closing the Center was that the building was in such disrepair that it was a danger to patrons. However, given that just a few days before the announced closure, the White House had used this very same venue to host the premiere of the documentary about his wife “Melania,” insiders suggest another reason behind the abrupt decision to shutter the Center.

Unilaterally changing the name of the Center, removing its board, and adding his supporters as board members with himself as chair has made the once-revered institution partisan and toxic. It was losing members and donors, performers were cancelling, and it was bleeding money. Rather than admit defeat, the president shut it down.

One of the president’s earliest actions was to try to bring the nation’s most prestigious universities to heel. He did so by charging them with chronic antisemitism and using “diversity quotas” in hiring and admissions. Because these two issues resonate with his base, he was determined to win. He began by withholding federal grants until universities complied with his demands to rid their campuses of antisemitism (which meant ending protests against Israel) and make admissions and hiring blind. A number of smaller schools submitted to the threats, but Harvard held out. Finally, after a year or fruitless negotiations and threats, the story came out that the White House was backing down on its threat to fine Harvard. This suggestion of defeat so enraged the president that he both denied it and announced that instead of penalizing Harvard $200 million if they didn’t agree to his demands, he was raising Harvard’s penalty to $1 billion, an example of personal peeve becoming policy.

These recent actions by the president are part of a pattern that grows more pronounced each day. He makes decisions unilaterally without regard to the Constitution or established procedure. He acts to punish those who do not submit to his dictates. And he governs as if “L’État, c’est moi.” With the support of a compliant Congress and a base of true believers, right now this president appears to be untouchable. But should he push too far or should Republicans lose control of Congress in November, the tide could turn, leaving Mr. Trump’s effort to create an “Imperial Presidency” to die on the vine.

The decline of Keynesian economic theory in the 1970s marked a tipping point in the evolution of capitalism in the United States. Beginning with the Great Depression, Keynesian economic policy facilitated the expansion of social welfare programs to mitigate the social inequities of the nation's economic system. In the last quarter of the 20th century, however, rising political conservatism targeted public expenditures for social services. Cuts in education and health, including reductions in social welfare programs and the weakening of the social safety network for the poor, were then and continue today to be goals of political conservatives. Conservatives, furthermore, argue that cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations promotes investment, economic growth and job creation; and that smaller government and less regulation of market forces distributes wealth the most equitably. These ideas are variously known as supply-side economics, neoliberal economics or simply “trickle-down theory.” Historically, though, trickle-down theory has failed to benefit American working families. In fact, during the course of the last several decades this market strategy has encouraged vast accumulation of private wealth and accelerated its concentration on both a national and global scale. Tragically, it has had deeply injurious social consequences. The societal crisis America finds itself in today relates directly to extreme concentration of wealth.

Absent effective public regulation of economic activities, government and law protect investors and corporations in their aggressive pursuit of wealth. The distribution of wealth in the U.S. is a primary indicator of who benefits most from the political and legal organization of American society. In the third quarter of 2025, according to Federal Reserve data, the top 1% of Americans held 31.7% of all wealth while the bottom 50% held 2.5% (Federal Reserve 2025). That is the highest concentration of wealth in the post-WWII era (Economic Inequality), greater than almost any other developed country. Another indicator of the government's weak support for workers and their families is the federal minimum wage. It is $7.25/hour. At forty hours per week this represents a monthly income of $1160 and a yearly income of $13,920. In 2025, the federal poverty level for individuals was $15,650 and $32,150 for families of four (Poverty Level). These dismal figures show how dire wages are for many millions of Americans. In real terms (inflation-adjusted) the average wage of American workers peaked 48 years ago in 1978 (Wages Peaked).

