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Today on “The TMI Show with Ted Rall and Manila Chan, we’re exploring animal rights. Should animals be granted legal status? If so, which animals and why? The “Happy the Elephant” lawsuit, launched by the Nonhuman Rights Project, fought for Happy, an Asian elephant at the Bronx Zoo since 1977. Living alone since 2006, Happy’s self-awareness—proven by passing a mirror test—sparked the NhRP’s habeas corpus petition, demanding that she receive legal personhood and be transfered to a sanctuary where she would be, well, happier. They argued that her isolation and cramped space were unlawful imprisonment. The Bronx Zoo fought back, insisting Happy is well-cared-for and not alone, calling the suit a stunt. Courts, including New York’s highest in 2022, rejected Happy’s claim, ruling that habeas corpus is for humans only, though dissenters pushed for Happy’s rights. Is animal personhood a legitimate civil rights movement, or a slippery slope? Elephants’ established intelligence—tool use, epic memory, empathy—fuel the debate, alongside landmark cases like Sandra the Orangutan’s. Don’t miss this deep dive into animal rights and legal limits!

Plus:

• Today’s Loving Day celebrates the 1967 Supreme Court ruling legalizing interracial marriage, sparked by Richard and Mildred Loving’s fight.
• An Air India flight crash in Ahmedabad kills hundreds, including students, after hitting a medical college dining hall. It’s a Boeing 787.
• Israel is gearing up for a potential Iran strike, risking Middle East chaos and Trump’s nuclear deal.

 

The post TMI Show Ep 158: “Happy in the Bronx” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Republicans in Congress are planning to slash funding for Medicaid in order to help pay for major tax reductions for wealthy Americans and corporations. But they don't want to cut Medicaid openly, because it will gravely injure many people who voted for them.

One way to cut Medicaid expenditures without overtly reducing benefits is to increase required paperwork. Additional bureaucratic hassle will discourage people from applying for what they are eligible for. The "big beautiful bill" currently discussed in Congress incorporates this strategy.

The major provision aimed at saving money requires Medicaid recipients to work at least 80 hours a month.

Until American conservatives wise up and emulate the conservatives in Taiwan, who introduced universal medical insurance there, we will have to live with a lot of unnecessary complexity and inflated administrative expense.

The work requirement requires frequent verification that a recipient is employed—more hassle. It will deny coverage to individuals who—for one reason or another—can't find work.

Given likely job loss due to artificial intelligence, mass corporate layoffs, and huge reductions in government payrolls, the number of people without insurance because they can't find work will likely be large.

This policy will be rather hard on people who through no fault of their own are unable to find work. And inability to get medical treatment may leave some people in such poor health that it makes it even harder to find and hold a job.

The work requirement, though, appears to be popular when people are polled. But many of the polled people may underestimate the danger that they themselves will lose their jobs, their job-related insurance, and their eligibility for Medicaid.

Fortunately, the bad consequences of the requirement could be completely eliminated by one simple additional government policy: that it will hire anybody who is otherwise unable to find work.

There is, of course, no end to the useful work that people employed by the government could do: elderly people who need help in their daily lives, children who could use tutoring, parks that need to be cleaned up, hiking trails that need maintenance, etc.

But guaranteeing jobs would cost the government (which is to say taxpayers) money, which would conflict with the desire to save money prompting Congress to restrict Medicaid eligibility in the first place.

And a guaranteed jobs policy, morally necessary in order to make federal medical policy less unjust, would also make public policy even more complicated than it already is.

A better solution to this problem would be to completely decouple medical insurance from employment. The United States is the only developed country that does not guarantee medical insurance for everyone, employed or unemployed, rich or poor, young or old.

Instead, we have a tremendously complicated system with different government programs for the old, for children, for Native Americans, for veterans, for the poor. As people's situations change, they can "churn" from one program to another, all too often falling into the gaps between programs, which leave them totally uncovered.

We'd all be better off, and would probably save money, if Congress wiped out all of today's complicated government insurance programs—including Obamacare, Medicare, and Medicaid—replacing them with a single program insuring everybody no matter their age or work status.

Unfortunately, American conservatives have been trained to reject a single-payer program like Medicare For All as "socialistic," without inquiring into the benefits such a program would produce. And enacting a major program like this would require bipartisan support.

Until American conservatives wise up and emulate the conservatives in Taiwan, who introduced universal medical insurance there, we will have to live with a lot of unnecessary complexity and inflated administrative expense.

Given this unpleasant fact, if Congress actually imposes a work requirement for Medicaid recipients, it should also enact a governmental program to employ anybody who is unable to find work elsewhere.

Since it is unlikely that Congress will do this, the best outcome we can realistically hope for is that the work requirement for Medicaid recipients will be stripped out of the bill in the Senate.

I don’t know much about the theory of courage. But I believe that it shows up when summoned from the depths of our loyalties and affections—doing work for which we’re willing to live and die.

Whatever the causes, the world has gone haywire and in the years ahead all of us will need courage more than ever. A few examples to make the point:

• Some tech bros—about your age—are dismantling the Federal government, painstakingly assembled over 235 years;
• Immigrants—some U.S. citizens—are being arrested and shipped to foreign prisons... without due process;
• The president says he “doesn’t know” whether he must uphold the Constitution—that he swore to “preserve, protect, and defend” 125 days ago;
• Billionaires and mega corporations are getting more tax cuts;
• People, young and old, are dying in Ukraine, Gaza, South Sudan;
• Last week others died in heat and storms in the Midwest;
• During this one hour, we will release the heat equivalent from 18,000 Hiroshima-size bombs to an already overheated Earth; and
• Mendacity and oligarchy are on the march; Truth—our stock in trade—is under assault.

Future generations will think us “deranged” in Amitav Ghosh’s words. Your job—our job—is to prove them wrong and make a better future than that in prospect. So, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” (Mary Oliver)

As you think it over, know that there is work for you to do—good work... and trouble to cause, what John Lewis called “necessary trouble.” But good work and necessary trouble always come with the courage to do it. With that in mind, a few observations:

1. Get a life before you select a career... have a compass, not an itinerary... know whose side you are on;
2. Stand for something that matters—and there is a great deal that matters;
3. Be less certain of your certainties, but more clear about your values;
4. Laugh at the human predicament and yourself... otherwise you’re just not taking things seriously enough;
5. Pay attention to serendipity—those small chance occurrences, once defined as God’s way to remain anonymous;
6. Be grateful always: You are the beneficiary of kindnesses, known and unknown;
7. Remember that you are kin to all that has ever lived, is living, and by our forbearance will live; and
8. In coming years, as you learn, in Rutger Bregman’s words, to “self-diminish,” become more kind, compassionate, and wise.

As for courage... remember the Lion in The Wizard of Oz walking down that yellow brick road looking for courage... only to find that the wizard was a phony and that he had courage all along, it was all around him and It’s all around you too and will come when you most need it. You will be surprised when you discover how much you can do in the years ahead, and there is not a moment to lose.

AND Congratulations, we’re very proud of you! Godspeed!

President Trump’s deployment of 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to Los Angeles to quash peaceful demonstrations against brutal ICE raids is a wake up call. Now is the time to push back against this administration’s use of military violence against its own citizens to consolidate authoritarian power. As Trump threatens to arrest California Governor Newsom and unleash “troops everywhere,” the people of this country must reject militarization as a tool of authoritarianism and stand firm to defend and expand democracy.

As tanks and troops descend upon Los Angeles to silence dissent, on Saturday, they will roll through Washington in a display of power, revealing the undercurrents of an administration that wields militarization not for defense, but for domination.

On his 79th birthday, President Trump will finally get his “big, beautiful” military parade, brandishing unrivaled U.S. military might on the streets of the nation’s capital. Marking the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army, the $45 million parade will feature nearly 7,000 soldiers marching down Constitution Avenue, flanked by hundreds of B-17 bombers, Strykers and Apache helicopters. Washington will look like Nazi Germany, and unless we tackle militarism in our fight to defend democracy, we, too, may soon live under authoritarian rule.

As longtime peace activists, we have opposed U.S. wars against Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, and raised the alarm over militarized U.S. foreign policies like war drills against China and North Korea which provoke a dangerous counter-reaction and fuels an arms race that could trigger nuclear war.

The Trump administration isn't trimming fat from the federal budget, they're cutting the heart out of communities to further enrich billionaires, war profiteers, and techno-fascists.

Deluged daily with domestic crises, it is challenging to draw attention to the dangers of U.S. militarism, especially when most view it as a problem “over there.”

But now we are in an era where masked ICE agents are raiding schools, workplaces, churches and homes, tearing apart families by abducting and deporting legal residents and rounding up students for protesting U.S. support of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.

The U.S. public can no longer afford to ignore the lethal consequences of militarism on our democracy at a time when our Commander-in-Chief has pardoned January 6th vigilantes, defied the Constitution and judicial rulings, threatened to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act, and has already deployed the National Guard and active-duty Marines in an attempt to quash dissent at home.

While most Americans instinctively understand the threat U.S. militarism poses to democracy, the times call for more explicit links between militarism and rising fascism and a blueprint for reversing this threat.

Contrary to Trump’s campaign promises to end U.S. involvement in Ukraine and Gaza, he is calling for an unprecedented $1.1 trillion Pentagon budget for more war and militarism, including modernizing nuclear weapons, further entrenching the U.S.’ permanent war footing across the Pacific and Asia in preparation for war with China, and massively increasing policing, detention and deportation.

In 2026 alone, Trump and Republicans want to spend an additional $43.8 billion on mass detentions and deportations, funding more ICE raids like those in LA. This militarized budget accounts for 75 percent of the entire discretionary budget, which explains why on top of massive tax cuts for billionaires, there is no money for social programs and federal agencies that actually help our communities feel safe – clean air and water, healthcare, child nutrition, education, and housing assistance.

U.S. taxpayers are told this historic increase in more militarism is a “generational investment” in defending our country, or that it’s to honor the sacrifices of U.S. service women and men.

But the truth is that half of the Pentagon budget goes to defense contractors that sell weapons of mass destruction to authoritarian states and human rights abusers, like Saudi Arabia and Israel. Instead of financing Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza with $17.9 billion in 2024, U.S. taxpayer dollars could have provided more than one million U.S. veterans with VA healthcare.

Our taxpayer dollars also enrich tech billionaires like Elon Musk, whose $277 million dollar donation to Trump’s campaign landed him a $5.2 billion dollar Pentagon deal in April, and a free pass to wage an administrative coup. Billions of our taxpayer dollars also go to venture capitalist Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal and Palantir, which Bloomberg describes as an “intelligence platform designed for the global War on Terror [that] was weaponized against ordinary Americans at home.” Thiel, who doesn’t “believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” just received another contract to carry out ICE deportations, and is, along with Musk, Meta’s Zuckerberg and other techno-fascists, seeking to build a dystopian future of unregulated “network states” and surveil us all.

At a time when most Americans want an end to war, Trump is using our tax dollars to celebrate militarism as a cornerstone of consolidating authoritarian power...

The Trump administration isn't trimming fat from the federal budget, they're cutting the heart out of communities to further enrich billionaires, war profiteers, and techno-fascists. In the report Trading Life for Death, the National Priorities Project and Public Citizen found that militarized spending increases in the reconciliation proposals total $163 billion for FY 2026. That's more than enough to fund Medicaid for the 13.7 million people at risk of losing health care, and the 11 million people at risk of losing food stamps.

As Trump uses the parade as a spectacle to exalt his unchecked power, people around the country will join over 1,800 organized protests under the banners of “No Kings Day” and “Kick Out the Clowns.” This day of action offers an opportunity to shine a light on the threat of a highly militarized society to our democracy, from the bloated Pentagon budget that leaches funding from investments that make us secure, to state capture by techno-fascists on our taxpayer dime. We need to do the hard work to redefine our paradigm of national security. The Feminist Peace Playbook: A Guide for Transforming U.S. Foreign Policy provides one such guide for moving our country from one defined by war and violence to one built on care, compassion and cooperation.

Let’s heed the prescient words of President Eisenhower, a five-star general who led the Allied Forces in WWII to defeat fascism, when he warned Americans to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence… by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist."

At a time when most Americans want an end to war, Trump is using our tax dollars to celebrate militarism as a cornerstone of consolidating authoritarian power at home.

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Never a dull moment on the DeProgram show with political cartoonist Ted Rall and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, dissecting three pivotal issues! First, they dive into ICE’s aggressive deportation sweeps, with over 100,000 arrests since January. Anti-ICE protests are erupting in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and New York City against mass deportations, leading to violent clashes with police and National Guard, prompting Los Angeles to impose a curfew. Is this a replay of Nixon’s “Silent Majority” vs. Hippies…and of Kent State?

Next, John and Ted turn to Iran’s nuclear standoff,as Tehran rejects a U.S. proposal allowing limited uranium enrichment. Iran’s counterproposal, presented via Oman, demands continued domestic uranium enrichment at 3.67% and calls for Israel to dismantle its undeclared nuclear arsenal for a “nuke-free Middle East.” Tehran insists on guaranteed economic benefits and criticizes the U.S. offer for lacking clarity on sanctions.

Finally, will the last one to leave the US turn out the lights? Between the low birth rate, mass deportations and now a post-Trump exodus, will anyone be left? American emigration has increased, with 5.4 million U.S. citizens living abroad in 2024, up from 4.4 million in 2020, marking a 22.7% rise driven by political, economic, and social factors. The trend accelerated post-2024 election, with 53% of millionaires and growing numbers of middle-class families citing instability and policy shifts as reasons for leaving.

Join Ted Rall’s pointed commentary and John Kiriakou’s insider expertise for a fearless breakdown of these stories.

The post DeProgram: “Anti-ICE Protests Spread, Iran Trolls Israel, Amer-Exit” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

So, Matthew Yglesias posted this challenge on Twitter earlier this week: "This is my challenge for people who want to make reducing corporate power the lodestar of their politics — how do you measure this?"

— (@)

Well, there's a couple of ways. But first, let me tell you what's happening right now: There are 700 Marines in Los Angeles. Marines. In an American city. Four thousand National Guard troops deployed. A union president arrested and facing six years in prison for observing ICE raids. Families torn apart at Home Depot, at restaurants, in the garment district.

This is America, June 2025. Trump's back, and he's moving fast. Marines—actual Marines—carrying out immigration raids in an American city. It's unprecedented, it's shocking, but here's the thing: it's tragically predictable.

This isn't just Trump being Trump. This is the inevitable result of decades of corporate power combining with an authoritarian president. It's been a journey, and we need to understand how we got here.

The system that corporations captured needed a desperate, vulnerable workforce so they could extract more profits.

For 50 years, corporations and the financial elite have been running the greatest theft in human history. The RAND Corporation—the RAND Corporation!—showed that the bottom 90% got paid $79 trillion less than they should have based on economic growth from 1975 to today. By their calculations, median income should be $102,000.

But here's the genius part: they needed someone to blame for this theft. So they pointed fingers at everyone except themselves. Black women on welfare. People getting food stamps. And especially immigrants—documented and undocumented alike.

The system that corporations captured needed a desperate, vulnerable workforce so they could extract more profits. So they made it possible—hell, they made it easy—to hire people who were undocumented. They created an entire infrastructure for exploitation.

Last night, my wife was asking how it is that undocumented people are able to work all these jobs? How is it possible? Well, they have what's called an ITIN—Individual Taxpayer Identification Number. That's something set up by the government to allow people who are undocumented to still pay taxes. They pay payroll taxes, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Now, does it give them the ability to obtain any benefits from those things? No, it does not. They'll never get Social Security. Even if they get a path to citizenship, even if they become citizens after being here undocumented for 20 years, paying taxes for 20 years, they still don't get access to that money. They only get the past two years.

You see, you've got this system that's set up that has been utilizing the labor, utilizing the hope, utilizing the desire for a better life. Our system of banking was set up for their money. Our system of car sales, home sales, taxes—everything was set up to make sure they could participate in capitalism.

Rules and regulations were changed to welcome and accommodate them economically. Not politically, not socially. No, no, no. That's when the same corporations would fund politicians and media to vilify these workers.

You've got an entire media ecosystem one in the hands of an ever-shrinking number of corporate owners that for decades has been blaming immigrants for our problems. Fox News talking about invasions and hordes. And it's not like we have an alternative media that is actually naming the real people that are taking all our shit, that are putting us in poverty, that are putting their boots on our throats—which of course is the wealthy, the top 1%, their corporations and their lobbyists and their lawyers.

You don't see that $79 trillion theft on TV every day with the faces of the villains and B-roll of corporate boardrooms showing where the money was sucked up, do you? No, you don't. Because the corporations own the media.

It's been a very Machiavellian corporate play. You bring in this thing that helps your bottom line—more desperate labor, more hopeful, more excited people ready to participate in your system. And then you use them as political pawns to maintain your power and prevent people from organizing together. You stoke hatred and class division through racial identity and racism while you keep taking and taking... and taking. Money. Power. Our democracy. They take it all.

This isn't just Trump being Trump. This is the inevitable result of decades of corporate power combining with an authoritarian president.

Here's what enrages me. Democrats thought they could play this game, too. People like Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Joe Biden would say, "Oh, we've got a problem at the border. We've got to do this, we've got to do that." They deported millions, but more quietly. They increased ICE funding. They stoked the flames of fear and jealousy.

Democrats thought they could use this hateful rhetoric for political gain, but keep it contained. They thought they could control people’s frustration with immigrants, whom they blamed for our collapsing lifestyles and shrinking safety nets. They'd validate the "crisis" narrative instead of naming the real villains—the corporations and extractors in our economy. They did that because they didn't want to have the fights.

The Democratic establishment would say, "We have to say, whoa, it's time to move to the center, guys. We'll protect you better than these people will. We won't call out the National Guard. We'll just use the LAPD. We won't go nuts with ICE. We'll just do a kinder, gentler deportation scheme."

And what it ends up being is a party that doesn't really seem to stand for much. You're going to be labeled as a party of open borders anyway. But instead of trying to embrace it and make the case for it, you push back against it.

They say, "Oh, we've got to be the alpha dogs. We've got to show alpha energy." But they really don't understand alpha energy, because by and large, they're bitches. They're little scared bitches that don't know how to stand up and fight for something they believe in. Or they just don't fundamentally believe in much of anything.

Meanwhile, the corporate capture of government continued. You can see how many people from corporations like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and Citigroup end up running our economy. Tim Geithner went from the New York Fed straight to Treasury Secretary after helping bail out his Wall Street buddies. Jerome Powell? Private equity guy. Steve Mnuchin? Goldman Sachs partner turned Trump's Treasury Secretary.

Look at Scott Gottlieb, who served as FDA Commissioner, then joined Pfizer's board just 85 days after leaving the agency. Look at Ajit Pai, who worked as a Verizon lawyer before becoming FCC Chairman, where he repealed net neutrality rules that constrained his former employer.

Billy Tauzin chaired the House committee that passed Medicare Part D—which explicitly prohibited Medicare from negotiating drug prices. Upon leaving Congress, he immediately became president of PhRMA at $2 million annually, eventually earning $11.6 million in his final year.

You can look at the number of bills written by ALEC that show up in state legislatures. You can look at all the laws that block unionization. Mandatory arbitration. Right-to-work laws. Guess who pushed for those? Corporations.

How else can you tell corporate power is near absolute? We're seeing cities, towns, and states sell off their assets, sell off their services, privatize all the things that government used to do for people. Everything from trash collection to water to sewer to power.

Chicago sold its parking meters to Morgan Stanley for $1.15 billion in a 75-year lease. Parking rates immediately quadrupled. The private operators recouped their entire investment plus $500 million in profit by 2019, with 60 years remaining on the lease.

Water privatization? Private water systems charge customers $144 more annually on average. In Illinois, companies have acquired 59 water systems since 2013, with over $402 million in acquisition costs passed directly to ratepayers.

That's how we know corporations are in control.

So when an authoritarian comes to power, what does he find? A system perfectly designed for exploitation. A workforce made vulnerable by design. A media ecosystem that's been blaming immigrants for decades. Democrats who validated the "crisis" narrative. And a population primed to accept military force against the scapegoats.

Noah Smith says "unfortunately, he's right" about mass deportations. Young people are swinging hard for candidates like Zohran in New York because they're getting the squeeze economically and they know this is broken. But it's not really all that surprising that people are calling for mass deportations when you've had decades of both parties blaming immigrants for problems caused by corporate theft.

When an authoritarian comes to power, what does he find? A system perfectly designed for exploitation. A workforce made vulnerable by design. A media ecosystem that's been blaming immigrants for decades. Democrats who validated the "crisis" narrative. And a population primed to accept military force against the scapegoats.

Donald Trump deploys not only the National Guard but also the Marines. To round up undocumented house builders, restaurant workers, nannies, gardeners, baristas, retail workers, and factory workers. People that want to be Americans.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass says the city is being used as a "test case" and "an experiment." California Gov. Gavin Newsom calls it "an unmistakable step toward authoritarianism."

But this authoritarianism didn't come from nowhere. It came from decades of corporate power building a system of exploitation, then using their media and political influence to blame the exploited for everyone's problems. It came from Democrats who thought they could moderate their way through fascism.

So when Matthew Yglesias asks how to measure corporate power?

Count the Marines. Count the families torn apart. Count the $79 trillion stolen. Count the privatized water systems and parking meters. Count the pharma executives at the FDA and the Wall Street guys at Treasury. Count the ALEC bills in state legislatures. Count the Democrats who won't fight.

The theft is coming from inside the house. The theft is coming from the people upstairs in the top 10%, top 1%, and they want to blame the people in the economic basement. They have effectively utilized the cheap labor pool that they imported for decades as punching bags for that theft.

And now, when people finally rebel against this system, when they take to the streets to protect their neighbors and coworkers and families - that's when the corporate state shows its true face. Military protection for profits. Combat boots for capital.

You want to know how to measure corporate power? Look to Los Angeles, where decades of corporate exploitation and political cowardice have delivered us to this moment: Marines in American streets, rounding up the workers that corporations brought here to exploit.

That's how you measure it. The question is: what are we going to do about it?

The “No Kings Day” mass rallies and marches this Saturday across the country will be, hopefully, a political and cultural affirmation of the democratic vision that we should be a self-governing people, a vision that has never been fully realized. The events must not only reject the reemergence and expansion of authoritarianism of Trump from his previous administration. They should also acknowledge the much longer tyranny and authoritarianism of corporate rule.

Speeches, signs, chants, and petitions will undoubtedly address the numerous authoritarian actions by the Trump administration since the election. These include pardons and immunities for loyalists, the use of federal agencies against political opponents, use of disinformation and threats against elected officials, mass deportations and family separation, executive orders that trump local and state governments, government loyalty purges, crackdown on the media and dissent, and militarized response to protests – such as the overreacting deployment of the Marines in response to the largely peaceful protests against ICE immigration raids in Los Angeles.