If one takes a closer look at wealth concentration and the average American’s opportunity to accrue wealth since the 1970s and 1980s, it offers more evidence of how the last few decades of capitalism's development have denied workers a fair share of the tremendous wealth that has been generated. Indeed, a 2023 Rand Corporation analysis revealed that, since 1975, $79 trillion in wealth had been transferred from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. (Massive Wealth Transfer ). This massive redistribution of wealth continues today. In 2023 alone, $3.9 trillion in wealth was siphoned from working Americans to the richest Americans, enough to give every full-time worker in the bottom 90% a $32,000 raise for the year (2023 Wealth Transfer). When it comes to gaining wealth for the average working American, owning a home is the principal path. Home ownership, however, is completely out of reach for the poor and millions more in today's middle class find it unattainable. The median home price to annual income ratio was 5 in 2025. In other words, the median price of a home was equal to 5 years of salary. The ratio was 3.7 in 1985 when a median-price home was $82,800. Today a median-price home is $416,900. Not only is the distribution of wealth radically unequal, the pathway to increased wealth in home ownership has narrowed dramatically.

The political division and violence in America today stems in large measure from a political system whose policies have encouraged radical disparities in incomes and wealth.

These data amply illustrate the crisis poor and increasingly middle income people in the United States face. The poorest Americans, the bottom 20%, simply do not have enough money to meet their daily needs. Nearly a third of all households lives on less than $50,000 annual income (Household Income). In the richest country in the world 36.8 million Americans live in poverty (Poverty), including 9 million children without adequate access to food, shelter and healthcare (Children). At the same time, the more than 900 billionaires in the U.S. have a collective wealth of $6.9 trillion, their wealth increasing 18% in 2025 alone (Fortune). As reported in Forbes, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, now has wealth of $778 billion (Elon Musk). It would take the average American worker 16 million years to make that much (Extrapolated).

The US government simply has not done enough to ensure that the livelihoods of all Americans are protected in this new Gilded Age. In fact, the government actually provides 40% more benefits to the wealthy than to the impoverished. In his 2023 book Poverty, By America, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Matthew Desmond draws attention to this fact. From recent government data “compiling spending on social insurance, means-tested programs, tax benefits, and financial aid for higher education,” Desmond calculates that the top 20% of income earners on average receives $35,363 in government benefits and individuals in the bottom 20% receive an average $25,733 (p. 99). This reality is a result of policies, policies that benefit wealthy Americans and corporations at the expense of working people. Public policy, in turn, is shaped by corporate lobbying and political contributions as well as professional research that supports goals of the wealthiest and most influential: smaller government, broad corporate deregulation, limited worker protections, and tax breaks favoring the wealthy over working Americans.

It has not always been this way. Between 1947 and 1979, the period when Keynesian economic theory and policies prevailed, “hourly wages grew 2.2 percent. From 1979 to the present, average growth in hourly wages fell to 0.7 percent per year, only one-third of the average rate in the earlier postwar period” (Economic Policy Institute). In the first three decades after WWII labor unions tripled weekly earnings of manufacturing workers across the nation. Collective bargaining gained “for union workers an unprecedented measure of security against old age, illness and unemployment, and, through contractual protections, greatly strengthening their right to fair treatment at the workplace” (Labor Unions). Significantly, one-third of workers (32.3% in 1959) were unionized in this post-war period (Bureau of Labor Statistics ). By 2024, the percentage of wage and salary workers in unions fell to 9.9 percent (Bureau of Labor Statistics). Concentrated wealth, particularly corporate wealth, and government failure to protect workers dampened wages. Also, in the 1950s the statutory taxes on U.S.corporate and personal wealth were much higher, though the effective tax rate was considerably lower due to corporate tax loopholes and rich taxpayers recategorizing income as derived from investments (Tax Rates). The statutory corporate income tax was over 50 percent (Economic Policy Institute). Today it is 21 percent (Corporate Tax). While it is difficult to determine the percentage of taxes actually paid by wealthy individuals and corporations in the early post-war era, it is clear that the statutory personal and corporate income tax is lower today than it was 70 years ago. Of course, enforcement of steeply progressive taxation would make billions of dollars, even trillions, available to fund social programs that distribute income and wealth more fairly.