As we protest authoritarianism this Saturday—and legitimately condemn the many anti-democratic and unjust actions of Trump—let us also remember that tyranny has many symbols. One is a red hat. The other is a corporate logo.

The No Kings Day actions are just the latest and important public resistance to Trump’s tyrannical actions that have included other nationwide demonstrations and civil disobedience, legal challenges, whistleblowers and leaks, mutual aid, sanctuary networks, state and local government pushback, worker and union actions, and campus resistance.

Yet the reality is that Trump and his Project 2025 playbook represent one form of authoritarianism that, while distinct in some respects, intersects with another deeply entrenched form: corporate domination.

Unlike Trump’s style of blatant and unapologetic brute force, intimidation, and open defiance of the rule of law, corporate rule has been a slow, legalistic, never ending, and largely invisible seizure of power — not by individuals, but by artificial legal entities with little public accountability.

Corporations today define nearly every aspect of our lives:

• Our values: Consumerism and its emphasis on profit-first “logic” and primacy of property protection over human rights and the rights to a livable world.
• Our labor: Work hours, wages, and benefits are dictated by corporate interests.
• Our environment: Corporations control production, pollution, extraction, and destruction.
• Our food system: From seeds to supermarkets, agriculture is consolidated and chemically dependent.
• Our technology and data: AI, surveillance, and algorithms are driven by profit and privatization.
• Our politics: Elections, legislation, and regulation are shaped by lobbying and campaign contributions.
• Our culture and information: Entertainment, education, and news are filtered through corporate lenses.

How did this happen? The sword and shield of corporate rule is the U.S. Constitution. Despite corporate entities being originally created and defined by the government as a public tool to provide goods and services, the Supreme Court declared them to be private institutions, out of bounds to public definition and control. What had originally been the state providing mere “privileges” via the granting of charters or licences that could be withdrawn via the revoking of charters that violated the law became constitutional rights deemed beyond the reach of legislatures or individuals.

The Supremes have anointed corporations the constitutional rights of natural persons for more that a century, including:

• First Amendment rights — to spend unlimited money on elections (Citizens United v. FEC being the latest decision), to not to speak, to lie, and even to some extent religious rights
• Fourth Amendment rights — to block health, safety, and environmental inspections.
• Fifth Amendment takings rights — to challenge local and state regulations under the Takings Clause that affect profit.
• Fourteenth Amendment equal protection — to avoid differential treatment in the law, even when such laws protect local businesses and communities over chain stores and other businesses.

Corporate “personhood” is an absurdity, yet humanly, environmentally, and democratically lethal.

While there have been frequent mass actions over single corporate abuses, we don’t see mass protests in the streets about the totality of corporate rule. Why does corporate tyranny go unchallenged?

Corporate rule has been normalized. It is:

• Cultural: So embedded that we barely notice it — from Amazon to Apple to Exxon to BlackRock. Call it the “fish discover water last” syndrome in which it's so much a part of our daily lives that it’s hardly recognized..
• Gradual: It’s happened over a century, one Court decision at a time, which is challenging to understand given the legal complexity and, of course, rarely covered by the corporate press.
• Justified: We’re told corporations bring jobs, innovation, and prosperity — even as economic inequality soars and corporate entities are increasinbly able to shift capital where and when they want to other states or nations.
• Powerful: We’re told that the economic and political power of mega-corporations is inevitable and irreversible – so public focus should remain on elections, statutes, and regulations that merely manage corporate harms and impose minimal guardrails, keeping us perpetually on the defensive, opposing one corporate abuse or company at a time while censoring ourselves from demanding structural change.
• Feared: To criticize corporations is to risk being labeled “anti-American,” a “socialist,” a “Luddite” or worse.

Move to Amend exists to expose and abolish corporate constitutional rights and the doctrine of money as speech through the We the People Amendment (HJR54). This is not about regulating corporations better. It’s about breaking the illegitimate foundation of their power and declaring that we should have the power and right to define corporate actions.

As we protest authoritarianism this Saturday—and legitimately condemn the many anti-democratic and unjust actions of Trump—let us also remember that tyranny has many symbols. One is a red hat. The other is a corporate logo.

So let us all turn out on No Kings Day not only to oppose authoritarian rule, but also as an opportunity to oppose corporate rule, which will remain long after Trump is gone.

The photographs are unbearable. Hollow-eyed children staring into cameras, their faces etched with a hunger that reaches beyond the physical. Families huddled in makeshift shelters, their possessions reduced to what they could carry. These images from Gaza pierce through my screen and lodge themselves in a place where other images have lived for decades—the inherited memories of my grandparents' stories, passed down like sacred wounds.

All four of my grandparents fled the Nazi machinery of death. They carried with them fragments of lives destroyed: a photograph here, a recipe there, stories that began with abundance and ended with ash. They spoke of hunger as a weapon, of siege as strategy, of how systematically cutting off food, medicine, and hope could break a people's spirit before breaking their bodies.

I grew up believing that "Never Again" meant exactly that—never again would any people, anywhere, face the deliberate infliction of starvation and suffering. I believed that we, as Jews, would be the first to recognize the early warning signs, the first to cry out when others faced the machinery of dehumanization.

Today, I am ashamed.

"Never Again" loses all meaning if it only applies to Jewish suffering.

Not ashamed to be Jewish—that identity remains precious to me, woven as it is with traditions of justice, compassion, and repair of the world. But ashamed that a state claiming to represent Jewish values has chosen hunger as a weapon of war. Ashamed that siege has become a strategy. Ashamed that the descendants of those who cried out, "Let my people go" have become deaf to similar cries in Arabic.

This is not what my grandparents envisioned when they dreamed of a Jewish homeland. They dreamed of safety, yes, but not safety built on others' suffering. They dreamed of dignity, but not dignity that required stripping it from their neighbors. They imagined a place where Jewish children could grow up free from fear, but they never imagined that freedom would come at the cost of Palestinian children growing up with empty stomachs.

The Israel my grandparents hoped for was meant to be a light unto the nations—a place where the lessons of Jewish suffering would translate into Jewish compassion. Instead, we see policies that mirror the very tactics once used against us. We see justifications that echo the language of those who once justified our persecution. We see the slow strangulation of a people that feels horrifyingly familiar to anyone who has studied the ghettos of Warsaw or the camps of Europe.

I know the counterarguments. I know about security concerns, about terrorism, about the complexity of this conflict. I know that Israelis have suffered, that Jewish children have died, that fear runs deep on all sides. But none of this justifies using starvation as a weapon. None of this justifies trapping 2 million people in what amounts to an open-air prison. None of this honors the memory of those who died precisely because the world stood by while their humanity was systematically denied.

The Jewish concept of tikkun olam—repairing the world—demands that we speak truth even when it's uncomfortable, especially when it's uncomfortable. It demands that we hold our own people accountable to the highest moral standards, not because we hate them, but because we love them too much to watch them betray their own values.

Being Jewish taught me that moral authority comes not from power, but from how that power is used. It taught me that we have a special obligation to protect the vulnerable precisely because we were once vulnerable ourselves. It taught me that "Never Again" loses all meaning if it only applies to Jewish suffering.

The images from Gaza haunt me not despite my Jewish identity, but because of it. They haunt me because I recognize in Palestinian faces the same hollow desperation my grandparents described in the faces of their neighbors. They haunt me because I see in Israeli policies the same cold calculation that once sought to break Jewish spirits through systematic deprivation.

This is not Jewish. This is not what our ancestors dreamed when they prayed, "Next year in Jerusalem." This is not what it means to be a people chosen for the hard work of justice.

We can do better. We must do better. The children of Gaza deserve better. The memory of those who perished in the Holocaust demands better. The future of Judaism itself depends on better.

The photographs will keep coming. The question is whether we will keep our eyes open long enough to see ourselves reflected in them, and whether we will have the courage to look away from the mirror and toward the work of repair.

As Trump stokes conflict at immigration demonstrations, will the public side with Trump or the demonstrators?

Attacks on immigrant workers are accelerating as ICE zeros in on sites where immigrants gather to find work, and outside courts where immigrants go because their legal status requires it. The demonstrations erupted in Los Angeles as ICE arrested day-laborers who lined up at Home Depot waiting to be selected by contractors. ICE is also aggressively sweeping LA garment shops dependent on immigrant workers. Trump and ICE claim they are only seeking to deport violent criminals. But this flimsy excuse collapses against the reality of hundreds of undocumented workers, most with no prior contact with law enforcement, caught up in these raids, torn away from their families and friends.

Does the public at large endorse these arrests? Don’t working-class people in general want these undocumented workers deported to alleviate job competition? That apparently reasonable commonsense claim turns out to be wrong. according to recent survey data.

I reviewed this data in a recent Substack, but it bears repeating because it is so important to clearly understand what working people actually support.

The Cooperative Election Study (CES), with more than 500,000 respondents, asked the following question repeatedly from 2010 to 2020.

“Are you in favor of granting legal status to all illegal immigrants who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least three years and have not been convicted of any felony crimes.”

There are approximately one million undocumented workers in the LA area that fit this description. They are hard-working neighbors, families, and friends, not violent criminals. Clearly, they have wide-spread support withing the vast LA Hispanic community. But do Anglo workers support them?

I tackled that question in my book, Wall Street’s War on Workers, by sorting the CES data to include only white respondents without four-year college degrees, who are also in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution.

The data show that our commonsense understanding about white working-class resentment towards immigrants was justified in 2010 when only 32 percent supported the statement that granted legal status, but by 2020, white working-class support for legalization jumped to 62 percent.

But that was way back in 2020, long before the Biden immigration surge. Have working-class sentiments about immigrants changed since 2020? Trump’s incessant pounding away at undocumented immigrants and his successful campaign in 2024 would suggest they would have.

We tested the exact same CES question again in a YouGov survey (April 2025) designed by the Labor Institute, the Center for Working Class Politics and the Rutgers Labor Education Action Research Network. The survey included 3,000 respondents from Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, largely white working-class states.

Before the survey, I was certain that support had plummeted, given the rise of job insecurity and inflation during the last four years. I expected that more voters in those Rust Belt states would be worried about losing their jobs to low-wage immigrants and would therefore be more open to Trump’s deportation campaign. But I was mistaken.

In these four states, 63 percent of the respondents supported “granting legal status to all illegal immigrants who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least three years and have not been convicted of any felony crimes.” Only 34 percent opposed the statement.

I’ve heard activists say that black voters are more hostile to immigrant workers, because many work in lower-wage jobs that face competition from undocumented workers. Wrong again: 77 percent of the black respondents in these four states favored the proposal. In every demographic and income category strong majorities favored “granting legal status” to these “illegal” hard-working immigrants.

Are the Democrats sleep-walking through this crisis?

Given this survey data, as well as just plain decency, the Democratic Party should be all over this issue. Democratic leaders of all ideological shades should be marching together arm-in-arm with the protestors, demanding a path to citizenship for hard-working, law-abiding undocumented workers. Why isn’t the Democratic leadership taking the lead?

I really don’t know. But I do know that their abdication leaves the field to Trump, who is doing all he can to provoke confrontations between the demonstrators and police, confrontations that play to his base’s fears and strengthens him. That would be much harder to do if Democratic elected officials were on the front lines. Trump’s getting away with this even though nearly two-thirds of the public doesn’t agree with him on deporting hard-working immigrants. That’s Democratic political malpractice.