The pro-democracy citizenry must organize around a political vision that emphasizes several political projects: a just, progressive taxation system; a guaranteed household income; universal healthcare; quality public education; free preschool education; and scientific and technological initiatives for a sustainable economy.

A society riven by such income and wealth inequality is inherently unstable. The political division and violence in America today stems in large measure from a political system whose policies have encouraged radical disparities in incomes and wealth. The loss of 6.5 million manufacturing jobs since 1979 (1979 and 2025), for example, has been facilitated by trade agreements that enable corporations to chase the cheapest wages throughout the world. Runaway companies have gutted industrial towns without consequence, leaving behind poorer communities of people with limited resources to rebuild their lives and neighborhoods. The federal government, moreover, has done virtually nothing to force corporations to pay reparations for the social disintegration left in their wake. As the coastal regions and large metropolitan centers of the nation were generally integrated into the surging commerce of unbridled globalization, distant rural regions experienced economic stagnation and decline. It is little wonder that an authoritarian political figure that exploits these divisions has risen to the presidency of the United States.

In his seminal book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, French economist Thomas Piketty provides an analysis of capitalism in which he notes that “the history of the distribution of wealth has always been deeply political” (p. 20). Reduction of taxes that favors the wealthy is one political determination reflecting the unstemmed power of concentrated wealth. While this political maneuver undermines a primary income and wealth distributive mechanism (taxation system), it further restricts the resources for funding other re-distributive projects such as social welfare, public education and healthcare. Smaller government and privatization of public services are corollary results.

A principal dynamic factor in the process of wealth accumulation and concentration over the last several decades is the growth of profits as the economic growth rate has slowed down. Put another way, the wealthy are taking a larger and larger slice of diminishing income and wealth production. As the vast inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth deny the provision of basic living necessities to tens of millions and circumscribe opportunity for most Americans, social instability and political division and violence escalate. In response, an authoritarian regime consolidates its power around armed force to repress those protesting its anti-democratic policies. Its armed repression inevitably leads to bloodshed.

The pro-democracy citizenry must organize around a political vision that emphasizes several political projects: a just, progressive taxation system; a guaranteed household income; universal healthcare; quality public education; free preschool education; and scientific and technological initiatives for a sustainable economy. These political goals stand in stark contrast to an authoritarian regime that advances the interests of the one percent. They offer a view of the future that is constructive and inspirational, one that generates broad social justice and appeals to the vast majority of Americans.

I’ve been in Washington, DC for the past week battling the icy and snow piled sidewalks and streets, one week after the big snow and ice storm that immobilized the city for days.

While using the city’s buses and Metros, it was very apparent the most probable danger in DC is falling on sidewalk ice and at unshoveled bus stops.

The National Guard, the group that was brought into the city by President Trump for the soc=-called "protection" of the residents of the city, was doing nothing to protect its residents.

Of the thousands of National Guard personnel sent to Washington, every day at least 15 National Guard personnel in groups of three or four were at various corners around the Eastern Market Metro stop. These young men and women in uniform watched as residents slid, climbed over, and fell through piles of snow and ice.

Never did I see one of the young National Guard soldiers help the mothers with babies in strollers that were pushing through piles of snow to get onto a bus or help a person with a cane or walker.

I introduced myself as a retired US Army Reserve Colonel. I asked if their officers had told them not to help residents, something I would have hoped that each would have done out of uniform as pure courtesy toward others. The polite answer, “No ma’am, but that’s not our job. We are to protect you from criminals.”

Have you apprehended any criminals? “No ma’am, but we are always ready.”

Have you thought to ask if the National Guard could buy some shovels for you to help protect citizens from injury? “Yes, but no one has.”