If you step back and look at the broader picture, it sure seems like the Democrats have given up on bold support for working people. Yes, they will talk about the illegality of sending in the National Guard, they decry the blatant violations of habeas corpus, and they express concerns about Trump-the-Oligarch’s threat to democracy. But full-throated support for bringing immigrant workers out of the shadows and into citizenship? Radio silence.

It’s time to figure out, I think, how to create a new party of working people. As it turns out, I’m not alone. Nearly sixty percent of Rust Belt voters support that too! (More on that when we release our complete survey results, coming soon.)

Meanwhile, let’s hope that some Democrats join the activists on the frontlines, coming to the defense of working people in dire need of support. Is that really too much to ask of the one-time party of working people?

The military is in the streets of Los Angeles.

That image alone—armed National Guard troops deployed by a sitting president against the will of local officials—should shake this country to its core. But it is not happening in isolation. It is part of a coordinated and escalating assault on democracy itself.

All while, in the backdrop, Congress is advancing a budget deal that expands military and ICE funding while slashing Medicaid and nutritional assistance for millions of working-class families.

And on Saturday, Trump will stage a military parade in Washington, D.C.—a grotesque celebration of state power at the very moment it is being used to crush dissent and consolidate control.

This is not a metaphor. This is a turning point.

We are witnessing, in real time, the merger of authoritarianism and oligarchy. Trump is consolidating power not just through policy but through spectacle, surveillance, and the criminalization of dissent. His targets include journalists, immigrants, students, union organizers, law firms, and civil society groups.

We know we cannot count on the same institutions that have ignored or dismissed the very communities now under threat. We are turning to the people—to the organizers, the movement-builders, the working class—to rise up and defend what remains of our democracy.

His allies are billionaires and corporate elites—Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Goldman Sachs, Palantir. With them, he is expanding the surveillance state, deregulating crypto markets, and auctioning off public power to private interests. The machinery of government is being weaponized to serve wealth and silence opposition.

Meanwhile, Democrats are fumbling.

Instead of confronting this authoritarian moment with clarity and resolve, too many are still busy in performative tactics. Just last week, while organizers were bracing for raids, the most shared political image was not a show of solidarity or urgency. It was Democrats handing tacos to Republicans.

That is not leadership. It is negligence.

The Democratic Party cannot continue to treat this as business as usual. The military is being deployed against U.S. citizens. Protest is being criminalized. Critical lifelines for working families are being gutted. And the infrastructure that supports grassroots resistance is under sustained attack.

Yet even in the face of authoritarian repression, it is the people, not institutions, who are leading.

From immigrant justice groups like CHIRLA to local organizers in Los Angeles, everyday people are rising up to defend communities that have been abandoned. These are not just protests. These are acts of solidarity. People are risking arrest, injury, and intimidation to stand for dignity, democracy, and human rights.

It is organizers who are showing up for Black and Brown communities under siege. It is students who are mobilizing in the streets to defend freedom of speech. It is workers who are fighting for unions in the face of corporate retaliation. It is faith leaders and neighborhood advocates who are providing care where public systems have failed.

The question is no longer whether this is real. The question is what we are going to do about it.

These are the people building the real opposition. Not consultants. Not think tanks. Not party insiders.

That is why Our Revolution has launched an emergency petition demanding Congress block Trump’s military deployment. We know we cannot count on the same institutions that have ignored or dismissed the very communities now under threat. We are turning to the people—to the organizers, the movement-builders, the working class—to rise up and defend what remains of our democracy.

Because this is not a series of unfortunate events. It is a strategy. A strategy to consolidate power, suppress dissent, and dismantle democratic norms. The signs are not subtle. They are loud. They are public. And they are accelerating.

We have seen this before. In other countries. In history books. And now, right here.

The question is no longer whether this is real. The question is what we are going to do about it.

If not now, when?

When history asks what we did as the tanks rolled in, as communities were criminalized, and as working people were stripped of basic dignity, our answer cannot be: we served tacos.

It must be: we stood with the people. We saw the danger for what it was. We acted. We organized. We fought. And we built something better.

For years, we have warned against the danger of an unchecked president turning the military against American civilians.

In an extraordinary show of force, President Trump has federalized 4,000 members of the California National Guard and deployed 300 of them, in addition to deploying 700 Marines, to quell protests in the Los Angeles area. All over the objections of Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Why this abrupt, camera-ready escalation? White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller posted a video of a peaceful protest parade. “If we don’t fix this, we don’t have a country,” he shuddered. “Pass the BBB” — the budget bill now facing turbulence in Congress.

Trump’s administration is spoiling for a fight. It pops out emergency declarations like a Pez dispenser. It is also relying on flimsy legal justifications, as my colleagues have pointed out.

Presidents have deployed troops to control civil unrest only 30 times before in U.S. history. The Posse Comitatus Act generally prohibits federal troops from engaging in civilian law enforcement. Soldiers are trained to defeat an enemy, not to de-escalate protests.

The situation in Los Angeles is bad. What might come next could be worse.

The last time that a president sent in the Guard without a clear request from a state’s governor was 1965, when troops were used to protect the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery. (And even in that case, George Wallace waffled.)

To be clear, violent protests are not acceptable or productive. The federal government should be unobstructed in carrying out its lawful duties. Of course, the specter of masked ICE agents lurking in the lobbies of immigration courts, as has happened here in New York City, is itself willfully provocative.

In fact, in Los Angeles, protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful. The LAPD — hardly a department of pushovers — has been adamant that it has the situation under control. Not surprisingly, the troops have only fanned the protests. Newsom formally requested that the administration rescind the deployment, saying that it is “inflaming tensions while pulling resources from where they’re actually needed.”

The situation in Los Angeles is bad. What might come next could be worse.

Trump’s executive order authorizes deployment of the Guard “at locations where protests against [ICE] functions are occurring or are likely to occur.” Where might that be? “We’re gonna have troops everywhere,” Trump declared.

As my colleague Elizabeth Goitein notes, “No president has ever federalized the National Guard for purposes of responding to potential future civil unrest anywhere in the country. Preemptive deployment is literally the opposite of deployment as a last resort. It would be a shocking abuse of power and the law.”

The most powerful repressive tool would be the Insurrection Act — a law that lets presidents deploy troops to suppress a rebellion or insurrection or curb domestic violence in extreme scenarios. Trump threatened to invoke it against Democratic-run cities during his 2024 campaign.

The Insurrection Act is, unfortunately, a mess of a law. Key words such as “rebellion” and “insurrection” are left undefined. Courts have given presidents a wide berth. Trump winked at this law by calling the protesters “insurrectionists.”

He has so far chosen to rely on a different law — one that has never been used to quell civil unrest without an accompanying Insurrection Act invocation. The administration claims that it is invoking this law only to protect federal personnel and property. But Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has requested that soldiers be authorized to detain and search protesters, functions normally prohibited by the Posse Comitatus Act.

It’s clear that Trump wants to use this showdown to expand enforcement powers.

The week before he stages a strongman-style military parade along the National Mall — complete with tanks, missiles, and military aircraft — Trump has claimed the right to preemptively authorize deployment of the military all across America.

That should be chilling to most Americans, who have enjoyed a firm line between police and the military as an essential component of our democracy. The deployment of the military against civilians should only be used in the most extreme cases as a last resort. Otherwise, as Elizabeth Goitein notes, “an army turned inward can quickly become an instrument of tyranny.”

Experts have already identified worst-case scenarios. George W. Bush administration official David Frum has sounded the alarm on the possibility of Trump using the military to influence the 2026 election.

If you want to learn more about all of this, here are reports we’ve published in the last few years on emergency powers, the Insurrection Act, the Posse Comitatus Act, the Alien Enemies Act, and martial law.

Once again, in the face of a lawless executive, the courts must now step up. The Supreme Court may want to avoid a conflict, but here, it may have no choice. It is imperative that it uphold checks against the use of military force against civilians.

And now that we know that the existing laws can be used, however tendentiously, to justify provocative military action, we must fix those laws so they cannot be abused again.

The Brennan Center has proposed reforms to the Insurrection Act, including defining the law’s critical terms and enforcing more checks on its use. We have also proposed reforms to strengthen the Posse Comitatus Act. Americans must be adamant, too, that even under existing statutes, presidents lack the power to declare martial law.

This is a critical moment in U.S. history, and it demands that we stand strong in our opposition to the administration’s reckless and unlawful use of military force, in Los Angeles and across the country.

LIVE 10 AM Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Today, it’s a thought-provoking episode of “The TMI Show”! Political cartoonist and columnist Ted Rall brings his razor-sharp perspective to the forefront with his provocative thesis: Israel Is Dangerous for Jews. This isn’t just talk—this is a deep dive into a topic and longstanding assumptions that turn out to have been totally false. Rall tackles the long-held belief that Israel is the ultimate safe haven for Jewish people, armed with stark statistics: 1,755 Jewish people have died from hate crimes and terrorism in Israel during 2015-2024 (0.024% of its Jewish population) versus just 24 in the diaspora (0.0003%). That’s a 73-times higher risk, and even though the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack contributed, it’s still far more dangerous to be Jewish in Israel than anywhere else.

Ted challenges the narrative that pro-Palestinian activists want Jews to be killed if Israel dissolves, pointing to historical examples like Austria-Hungary’s dissolution without mass killings, and references Edward Said’s vision of a binational peace and a one-state solution. The controversy heats up as Rall questions U.S. support rooted in 1948 post-Holocaust logic, now strained by decades of conflict. Israel, it turns out, is making life worse for Jews.

Joined by co-host Manila Chan, this episode promises unfiltered insights into Zionist arguments, pro-Palestinian perspectives, and the messy reality of the Middle East. Whether you’re pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, or just here for the truth, this is must-see TV. Tune in, share your thoughts, and let’s get real about one of the world’s toughest issues.

Plus:

• At least 10 people were killed and 12 wounded in a mass shooting at a high school in Graz, Austria, marking the deadliest attack in the country’s postwar history.
• Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced 4,000 National Guard troops will remain in Los Angeles for 60 days at a cost of $134M, amid a proposed $831.5B FY 2026 defense budget.
• The U.S. and China agreed on a trade deal framework in London to implement a May 12 tariff pause, potentially easing rare earth mineral export tensions.

 

The post TMI Show Ep 157: “Israel Is Dangerous to Jews.” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

As part of a deliberate strategy to keep adversaries off-balance, the Trump Administration floods the news cycle with wild and controversial policy decisions and public statements, like mass deportations, expelling foreign students, and imposing travel bans—often harsh and cruel. The blizzard of state violence is entertaining. But it also causes widespread stress. These moves will only intensify, making us even crazier. The constant barrage leaves the public grappling with uncertainty, fear, and division, with no relief in sight..and any of us could be next.

The post Are You Entertained? appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Trump wants blood.

The spectacle is the point. The helicopters. The uniforms. The rumble of armored personnel carriers down the boulevards of Los Angeles. The former president of the United States — now reinstalled in the White House through a judicial (Citizens United) and electoral (Musk’s money and X) sleight-of-hand that would make Orbán proud — is sending U.S. Marines into an American city.

Marines who are trained in killing people. Quickly, efficiently, ruthlessly. Not crowd control, not defending the Constitutional right to protest, not arresting and Mirandizing: just shedding blood. Blowing things up and killing people is what this most lethal fighting force in the world does so well. And Trump just sent them into our civilian streets.

At the same time, Donald Trump is presiding over the most openly corrupt regime in the history of this country.

He’s looting the treasury in broad daylight, giving away a $4 trillion tax cut to his billionaire donors and golf buddies, repealing clean air and water protections while wildfires torch the West and hurricanes batter the South, and inviting domestic terrorists into the halls of power. His family and cronies are raking in billions from foreign governments — from Saudi royals to Russian oligarchs to Chinese front companies — with not even a fig leaf of legality.

Meanwhile, he’s gutted the FBI’s domestic terrorism unit, turned DHS into a political police force, and is laying off scientists from NOAA and NASA because they keep insisting that the Earth is, in fact, burning from the poisons his fossil fuel billionaire friends sell.

And now, as his approval ratings begin to wobble and questions mount about his finances, his backroom deals, and his erratic behavior, he reaches for the oldest play in the authoritarian playbook: provoke unrest and then send in the troops.

As LA Mayor Karen Bass said:

“These tactics sow terror in our communities and disrupt basic principles of safety in our city.”

This is not new. Nixon tried it. Hitler perfected it. Mussolini reveled in it. Trump is following a script so old and worn that it should’ve been burned for kindling by now, but here we are again.

In the early 1970s, as opposition to the Vietnam War reached a boiling point, Richard Nixon didn’t try to calm the waters: he deliberately stirred them. He referred to student protesters as “communists” and “bums,” cheered on violent pro-government mobs like the one that beat peaceful demonstrators during the Hard Hat Riot in New York, and did everything he could to push the country into a cultural war fever.

Nixon’s goal was simple: make protest look like rebellion, make rebellion look like terrorism, and make himself look like the only one who could restore “law and order.”

He succeeded, for a while, and it even got him re-elected in 1972. But the price was Watergate, war crimes, and a generation’s trust in government flushed down the drain.

Now Trump, with Stephen Miller whispering fascist bedtime stories in his ear and Steve Bannon howling about civil war from the sidelines, is picking up where Nixon left off. But this time the stakes are even higher, and the intentions are even clearer.

Trump’s deployment of Marines to Los Angeles under the absurd claim of needing to “protect the public” from leftist “urban insurgents” is not about law enforcement. It’s about spectacle. It's about optics. It’s about setting the stage for something much darker.

Like Viktor Orbán in Hungary or Erdoğan in Turkey, Trump is using public protests as both scapegoat and smokescreen. The plan is to provoke confrontation, paint it as insurrection, and then invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, a 200-year-old law that allows a president to deploy the military domestically and override governors and mayors.

Once that happens, the road to full dictatorship is wide open.

Because the Insurrection Act suspends Posse Comitatus, the 1878 law that prevents the U.S. military from being used as a domestic police force. With a stroke of a pen, Trump can militarize every protest, shut down dissent, seize media infrastructure, or even delay — or “postpone” — elections on grounds of public disorder.

Think that’s far-fetched?

Trump has already floated the idea of suspending elections. He joked in 2020 about “twelve more years.” His allies in Congress and right-wing media are openly calling for him to stay in office “as long as necessary.” A majority of Republican voters now say they’d support postponing elections “in an emergency.” And who defines the emergency? Trump does.

The recent calls for the military to intervene aren’t about securing streets; they’re about testing the waters. If there’s not enough public backlash to sending Marines into Los Angeles, what’s next? Troops in Seattle? Chicago? Portland? Atlanta? Your town?

This is how democracies die: not with a bang, but with a series of flags, uniforms, and carefully orchestrated TV shots showing a president “taking control.”

— And while all this is happening, where’s the coverage of the $4 trillion tax giveaway to the morbidly rich?
— Where’s the outrage over the billions flowing into Trump’s money bins from foreign governments in violation of the Emoluments Clause?
— Where’s the investigation into the domestic terrorism unit Trump dismantled while neo-Nazis train in camps in Michigan and Florida?
— Where’s the climate report that was buried?
— Where are the Epstein files?
— Where’s the fury over his push to gut Medicaid and privatize our social safety net?

The answer: they’re all buried beneath a pile of riot gear and tear gas canisters.

This is the playbook. Distract, divide, and dominate.

Hitler provoked street clashes with pro-democracy protestors with his brown shirts starting street brawls, then used the Reichstag fire as the excuse to seize emergency powers. Mussolini’s Blackshirts beat and murdered union organizers to manufacture a crisis, then demanded — and got — martial law. Marcos in the Philippines used student protests to declare martial law and cancel elections: I was working in that country the week he fled to Hawaii. Erdoğa used unrest in Gezi Park to round up journalists, rewrite the Turkish constitution, and jail his political rivals.

This is the playbook. Distract, divide, and dominate. Hitler provoked street clashes with pro-democracy protestors with his brown shirts starting street brawls, then used the Reichstag fire as the excuse to seize emergency powers.

It’s not just history. It’s prophecy.

Trump has studied these men, either directly or through his cadre of enablers and strategists. Steve Bannon once said he admired Lenin because he wanted to “destroy the state.” Stephen Miller has been pushing for suspension of habeas corpus. Trump himself tried to deploy the military in 2020 during the George Floyd protests but was held back — barely — by Defense Secretary Mark Esper. Esper’s gone now. In his place? Loyalists.

So what do we do?

We do the one thing that autocrats have never figured out how to fully suppress: we show up.

We take to the streets, not in violent defiance but in peaceful, defiant unity. We reclaim the tools of democracy — voice, presence, solidarity — and we make it clear that we see what he’s doing and we are not going to let it stand.

That’s why this coming Saturday matters more than ever.

We take to the streets, not in violent defiance but in peaceful, defiant unity. We reclaim the tools of democracy — voice, presence, solidarity — and we make it clear that we see what he’s doing and we are not going to let it stand.

No Kings Day isn’t just a rally. It’s a declaration. That we will not be ruled by strongmen. That we do not recognize the Trump family as royalty. That we believe in the power of the people and the promise of our republic.

That no matter how much bloodshed Trump tries to provoke, he will not succeed.

Because when you stand in a crowd of thousands, arm-in-arm with your neighbors, flags flying not in fear but in resistance, you remind the would-be tyrant of something he desperately wants to forget: we outnumber him.

We always have. We just need to show up.

In an aphorism sometimes attributed to Leo Tolstoy, sometimes to John Gardner, all literature relies on one of two plots: a person goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

Let me offer my own version. We might summarize the entire history of the human race in two words: people move. Everything else is just elaboration on that basic plot.

While it’s easy to imagine that colonialism is part of our past, think again.

Some of history’s worst atrocities can be attributed to certain people trying to control other people’s movements, whether by capturing them, herding them into prison camps (concentration camps, strategic hamlets, model villages), enslaving and transporting them, or warehousing them in besieged countries or regions while barricading the borders of anyplace to which they might want to flee, often consigning them to death in treacherous deserts or seas for trying to exercise the basic human right of freedom of movement.

European Freedom and Colonial Domination

In February, President Trump astonished the world by proclaiming that the United States should “take over” Gaza and rid it entirely of its Palestinian population. Yet in many ways, as startling as that might have seemed, his proposal fit right in with his drive to remove millions of people from the United States. Both reflected a colonial arrogance that the U.S. and Israel share: the idea that some people (Americans/Europeans/Whites/colonizers) have the right to move themselves as they desire while moving others against their will. Consider it, after a fashion, a contemporary (as well as historic) version of apartheid.

Forcing people to move or prohibiting their mobility are two sides of the same colonial or neocolonial coin. Colonizers invade and drive people out or enslave, transport, enclose, and imprison them while barricading off the privileged spaces they create for themselves. In a vicious cycle, colonizers or imperial powers justify their borders and walls in the name of “security” while protecting themselves from those desperate to escape their domination. And such ideas, old as they may be, are still distinctly with us.

European imperial actors from Christopher Columbus on claimed the right to freedom of movement on this planet. Today, the flyer you get in the mail with your passport proudly insists that, “with your U.S. passport, the world is yours!”

Or consider historian and scientist Jared Diamond’s nonchalant claim that “no traditional society tolerated the relatively open access enjoyed by modern American or European citizens, most of whom can travel anywhere… merely by presenting a valid passport and visa to a passport control officer.”

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Diamond argued that Americans and Europeans exemplify the freedoms of modernity, while more “traditional societies” oppress people by restricting their travel. But if Americans and Europeans enjoy the freedom to travel, it’s not because they are so much more modern than other inhabitants of this planet. It’s because other countries don’t restrict their freedom. On the other hand, it’s the U.S. and Europe, Diamond’s symbols of modernity, that tend to impose the greatest restrictions with their militarized borders and deportation regimes.

Perhaps we could better define modernity as the European drive to control mobility, forcing others to accept their intrusions while denying free mobility to the rest of the world. The United States and Israel offer a spectrum of examples of how the right to deport, the right to transport, the right to enclose, and the right to exclude tend to complement one another on this strange planet of ours. Both countries claim to be liberal democracies and celebrate their commitment to equal rights, while reserving those rights for some and excluding others.

Colonialism and the Postwar Order

While it’s easy to imagine that colonialism is part of our past, think again. Its structures, institutions, and ideas still haunt our world. And one of the defining powers of colonizers always was the way they reserved for themselves (and only themselves) the right to move freely, while also reserving the right to move those they had colonized around like so many chess pieces.

Moving (and moving others) has been inherent in every colonial project. The roots of today’s deportation regimes — particularly in the United States, Europe, and Israel — lie in the determination of colonializing countries to wrest wealth from the lands and labor of those they colonized and enjoy that wealth in their own privileged spaces from which the colonized are largely excluded.

The “rules-based world order” that emerged after World War II created institutions for international cooperation and international law, ended colonial empires (as the former colonies gained independence), and dismantled segregation in the United States and, eventually, apartheid in South Africa. But none of that truly or totally erased what had existed before. Global postwar decolonization and the struggle for equality proved to be lengthy and sometimes extremely bloody processes.

In the U.S., people of color are full citizens and can no longer, as a group, be legally enclosed or removed against their will. Europe, too, has dismantled its colonial empires. But the post-colonial world has developed a new form of global apartheid, where the racialized drive to enclose and remove is now directed at immigrants, the vast majority of them escaping the ongoing ravages left by colonialism (and more recently climate change) in their own countries.

Israel is in some ways an anachronism in that twentieth-century trajectory. Its colonizing project was carried out just as other colonized peoples were throwing off their rulers. Its expulsions of Palestinians, which began in the 1940s, have only accelerated in our own time. Meanwhile, Israel created its own legal version of apartheid (even as South Africa’s was dismantled), with those Palestinians who were not expelled increasingly surrounded by prisons and walls.

The Right to Deport: Israel

Zionists began to assert the right to expel well before the state of Israel was created in 1948.

In 1895, in an often-quoted passage, Zionism’s founder, Theodor Herzl, proposed that “we shall try to spirit the penniless [Arab] population across the border… The removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” During the post-World War I British Mandate in Palestine, Zionist, Arab, and British officials agreed that “there could be no viable Jewish state in all or part of Palestine unless there was a mass displacement of Arab inhabitants.”

Palestine’s British colonial authorities advocated such a displacement in their 1937 Peel Commission Report. It was then enthusiastically endorsed by Zionist leaders like David Ben-Gurion, later Israel’s first prime minister (“The compulsory transfer of the Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give us… an opportunity which we never dared to dream in our wildest imaginings”) and Chaim Weizmann (“If half a million Arabs could be transferred, two million Jews could be put in their place”).

Israel compounded its right to deport with the right to imprison, enclose, and kill. A plethora of laws and walls continue to restrict the return, movement, and residence of Palestinians. Israeli historian Ilan Pappé described the Israeli occupation regime in the West Bank and Gaza since 1967 as having created “the biggest prison on earth.”