A total of 2,188 National Guard troops have been assigned to the joint task force in Washington, DC, according to a government update reported by the Associated Press. Of those, there are 949 DC National Guard troops, as well as close to 1,200 troops from several outside states, with West Virginia having deployed 416 guardsmen.

So much for a good use of the National Guard deployment in Washington, DC.

If they're going to stay, I have a simple demand: put down the guns and pick up some shovels.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

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

Today we discuss:

•  Investigators are confounded by the lack of a recognizable ideological agenda in a wave of high-profile killings and political violence — shootings, a bombing, a planned drone attack — by assailants who were not Democrat or Republican, or Islamist militant, or antifa or white supremacist. They declare their contempt for humanity and a desire to see the collapse of civilization. It’s a contemporary strain of nihilism, the philosophical stance that arose in the 19th century to deny the existence of moral truth.

• The Sun Rises Also: Right-wing LDP Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi won a landslide victory in a snap election, marking a historic turnaround for her party. Japan’s first female leader enjoys sky-high approval ratings and a glowing endorsement from Trump. She has also signaled the return of Japan as an aggressive military power in the Pacific.

• Israel to allow settler-colonists to purchase Palestinian land in the West Bank without Palestinian approval. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said, “We will continue to bury the idea of a Palestinian state.” “We are anchoring settlement as an inseparable part of Israel’s government policy,” said Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz. Is annexation inevitable?

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Those who cut our artificial stone countertops are breathing in silica dust and dying. Not just a few. In fact, so many that in Australia they’ve banned the product and adopted safer substitutes. In the US, however, the industry wants to ban workers from suing the manufacturers and Republicans are doing their bidding, introducing H.R. 5437, The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Stone Slab Products Act.

Dr. David Michaels, the former head of OSHA, points us to California’s tearless Silicosis Surveillance Dashboard: 511 cases of silicosis have been diagnosed among these workers; 29 have died (average age 46); 54 underwent lung transplants; and 98 percent of these workers are Latino.

In 2021, there were only two diagnosed silicosis cases in California. In 2025 there were 214. “The number of cases is rising rapidly,” Dr. Michaels wrote to me, “That’s the important point.”

Here’s the more tearful description form Dr. Michaels during testimony last month before the House:

The hallmarks of the disease: shortness of breath and diminished exercise capacity that progresses to an inability to climb even one flight of stairs. A short walk that should take just 20 minutes can take an hour. Working is difficult or impossible. People cough incessantly. They can’t sleep because it is difficult to breathe and they are kept awake coughing. Over time, people with more advanced silicosis require supplemental oxygen and can’t leave home without an oxygen tank. And they are at increased risk of dying from lung cancer.

The crime behind this slaughter is that safer, profitable substitutes are available. As Michaels testified:

There are substitute products that are comparable in use and cost, but which do not kill workers. Many substitutes are made from amorphous silica—a different and a safer material than crystalline silica. Since Australia banned countertops containing crystalline silica, countertops are fabricated from alternative products that look and cost the same but are safer for workers.

But switching to safer products involves costs that the manufacturers would prefer to avoid. Why lose any profits at all? Why go through the disruptions involved in producing new products? Better to be shielded by your political allies.

The countertop manufacturing industry doesn’t want to protect workers from harm; it wants protection from the workers it harms. It worries this could become another asbestos epidemic that has cost asbestos manufacturers billions of dollars in payments to the victims. This time around, the industry is in position to nip it in the bud, given that the Republicans are in full control of all three branches of government.

What the industry dreads are third-party suits. Workers are not permitted, in nearly all circumstances, to sue their own employers for illnesses and exposures at work. Those claims are covered by state workers’ compensation programs. But harmed workers can and do sue manufacturers of equipment or substances that cause them harm. And if the harm can be proved to a jury, the compensation can be steep. It doesn’t make up for the damage to the exposed workers, but it provides some support to their families and pressures the industry to find safer substitutes for its harmful products.