In the older settler colonial countries, the days of Trails of Tears, imprisonment on reservations, the forced removal of children to boarding schools, and wars of extermination are mostly in the past. But in Israel, we are witnessing such a project happening before our very eyes. The eliminationist project there is proceeding apace with the tens of thousands killed in Gaza, and in President Trump’s and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bald proposals for the complete removal of the Palestinian population from that strip of land, as well as in the restrictions on mobility and the thousands of home demolitions and displacements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The Right to Deport: The United States

In the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this country ended slavery and enclosure and granted previously enslaved Africans and their descendants, as well as Native Americans, the right to citizenship.

Until after the Civil War, however, “immigrants” meant White Europeans — the only people then allowed to become citizens. Citizenship by birth, mandated by the 14th Amendment after the Civil War, complicated that picture because non-Whites born in U.S. territories also became citizens. To avoid this, the country quickly began to racially restrict immigration. By the late twentieth century, the right to immigrate and more equal rights inside the country were extended to non-Whites. But those rights were always fragile and accompanied by anti-immigrant and deportation campaigns, increasingly justified with the concept of “illegality.”

Developments in the twenty-first century clearly suggest that the arc of history does not necessarily bend toward justice, as a racial deportation regime resurges in a major fashion under President Donald Trump. He, of course, has long distinguished between “shithole countries” and “countries like Norway” as he continues to tighten the screws around most immigrants from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, while recently ostentatiously welcoming White Afrikaaners from South Africa.

The Trump administration’s repressive treatment of immigrants includes endless border militarization, the stripping of legal status from hundreds of thousands of immigrants, inventing increasingly draconian excuses for deportation, expanding immigrant incarceration, and pursuing exotic extraterritorial imprisonment and deportation schemes, including pressuring and bribing countries ranging from Costa Rica and Venezuela to Libya and South Sudan to take people forcibly deported from the United States. Others are being disappeared into prisons in Guantánamo and El Salvador.

Strangely — or maybe not so strangely — at the same time that the United States is deporting such “despicable human beings,” it’s demanding the extradition of others, including dozens of Mexicans. “The previous Administration allowed these criminals to run free and commit crimes all over the world,” Trump complained. “The United States’ intention is to extend its justice system,” a Mexican security analyst explained, so that the U.S. can prosecute Mexicans for crimes committed in Mexico. Forcibly moving people works both ways.

Connecting the U.S. and Israel Through Importation-Deportation

The colonial importation-deportation-incarceration regimes of the United States and Israel are intertwined in many ways. Of course, the U.S. decision to strictly limit Jewish (and other southern and eastern European) immigration in the 1920s contributed to the desperate search of European Jews for refuge in the Hitlerian years to come — and to the growth of Zionism, and the postwar migration to Israel.

The new United Nations — made up primarily of colonizers who had been keen to deport (or, in the case of the United States, make sure they didn’t add to) their own Jewish populations — partitioned Palestine to create Israel at the end of 1947. As the only powerful country to emerge from World War II unscathed, the United States would play an outsized role in that organization.

President Trump’s proposal to take Gaza and eliminate its population expresses his own (and Israel’s) settler-colonial dream for what Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe famously called the “elimination of the native.” Trump initially suggested deporting Gaza’s population to Egypt and Jordan, then to Sudan, Somalia, and Somaliland, and then to Libya — proposals enthusiastically endorsed by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. By mid-March of this year, Israel was creating a new migration authority to oversee the planned expulsion and 80% of Jewish Israelis found that plan “desirable” (though only 52% thought it was “practical”).

As of late May, none of those countries had accepted Trump’s proposal, though negotiations with Libya were evidently ongoing. But Trump’s plan to pressure or bribe poorer, weaker countries to accept Palestinian deportees mirrored his deals to deport “unwanteds” from the United States. In addition to the several Latin American countries where his administration has already sent deportees, it is looking to Angola, Benin, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Libya, Moldova, and Rwanda as possibilities. As Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained, “We are working with other countries to say, ‘we want to send you some of the most despicable human beings to your countries…Would you do that, as a favor to us? And the further away from America, the better.’”

Another connection between the deportation regimes of the U.S. and Israel is the way the Trump administration has mobilized charges of antisemitism to imprison and deport Palestinians and their supporters. In ordering the deportation of protester Mahmoud Khalil and others, Rubio claimed that their “condoning antisemitic conduct” undermined American foreign policy objectives.

The United States and Israel share another dystopian project as well: ratcheting up fear and suffering to inspire people to “self-deport.” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem flooded social and other media with a “multimillion dollar ad campaign” threatening immigrants: “Leave now. If you don’t, we will find you and we will deport you.” In this respect, MAGA Republicans differed little from liberal Democrats, as Noem was echoing Vice President Kamala Harris’s words to Guatemalans: “Don’t come… If you do, you will be turned back.” In an eerily similar fashion, on the Israeli-occupied West Bank, “settler advertisements appear on screens and billboards telling Palestinians, ‘There is no future in Palestine.’” Though their tactics differ in scale — the United States is not massacring immigrants and bombing their neighborhoods — they share the goal of eliminating a population.

One apparent difference makes the comparison even more revealing. The United States is aiming its repression at immigrants; Israel against the native population. But the earliest history of deportation in the United States began with the pushing out or slaughtering of the indigenous Native American population in order to clear the land for White settlement. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Africans were forcibly imported to provide labor, many of them even before the U.S. became an independent state. They then remained enslaved and their mobility restricted for almost a century. Colonial control of freedom of movement, in other words, can take different forms over time.

Both the United States and Israel also disproportionately imprison their minoritized populations — another denial of freedom of movement. In the United States, this means people of color. Black people make up 14% of the population but 41% of the prison and jail population. Native Americans are incarcerated at four times the rate of White people. The United States also maintains the world’s largest immigrant detention system, with expansion plans already underway.

In Israel, it’s Palestinians who are disproportionately imprisoned, both inside that country and in its occupied territories. While Palestinians constitute about 20% of Israel’s population, they constitute about 60% of Israel’s prisoners. (Such statistics are hard to come by today, so that figure doesn’t include the thousands taken prisoner since Oct. 7, 2023.) Many Palestinian prisoners languish in what Israel calls “administrative detention,” a status created for Palestinians that allows lengthy detention without charge.

Borders, Walls, and Global Apartheid

We are so accustomed to imagining a world of equally sovereign countries, each creating its own immigration policy, that it’s easy to miss the colonial dimensions of immigration flows and the ways that colonial histories, immigration restrictions, expulsions, and incarceration are connected. Settler countries like Israel and the United States have particular similarities (and particular connections), but most European powers that have benefited from the world’s colonial order now barricade their borders against potential migrants.

Most of the world agrees that apartheid inside a country’s borders is the epitome of injustice. Why, then, are we so ready to accept a global version of it?

Our planet’s oceans remain one of the last global commons—a shared resource that supports countless species, regulates our climate, and feeds billions of people. However, for over 50 years, we have witnessed their destruction from the combined impacts of industrial fishing, plastic pollution, and climate change. Now, incredibly but predictably, President Trump is exacerbating this crisis, signing a slew of Executive Actions that prioritize corporate profit over the long-term health of this vital resource.

As we commemorate the 23rd annual World Oceans Day, it is critical that we remember just how helpful some of the protective actions we have taken have been. The global moratorium on commercial whaling brought the great whales back from the edge of extinction. Marine sanctuaries have allowed fish populations to recover in once-depleted fisheries. Bans on dumping have prevented millions of tons of toxic waste from poisoning our seas. These wins are proof that when governments commit to science-driven solutions, underpinned by social, economic, and environmental justice, progress is not only possible, it is inevitable.

The next opportunity for bold action is fast approaching, with governments this week convening at the UN Ocean Conference in Nice, France. As the US retreats from leadership on ocean protection, the international community is poised to make decisions that could have lasting benefits or far-reaching consequences. Governments must unite behind science, uphold international law, and take bold, collective action to defend the rights and futures of coastal communities and chart a sustainable course for life on Earth.

Ratify the Global Ocean Treaty

The first important decision is ratifying the Global Ocean Treaty, the only legal tool that can establish marine protected areas in international waters outside of the Southern Ocean. Despite covering roughly 75% of Earth’s surface and its indispensable role in supporting life on Earth, only 2.7% of the ocean is fully or highly protected from human activities. That drops to a mere 0.9% for the high seas. The Treaty’s “30 by 30” target, adopted as part of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework in 2022, aims to change that by increasing protection to at least 30% by 2030–the minimum scientists have stated is needed for marine ecosystems to recover and biodiversity to thrive.

Internationally, time is running out. The Treaty must be ratified this year to meet the 2030 deadline.

There is no way to meet this target without the Global Ocean Treaty. To succeed, this protection must extend across both national and international waters. Domestically, countries must protect at least 30% of their national waters, ban unsustainable extractive industries, and ensure that local and Indigenous communities are central to marine conservation planning and decision-making processes.

Internationally, time is running out. The Treaty must be ratified this year to meet the 2030 deadline. However, while 60 ratifications are needed for it to take effect, only 31 countries have taken that step so far. Governments must act swiftly in the coming months to ratify the treaty and keep the 30 by 30 target within reach–before it’s too late.

Stop Deep Sea Mining

The Trump Administration’s rogue push to unilaterally launch deep sea mining in international waters has been widely condemned by several state actors, including UNOC co-host France, along with China and the European Commission as a threat to multilateral cooperation and the United Nations. Alongside concerns about the ecological damage deep sea mining would cause, governments, civil society organizations, and Pacific Indigenous rights groups have also cautioned that it could trigger a reckless race to exploit the seabed.

Scientists have also debunked the industry’s claims that deep sea minerals are necessary for a green energy transition and have warned that mining the deep ocean could cause irreversible ecological harm on a vast scale. The economic case is no more substantial, as extraction and processing costs remain prohibitively high, and demand from key sectors, such as automotive and technology is limited. The so-called “energy security” rationale—invoked amid rising tensions with China—is similarly baseless and being aggressively promoted by the very corporations that would profit most.

The oceans are a shared resource. They are our planet’s life support system. But they are being damaged at a rate faster than we can save them for the benefit of a few.

With less than a month until the Council of the regulatory body, the International Seabed Authority (ISA) convenes in July, governments must go beyond words. They must reaffirm the centrality of the United Nations and international law in governing this global commons and vote to enact a moratorium. Thirty-three countries have already called for a moratorium, ban, or pause on deep sea mining. Leaders gathering in Nice should build on this momentum by clearly voicing their support.

Now is the moment to make it clear that the deep ocean, recognized by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea as the common heritage of humankind, cannot be seized by those with the deepest pockets or the best-connected lobbyists. Instead, the international community must ensure that any decisions regarding the future of the seabed are guided by science, equity, and multilateralism, rather than haste or corporate pressure.

Support a Strong Global Plastics Treaty

Our oceans are drowning in plastic-but this crisis extends far beyond littered beaches. It is a growing ecological and public health emergency that stretches from the depths of the ocean floor to our dinner plates, from the polluted bodies of sea creatures to our bloodstream and the bodies of newborn children. No matter where we live or even how much money we have, we rely on clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and nutritious food to eat. Today, all of these things are contaminated by toxic chemicals and microplastics.

Yet while governments continue to profess support for ocean protection, their continued failure to address the root cause–unchecked plastic production–serves only to protect the profits of fossil fuel and petrochemical giants, not the health of marine ecosystems or the millions of people suffering the consequences of this plastic pollution.

While governments continue to profess support for ocean protection, their continued failure to address the root cause–unchecked plastic production–serves only to protect the profits of fossil fuel and petrochemical giants, not the health of marine ecosystems.

As the final major gathering of relevant delegates and ministers before the resumed Global Plastics Treaty negotiations (INC-5.2), in August, UNOC presents a critical opportunity to change course. Delegates must issue a strong ministerial declaration on the Global Plastic Treaty that commits to cutting plastic production, ending single-use plastic, and prioritizing public health, environmental justice, and protection of our ocean.

The oceans are a shared resource. They are our planet’s life support system. But they are being damaged at a rate faster than we can save them for the benefit of a few.

While the scale of the threat is daunting, our history reminds us that we are not powerless.

This week's UN Ocean Conference in Nice, France, and the critical UN meetings later this Summer, offer governments a crucial chance to protect the hard-won gains and reverse the damages that have been made. Whether they seize it will determine the future of the world’s largest—and most essential—commons.

In a surprise development, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the man living in Maryland illegally deported to El Salvador was returned to the United States to face charges of transporting undocumented migrants. For months, the Trump Administration and the judicial system had been odds over returning Garcia to the United States. The Supreme Court had ruled that the Trump Administration had to “facilitate” Garcia’s return but not “effectuate” it.

It is essential to note that the Trump Administration admitted in court documents that they had inappropriately deported Garcia to El Salvador where he was imprisoned in a notorious maximum security prison. In an oval office meeting in April with Salvadoran President Bukele, Trump made it clear that Garcia would not ever be returning to the United States. Attorney General Pam Bondi said Garcia “is never coming back to our country.”

The standoff between the Trump Administration and the courts led to talks of a constitutional crisis. Indeed, it was hard to see how the impasse would be resolved. Then, without any warning, Garcia was moved from El Salvador to face charges in Tennessee of smuggling undocumented immigrants. Instead of her blanket statement that Garcia would never return to American soil, Bondi now said that “Abrego Garcia has landed in the United States to face justice. He was a smuggler of humans and children and women. This is what American justice looks like.”

The charges against Garcia are hotly disputed by his attorneys. Democrats on Capitol Hill are also challenging the evidence against Garcia. On CNN, Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal commented: “And I’ve heard again and again and again, as a prosecutor, as a United States attorney, federal prosecutor, as well as state attorney general, charges are not evidence. And so far, we’ve seen no evidence.”

Garcia’s return to the United States, even though he faces serious charges, is a real victory for the rule of law. As Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen put it in a statement: “As I have repeatedly said, this is not about the man, it’s about his constitutional rights—and the rights of all. The Administration will now have to make its case in the court of law, as it should have all along.”

For reasons that escape me, the mainstream media has not pointed out that Garcia’s return to the United States is a huge victory for the rule of law and a defeat for President Trump. Garcia is now in a judicial system facing charges, which will be tested in a court of law. His case will not be adjudicated by the whims of the Trump administration.

Recent events suggest that the Trump team realizes the importance of Garcia’s return to America. Trump is a master of the political counterpunch which distracts the media and public’s attention from the matter at hand. I strongly doubt that Trump would have deployed National Guard troops to Los Angeles to quell protests had he not suffered a defeat in the Garcia case. It is, as the New York Times put it, the political fight that President Trump is looking for.

The hard task for Democrats is to respond to Trump’s provocations while keeping the focus on the rights to a fair trial, due process and peaceful protest. It would be very helpful to American democracy if the media would do its job and focus on the fact that the Garcia case represents a major defeat for Trump and a victory for the rule of law.

The crackle of tear gas canisters and the rumble of tactical boots on asphalt echoed through Los Angeles this week as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), backed by federal agents and U.S. Marines, descended upon protestors decrying a sweeping series of immigration raids. What began as a protest against ICE quickly exploded into a broader protest. Progressive community members of all types flooded intersections, blocked freeways, and surrounded detention centers in a show of mass resistance. Federal forces responded with mass arrests, tear gas, and brute force—but the crowds didn’t disperse. They stayed. They returned. They grew.

The targets of the raids revealed the intent. ICE didn’t go after exploitative bosses or the companies violating labor laws. Instead, they rounded up garment workers, day laborers, and food delivery drivers—those whose labor keeps the city alive but whose status makes them vulnerable. Meanwhile, as Congress quietly pushed forward legislation providing major tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy, the manufactured “immigration emergency” shifted public attention away from growing inequality and back toward fear and division. The raids were less about enforcement than they were about distraction—shaping a narrative, channeling anger, and justifying control.

But this time, the usual script isn’t working. Instead of dividing people, the spectacle has clarified the real lines of conflict. Communities once siloed by race, language, or status are joining together—seeing the true threat not in each other but in those who profit from their separation. Warehouse unions, immigrant rights groups, tenant associations, and progressive local officials are increasingly aligned. A shared understanding is taking hold: the enemy is not the worker next to you—it is the elite profiting from your instability.

The movement taking shape in LA is not just a response to injustice. It is the beginning of something more ambitious: a challenge to the foundational myths of American political life.

This is also a stark illustration of the imperial boomerang in motion: the tools of empire—surveillance, militarized policing, psychological control—returning home. What was once deployed to suppress resistance abroad is now turned inward. But rather than subdue, this backlash is catalyzing a broader awakening. The brutality in Los Angeles has illuminated the deeper architecture of repression, drawing new political lines that unite across race, status, and geography. From LA to Gaza, the common thread is clear: state violence serves elite power, and the response from below is no longer fragmented. It is building into a global resistance that sees through the old divisions and names its adversary plainly—oligarchy.

Oligarchic Backlash and the Authoritarian-Financial Complex

President Trump’s activation of the National Guard under Title 10 and his readiness to deploy Marines from Camp Pendleton was never about public safety. It was a choreographed assertion of power meant to produce fear and reaffirm control. Helicopters circled. Tactical units patrolled neighborhoods. Cable news cycled images of property damage while ignoring the scenes of solidarity unfolding at the ground level.

This is how the authoritarian-financial complex operates—a system in which political repression and economic extraction are not separate but interdependent. Moments of unrest become business opportunities: more riot gear, more surveillance contracts, more privatized detention. Each crackdown funds the next. Each protest becomes another justification to expand the reach of state and corporate power.

Nowhere, perhaps, is the fusion of political repression and economic opportunism more blatant than in the machinery of immigration enforcement. The so-called “immigration crisis” has become a lucrative engine for private interests, with for profit prison companies expanding detention capacity well beyond ICE’s funded limits. The recent spike to over 48,000 detainees—far exceeding official capacity—is not a logistical error; it’s a business model. These companies are not just building prisons, they are lobbying for policies that fill them. Trump’s push to detain 100,000 people, coupled with doubled arrest quotas for ICE agents, has created an insatiable demand for space, surveillance, and services. Private contractors now profit not only from detention but from the entire apparatus of deportation—transportation, medical care, legal processing, and data collection—embedding their profit margins deep into the logic of state violence.

This financialization of immigration control explains why enforcement is not designed to succeed, but to persist. The spectacle of militarized raids and mass detentions serves a dual function: it energizes a political base while funneling billions in public money to politically connected firms. It’s no coincidence that watchdog agencies overseeing detention conditions were recently gutted, just as complaints of medical neglect and overcrowding mount. Nor is it accidental that local police forces, through programs like 287(g), are being deputized into ICE’s mission—blurring the line between civil enforcement and criminal policing, eroding community trust, and diverting resources from genuine public safety. This is not about border security; it’s about embedding a permanent state of exception, where fear and control are monetized, and immigrant lives are raw material for profit.

In Los Angeles, this convergence was unmistakable. While federal agents arrested undocumented workers, not one exploitative employer faced charges. The very actors enabling and profiting from illegal labor practices were shielded. The crackdown revealed the true purpose of enforcement: to preserve a system of racialized labor and elite impunity. But instead of breaking public resolve, the repression fueled it. Community leaders who might once have stood apart are now strategizing together. City council members are now publicly calling Trump’s actions “purposefully inflammatory”. The backlash is becoming organized—and political.

Anti-Oligarchic Backlash

The tactics on display in LA were not improvised. They were imported—from battlefields, occupied zones, and foreign policy handbooks. For decades, the U.S. honed its techniques of control overseas. Now, the same playbook—complete with unmarked vehicles, psychological warfare, and militarized response teams—is being applied domestically. This is the imperial boomerang: tactics of colonial dominance turned inward.

But as with foreign occupations, brute force rarely produces lasting submission. Instead, it deepens opposition. In LA, it is catalyzing an unprecedented alignment. Labor unions are holding joint press conferences with immigration organizers. Neighborhood coalitions are coordinating transportation and legal aid for arrestees. Local politicians are being forced to publicly clarify their loyalties: will they support their constituents, or will they remain silent in the face of elite-led repression?

Street actions are converging with union demands, tenant struggles, and local policy fights. Coalitions are being built not around identity alone, but around material interest and shared opposition to oligarchic control.

Mayor Karen Bass’s denunciation of the federal intervention sharpened the political meaning of the crackdown. Framing Los Angeles as a "test case" for the erosion of local authority, Bass exposed the authoritarian logic at work: not the restoration of order, but the imposition of federal dominance through manufactured crisis. Bass’s warning cuts through the noise: Los Angeles wasn’t descending into chaos—it was pushed. The ICE raids didn’t restore order; they shattered it, unleashing fear across communities, including among legal residents. This wasn’t enforcement—it was the imperial boomerang in action. Tactics honed abroad to control foreign populations are now being used at home to fracture civic life and neutralize dissent. Under the guise of national security, federal power bypassed local authority, transforming the city into a living laboratory for domination.

Governor Gavin Newsom’s decision to sue the Trump administration marks an even sharp escalation in the standoff, transforming the crisis into a battle over who holds real authority in a democratic society. By calling the federal deployment of the National Guard “illegal” and “unconstitutional,” Newsom exposed the move as a naked power grab—an attempt to override state control and impose federal force without consent. His defiance was visceral: “Arrest me,” he dared Trump’s border czar. This isn’t just legal pushback—it’s political resistance at the highest level, signaling that California won’t quietly submit to Washington’s manufactured chaos.

The backlash in Los Angeles is not isolated. Across the country, cities like San Francisco have become flashpoints for parallel demonstrations, where thousands marched peacefully in solidarity with immigrant communities and in defiance of federal raids. The widespread mobilizations—from San Francisco’s Mission District to streets in New York, Atlanta, and Seattle—underscore that this is not merely a local crisis but a national awakening. What is unfolding is a geographically diffuse yet politically unified resistance to the authoritarian-financial complex—one that links neighborhoods, cities, and struggles under a shared call for justice and accountability.

More profoundly, this moment is giving rise to a new sense of political identity. An identity not based on citizenship or party, but on a shared understanding of how power operates. It is increasingly clear that the real threat lies not with the person crossing a border, working a warehouse shift, or marching in the street—but with the structure that enriches itself by sowing division and suppressing dissent. The very tools of imperial control that were meant to fragment and subdue are now forging a unified opposition—turning the boomerang's trajectory from division into solidarity, from repression into resistance against the oligarchy itself.

Reclaiming Democratic Power

The movement taking shape in LA is not just a response to injustice. It is the beginning of something more ambitious: a challenge to the foundational myths of American political life. People are beginning to realize that democracy, as it has been practiced, too often serves as a tool of preservation—not transformation. But this moment is shifting that understanding.