The solution preferred by the countertop industry is simple: get a free pass, which is what this killer legislation would do. It would shield the entire industry from “persons who claim personal injuries as a result of exposure to silica dust produced during the alteration of such products in the course of their employment by third-party fabricators.”

Nice. No change needed, no interruption of profitable production, no switching to new products. No nothing except a few political donations to grease the skids. And at least some of that corporate-funded grease comes from millionaire Marty Davis, the CEO of Cambria, a large counter manufacturer, who has donated more than $800,000 to Republicans, and encouraged Trump to challenged the outcome of the 2020 election.

On this piece of legislation, the Democrats are saying the right things. Rep. Henry C. “Hank” Johnson (D-Ga.), the ranking Democrat on the House Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence and the Internet Subcommittee committee, which is pushing this legislation, said it as clearly as could be said:

The bill behind today’s hearing would give blanket immunity to artificial stone manufacturers and suppliers, preventing injured workers from seeking justice in court. It would dismiss the hundreds of cases pending against these manufacturers.

…Our courts determine liability all the time. People petition the court, have their grievances heard, a judge and jury consider the evidence, and a judgment is rendered.

Manufacturers are asking for a different scenario – one where the deep pockets go to Congress, Congress makes a snap judgment, and the big businesses never have to go to court again. That’s not how our justice system is supposed to work, and I condemn the blatant misuse of this committee to shield corporations at the expense of the American worker.

If only more Democrats would speak like this more often, millions of working people might hear them.

The quote in the headline of this article is attributed to journalist Paul Brodeur, author of "Expendable Americans."

History occasionally presents moments when the truth about a conflict is stated plainly enough that it becomes impossible to ignore. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s February 7 address in Doha, Qatar (transcript here) should prove to be such a moment. His important and constructive remarks responded to the US call for comprehensive negotiations, and he laid out a sound proposal for peace across the Middle East.

Last week, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called for comprehensive negotiations: "If the Iranians want to meet, we're ready." He proposed for talks to include the nuclear issue, Iran’s military capabilities, and its support for proxy groups around the region. On its surface, this sounds like a serious and constructive proposal. The Middle East’s security crises are interconnected, and diplomacy that isolates nuclear issues from broader regional dynamics is unlikely to endure.

On February 7, Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi’s responded to the United States’ proposal for a comprehensive peace. In his speech at the Al Jazeera Forum, the foreign minister addressed the root cause of regional instability – “Palestine… is the defining question of justice in West Asia and beyond” and he proposed a path forward.

The Foreign Minister’s statement is correct. The failure to resolve the issue of Palestinian statehood has indeed fueled every major regional conflict since 1948. The Arab-Israeli wars, the rise of anti-Israel militancy, the regional polarization, and the repeated cycles of violence, all derive from the failure to create a State of Palestine alongside the State of Israel. Gaza represents the most devastating chapter in this conflict, where Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine was followed by Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and then by Israel’s genocide against the people of Gaza.

In his speech, Araghchi condemned Israel’s expansionist project “pursued under the banner of security.” He warned of the annexation of the West Bank, which Israeli government officials, as National Security Minister Ben Gvir, continually call for, and for which the Knesset has already passed a motion.

Araghchi also highlighted another fundamental dimension of Israeli strategy which is the pursuit of permanent military supremacy across the region. He said that Israel’s expansionist project requires that “neighboring countries be weakened—militarily, technologically, economically, and socially—so that the Israeli regime permanently enjoys the upper hand.” This is indeed the Clean Break doctrine of Prime Minister Netanyahu, dating back 30 years. It has been avidly supported by the US through 100 billion dollars in military assistance to Israel since 2000, diplomatic cover at the UN via repeated vetoes, and the consistent US rejection of accountability measures for Israel’s violations of international humanitarian law.

Israel’s impunity has destabilized the region, fueling arms races, proxy wars, and cycles of revenge. It has also corroded what remains of the international legal order. The abuse of international law by the US and Israel with much of Europe remaining silent, has gravely weakened the UN Charter, leaving the UN close to collapse.