The bipartisan oligarchy is cracking, and a new political line is emerging—between those who serve concentrated power and those who challenge it.

As political theorist Camila Vergara argues, real democracy must be plebeian—built from below, driven by those excluded from traditional power. In LA, that principle is being tested. Street actions are converging with union demands, tenant struggles, and local policy fights. Coalitions are being built not around identity alone, but around material interest and shared opposition to oligarchic control.

This uprising is also forcing a reckoning within the Democratic Party. For too long, party leaders have paid lip service to justice while quietly enabling enforcement budgets and border expansion. Now, protestors are demanding clarity: who are you with? Those who remain silent risk political irrelevance. The bipartisan oligarchy is cracking, and a new political line is emerging—between those who serve concentrated power and those who challenge it.

A new democratic force is awakening. And it is not going back to sleep.

There’s a little-discussed word behind the escalating Gestapo-style abductions and deportations of ordinary working people, many longtime residents, that has produced increasing confrontations and mass protests across the U.S., most prominently in Los Angeles in recent days.

The term is quota. Yes, a word long viewed by the right as wicked as socialism or, more recently, woke.

From affirmative action to diversity, inclusion, and equity (DEI), and other social justice aims that sometimes include numeric percentages, quotas, are intended to redress centuries of racial, gender, and other discriminatory practices in employment, education, politics, and other sectors of society. Such quotas are designed to shift societal behaviors to create opportunities for historically marginalized people.

But those goals have repeatedly been a target for eradication by federal and state governments and the U.S. Supreme Court, and not just from conservatives. Under President Trump, purging any vestige of DEI has been the cover for wholesale assaults on federal employment, university practices, and elsewhere. It coincides with the white supremacist dream of reversing demographic changes in the U.S. and protecting white and far-right political, social, and economic control.

Yet a quota is no longer an anathema when it comes to their own right-wing policies, as is now playing out in the most draconian and inhumane perversion of immigration policy and “border security” in recent history.

Frustrated by what he viewed as a slow pace in deportations through the first four months of his reign, Trump pushed his top immigration staff to drastically ratchet up daily arrests of migrants to reach a flashy goal of one million deportations in his first year. That meant a steroid level explosion from an average of 660 arrests a day to a mandate–a quota–of 3,000 per day.

Marching orders in late May went to White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Department of Homeland Security minister Kristi Noem, and Acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement border czar Tom Homan.

All three are hardline Trump devotees who have relished carrying out their daily abductions in the most cruel manner possible–dispatching teams of masked agents roughly kidnapping lone individuals on the street, pulling parents away from their children, students on their way to school or volleyball practice, breaking windows in cars to drag out targets.

It all fit the demeanor for Trump’s secret police architects, especially the fanatical Miller, Trump’s anti-immigration policy guru. A man aptly described by ABC correspondent Terry Moran as “richly endowed by hate” whose “hatreds are his spiritual nourishment,” fueled not by his brains but his “bile.” And when Moran’s tweet, following the heavy-handed mass raids in Los Angeles and Trump’s autocratic commandeering of the California National Guard to assault the mass protests, prompted Trump’s machine to demand ABC fire Moran, ABC predictably caved and suspended him. Because that’s what major media frequently do on the road to dictatorship.

Trump defended his Los Angeles militarized order as a response to the supposed “invasion” of that city by undocumented immigrants. The real invasion, of course, was the mass deportation arrests of ordinary working people and students, followed by the dispatch of federally commissioned troops, over the objection of state and city officials, to enforce it and quell dissent.

The high-profile Los Angeles showdown symbolizes a significant switch in Trump’s deportation tactics driven by his newfound affection for a quota. It would also require a full repudiation of who Trump had defined as the focus for his deportation plans, outlined in frequent racist demagogy, such as labeling legal Haitian immigrants as eating pet cats and dogs. In a rally in Dayton, Ohioh Trump insisted “I don’t know if you call them (immigrants) people,” Trump said. “In some cases, they’re not people.”

Trump’s campaign rhetoric led many voters into expecting he would focus on deporting immigrants accused of violent and other dangerous crimes, like murder, sexual assault, domestic violence, drunk driving, and child pornography, many of whom are often already in custody.

Over the past decade, reports the Texas Tribune, 70 percent of ICE arrests were “handoffs by local police or federal prisons, according to an analysis by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.” Even with passage of the repressive Laken Riley Act in January, with the votes of 48 House Democrats and 12 Senate Democrats, the category was stretched to include lesser crimes, such as burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting

But to meet Trump’s demanding quotas, Miller, Homan, and company had to reach far broader, to immigrants with no record, using larger teams of masked federal agents to raid workplaces like factories, restaurants, construction sites, as well as schools and housing centers. The use of unidentified, masked, heavily armed agents is intended to terrorize and intimidate not just the undocumented, but anyone who stands in their way, especially for people who have already witnessed the shredding of legal due process rights.

The New York Times reported how masked agents stormed a student housing complex under construction in Tallahassee, Fl. abducting dozens of migrants, and seizing 15 people working on a flood control project in New Orleans. Massive raids in Martha’s Vineyard and the Berkshires sparked vehement local opposition. And when heavily armed, masked agents in tactical gear raided two San Diego restaurants putting 15 workers in handcuffs, scores of outraged neighborhood residents came out to confront them.

Suddenly, people who had been living and working peacefully for years or decades in the U.S.–janitors, housekeepers, dishwashers, factory, construction, nursing home, laundry, landscape and farm workers–were subject to large scale arrest by heavily armed swat teams in scenes conjuring up images from every dictatorship of the past century. The opposition messaging should clearly identify the everyday people who are being kidnapped and the tactics that are being employed to convey a message of unleashed, unaccountable autocratic power.

Trump’s brown shirt campaign has also sabotaged long-standing immigration system protections, such as courthouses, arresting non-citizens properly showing up for scheduled court hearings. And they were pressuring judges to quickly dismiss cases to more easily avoid due process procedures for quicker deportation, all of which ignores the long-term consequences of discouraging undocumented people from fulfilling their legal judicial expectations. Overall, the quotas remove any incentive to ensure all persons, whether documented or not, are guaranteed the legal rights stipulated by the Constitution’s 5th and 14th Amendments.

“They are desperate to reach a certain number of arrests per day. And the only way they can find non-citizens easily and quickly is to go to the courthouses, where they [immigrants] are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do,” said Nayna Gupta, policy director for the American Immigration Council. “This administration came into office with the illusion that they had been given a broad mandate to effectuate an aggressive immigration enforcement agenda, and they are doubling down now on that agenda.”

“Public polling,” Gupta added, “is showing decreasing support for Trump’s immigration agenda, as Americans wake up to the reality that mass deportation means arrests of our neighbors and friends, masked agents in our communities and people afraid to go to work and show up to school, in ways that undermine our local economies.”

That’s the danger Trump is creating for what for not only his signature issue, but also a longtime fundamental theme for Trumpism and the far right. Even in rural communities. One such example being a Missouri county that voted by 80 percent for Trump where Carol Mayorga, originally from Hong Kong, who had lived peacefully for 20 years, raising a family and making friends in a local pancake and waffle house. Her arrest sparked a vocal backlash and broad public support.

In red states and blue states, many Trump supporters watching neighbors and friends arrested, even deported, and their communities militarized and invaded by images they may have only seen on movie screens, are increasingly feeling betrayed.

“This is not what we voted for,” proclaimed Republican Florida State Sen. Ileana Garcia, founder of Latinas for Trump. “As the state senator who represents her district and the daughter of Cuban refugees, who are now just as American, if not more so, than Stephen Miller, I am deeply disappointed by these actions…This is not what we voted for. I have always supported Trump through thick and thin. However, this is unacceptable and inhumane.”

In a world deluged with crises—each vying for our limited attention—the catastrophe unfolding in Sudan has remained largely invisible to the American public. Yet, by almost any measure, it is among the most severe humanitarian emergencies of our time. Over 30 million people—two-thirds of Sudan’s population—now require humanitarian support. More than 12 million have been displaced, and famine threatens to claim countless lives. This is not a distant tragedy; it is a crisis in which American policy and the interests of American capitalists are deeply entangled.

Now, Congress is poised to vote on a set of resolutions that could finally interrupt the United States’ role in fueling this disaster. You can call your Senator and ask them to support S.J.Res.51, S.J.Res.52, S.J.Res.53, and S.J.Res.54—the Joint Resolutions of Disapproval by Senator Chris Murphy et. al. that would block more than $3.5 billion in proposed arms sales to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar. The Congressional Switchboard is at 202-224-3121.

This legislation is likely to come up this week and that makes this a rare moment of real leverage for American activists and concerned citizens. The urgency is clear: unless Congress acts, the U.S. risks deepening its complicity in Sudan’s suffering.

At the epicenter of Sudan’s unraveling is the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group whose origins trace back to the notorious Janjaweed militias involved in the Darfur genocide in the early 2000s. The RSF has been implicated in a series of systematic atrocities: targeted ethnic violence, mass killings, forced displacement, and widespread sexual violence. Investigations by the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International have all pointed to the same grim conclusion: the RSF’s actions constitute war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and, in the assessment of the U.S. State Department, genocide.

The mechanics of how these atrocities are sustained have already come into focus. According to Amnesty International, recently manufactured Emirati armored personnel carriers are now in the hands of the RSF. Flight data and satellite imagery have revealed a pattern: cargo planes departing from the UAE, landing at remote airstrips in Chad, and then offloading weapons and equipment that would soon appear on the front lines in Sudan. A New York Times investigation concluded that the UAE was “expanding its covert campaign to back a winner in Sudan, funneling money, weapons and, now, powerful drones” to the RSF.

What makes this all the more alarming is that the UAE is one of America’s closest military partners—and a major recipient of U.S. arms. Despite repeated assurances to Washington that it would not arm Sudan’s belligerents, the UAE has continued these transfers, as confirmed by the Biden Administration in one of its last acts as well as by members of Congress.

There is, however, another angle to this story—an angle that speaks to the corrosion of U.S. foreign policy by incredibly narrow financial interests. President Donald Trump and his family have cultivated deep financial ties with both the UAE and Qatar. The UAE has invested $2 billion in a Trump family crypto venture; Qatar has bestowed a $400 million on that luxury aircraft everyone’s heard about, intended for the U.S. presidential fleet, in a gesture that blurs the line between diplomacy and personal favor. These transactions are not just unseemly; they are emblematic of this new era in which U.S. foreign policy is increasingly shaped by the private interests of a handful of oligarchs.

To call this “kleptocracy” is not hyperbole. The intertwining of arms sales, foreign influence, and personal enrichment undermines both U.S. standing and the interests of the average American. Each weapon sold, each deal brokered, risks making the United States more complicit in the suffering of Sudan’s civilians.

To call this “kleptocracy” is not hyperbole. The intertwining of arms sales, foreign influence, and personal enrichment undermines both U.S. standing and the interests of the average American.

The Sudan crisis is a reminder that America’s actions abroad are neither abstract nor inconsequential—and all the uniqueness of the Trump 2.0 administration hasn’t changed that. U.S. policies still reverberate in the lives of millions. As citizens, we have a responsibility to demand that our leaders act not out of expedience or self-interest, but out of a sense of justice and human dignity. With a congressional vote imminent, the window for meaningful action is open—but it is closing fast.

The world is watching. So are the people of Sudan. The question is whether the United States will choose complicity—or conscience. Please call your Senators today at 202-224-3121.