In the concluding remarks of his speech, he offered the US a political solution and path forward. “The path to stability is clear: justice for Palestine, accountability for crimes, an end to occupation and apartheid, and a regional order built on sovereignty, equality, and cooperation. If the world wants peace, it must stop rewarding aggression. If the world wants stability, it must stop enabling expansionism.”

This is a valid and constructive response to Rubio’s call for comprehensive diplomacy.

This framework could address all the interlocking dimensions of the region’s conflict. The end of Israel’s expansion and occupation of Palestine, and Israel’s return to the borders of June 4, 1967, would bring an end to outside funding and arming of proxy groups in the region. The creation of a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel would enhance Israel’s security as well as that of its neighbors. A renewed nuclear agreement with Iran, strictly limiting Iran to peaceful nuclear activities and paired with the lifting of US and EU sanctions, would add a crucial pillar of regional stability. Iran already agreed to such a nuclear framework a decade ago, in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that was adopted by the UN Security Council in Resolution 2231. It was the US during Trump's first term, not Iran, that withdrew from the agreement.

A comprehensive peace reflects the foundation of modern collective security doctrine, including the United Nations Charter itself. Durable peace requires mutual recognition of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and equal security guarantees for all states.

Regional security is the shared responsibility of all states in the region, and each of them faces a historic obligation. This comprehensive peace proposal is not new, it has been advocated for decades by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (57 Muslim‑majority countries) and the League of Arab States (22 Arab States). Ever since the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, all of these countries have endorsed, on a yearly basis, the framework of land-for-peace. All major Arab and Islamic states, allies of the US, have played a crucial role in facilitating the latest round of US-Iranian negotiations in Oman. Additionally, Saudi Arabia has clearly reminded the US that it will normalize relations with Israel only on the condition of the establishment of a Palestinian State.

The United States faces a moment of truth. Does it really want peace, or does it want to follow Israel’s extremism? For decades, the US has blindly followed Israeli misguided objectives. Domestic political pressures, powerful lobbying networks, strategic miscalculations, and perhaps a bit of blackmail lurking in the Epstein files (who knows?) have combined to subordinate American diplomacy to Israel’s regional ambitions.

The US subservience to Israel does not serve American interests. It has drawn the United States into repeated regional wars, undermined global trust in American foreign policy, and weakened the international legal order that Washington itself helped to construct after 1945.

A comprehensive peace offers the US a rare opportunity to correct course. By negotiating a comprehensive regional peace grounded in international law, the United States could reclaim genuine diplomacy and help to establish a stable regional security architecture that benefits all parties, including Israel and Palestine.

The Middle East stands at a crossroads between endless war and comprehensive peace. The framework for peace exists. It requires first and foremost Palestinian statehood, security guarantees for Israel and the rest of the region, a peaceful nuclear deal restoring the basic agreement adopted by the UN a decade ago, lifting of economic sanctions, the unbiased enforcement of international law, and a diplomatic architecture that replaces military force with security cooperation. The world should rally behind a comprehensive framework and take this historic opportunity to achieve regional peace.

Democracy is not merely a collection of institutions, laws, and elections; democracy is, above all, a language. A language grounded in minimum respect, legitimate competition, and recognition of human dignity. When this language collapses, even if ballot boxes remain in place, the substance and meaning of democracy are hollowed out. The publication—and subsequent removal—of a humiliating video targeting Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama on a social media platform affiliated with Donald Trump must be understood precisely from this perspective: not as a communication mishap or a failed joke, but as a sign of the deliberate erosion of political language in the United States.

This video, released through a platform formally associated with the President of the United States, was not merely a harsh political message; it carried symbolism deeply rooted in a long history of racial degradation. More important than the image itself is the fact that such content could be disseminated at the highest level of American political power without first being stopped by ethical, institutional, or even purely strategic filters. This was no accident, but rather the product of a distinctive style of politics that Trump has cultivated for years.

From the moment he entered politics, Trump made clear that he had no intention of playing by the classical rules of political competition. He not only discarded the unwritten norms of political civility, but consciously sought to destroy them. In this model, insult, mockery, and humiliation are not costs but political capital. The harsher the reactions, the deeper the polarization, and the more brutal the language of politics becomes, the more victorious Trump perceives himself to be. Within this framework, the publication of a humiliating video targeting a former USpresident—particularly the country’s first Black president—is not a slip, but a logical continuation of the same strategy. This behavior is less about Obama himself than it is a message to Trump’s social base: that no red lines exist and that politics can be reduced to the realm of absolute derision.

The core problem is that when such images and metaphors are circulated by an ordinary citizen, they can be relegated to the margins of online hate speech. But when they are disseminated by a president or by a network affiliated with him, they enter an entirely different realm of meaning and impact. This is no longer a matter of “political satire,” but rather the normalization of a language of humiliation at the center of power. Animalistic metaphors used to describe human beings—especially racial minorities—carry a dark and bloody historical legacy. Reproducing them, even in the form of jokes or digital imagery, sends a clear message: a return to a politics in which human dignity is sacrificed for political entertainment. Trump may deny direct responsibility for this message, but denial does not absolve responsibility.

When a president turns a platform into a personal instrument of power, the ethical and political responsibility for all its messages rests squarely with him.

The removal of the video following waves of criticism should not be mistaken for reformism or accountability. This retreat resembled a tactical maneuver more than a genuine change of course. Experience over recent years shows that Trump and the media ecosystem around him have repeatedly employed the same pattern: release provocative content, gauge reactions, and, if necessary, execute a limited retreat without a real apology or acknowledgment of wrongdoing. This pattern is dangerous because it gradually shifts the boundaries of what is considered acceptable in politics. What is deemed “removable” today may become normalized tomorrow. In this way, society is not confronted with a single dramatic shock, but with a slow erosion of norms.

Truth Social is not merely a social media platform; it is the symbol of a mode of politics in which the president, the media, the message, and the audience all operate within a closed circuit. In this space, independent journalism plays no mediating role, nor do party institutions possess the capacity to moderate messaging. The result is a politics that depends less on public persuasion and more on the mobilization of loyal supporters. Within this ecosystem, Trump is not just a user but the architect of the space itself. Therefore, he cannot be absolved of responsibility for the content disseminated within it. When a president turns a platform into a personal instrument of power, the ethical and political responsibility for all its messages rests squarely with him.

The issue extends far beyond US domestic politics. For decades, the United States has sought to present itself as a defender of values such as human dignity, equality, and the fight against discrimination. Each time the official language of American politics slides toward humiliation and mockery, these claims lose credibility in the eyes of the world. For America’s rivals, such moments are a golden opportunity: living evidence of the contradiction between rhetoric and behavior. For allies, they signal troubling normative instability. And for societies grappling with racism and discrimination, they deliver a bitter message—that even at the highest levels of power, this language still enjoys legitimacy.

Ultimately, the question is not whether a single video was offensive or not; the question is what kind of politics allows such a video to be produced and circulated in the first place. Trump is not merely an individual; he represents a style of politics in which the destruction of the language of democracy has become an ordinary tactic. If democracy is to remain more than an electoral mechanism, it must protect its language. A politics built on humiliation may win votes in the short term, but in the long run it will lose public trust, institutional credibility, and moral standing. And this is a cost that not only Trump, but American society as a whole—and the global political order—will inevitably be forced to pay.

After ICE agents gunned down peaceful protester Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, the government smeared him (and previously, Renee Good) as a terrorist. In truth, he never drew, much less brandished, his gun. If he had a chance to come back to life and do it again, would he avail himself of his Second Amendment right to defend himself against random masked goons who might or might not be government agents?

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