In early January Common Dreams published my forecast of consequential developments in 2025, ones that would affect the way we’re governed and how we live our lives day-to-day. Now that the year is nearing the halfway point, and in the spirit of Memorial Day, it is instructive to review the list, which included the following:

• Democratic institutions will continue to crumble, with focus on the erosion of the rule of law in the U.S. and elsewhere;
• Long-standing norms governing public affairs, such as a bar to prosecuting political opponents, will loosen their grip on behavior;
• Countless species, especially among birds and insects, will go extinct;
• “Unnatural” disasters attributable to climate change, like wildfires and floods, will devastate wondrous landscapes and settled communities;
• Politically or environmentally induced mass migration, as experienced now in various parts of the world, will become more pervasive;
• Income inequality between the top .01% and the lowest 50% will increase; and
• economic stability, as in the historic world-wide acceptance of the U.S. Dollar, will wane.

I added the following as caveats to this grim list: uncertainties regarding the targets, timing, locales, extent of severity, and designation of victims.

Broadly speaking the forecast has been accurate. My purpose in conducting this initial review now, however, is not to gloat. Others may have been equally, if not more on target. Furthermore, most of what was predicted was in the wind before the year began. It would be useful at this point to reflect critically, focusing on the caveats noted above, and to address two important questions: “So what?” and “Now What?”

Most telling about what has happened to date in 2025 is the severity, acceleration, and chaos attending several of the enumerated elements, especially those relating to our form of governance and our economic well-being. Even more tragic than the qualifiers just noted is the countless number of innocent victims that have been swept up through indiscriminate governmental action. While the current administration in this country has led the way against those whose main “infraction” has been to exercise their right of free speech, allies like Israel have taken to maiming, starving, and murdering an entire people.

Yes, we should be prepared in the months ahead for even greater severity, continuing acceleration, and unbridled chaos. We should also expect that there will be more victims whose rights are trampled, or lives impaired or destroyed. The strategy of the administration is clear: Do as much as one can as fast as one can, causing as much pandemonium as possible.

So what and now what? What are the implications for those of us who seek to contain a wildfire threatening our political, social, cultural, and economic base? As many others have argued, a more radical, broad-based and well-coordinated disaster relief effort is warranted, involving all those who seek to perpetuate our constitutional republic. “All” here includes notables, leaders of major institutions—judicial, educational, occupational, journalistic, bolstered by millions of ordinary citizens of all ages and backgrounds. This wildfire is barely 5% contained, having engulfed our public life. The stakes are the upholding of a political framework grounded in a set of moral values that has remained largely intact for 250 years.

At the same time, it is important to recognize that individual minds and hearts—yours and mine—are deeply affected by this wildfire. We have been the beneficiaries of this experiment in nationhood, and we are on the verge of becoming its victims. What shall we do with our AMs and PMs beyond joining the “bucket brigade” of mass resistance? What mindset and emotional posture might sustain us going forward?

First and foremost, we must do what we can to quell our fears about the rampant destruction taking place, destruction that is well beyond our control as individuals. Fear breeds a turning inward, a defensive grasping for a way of being that will no longer be available to us. Things will never return to the state they were in before the wildfire broke out. It is better to accept that a large-scale transformation is afoot, one that beckons a personal transformation that we have the capacity to shape.

Essential for countering fear are an ongoing attachment to individual right action, compassionate outreach to others, bearing witness to what is happening around us through conversation or writing, and blessing moral action by others. We can endeavor to heal relationships, both familial and neighborly, and we can seek joy in the most intrinsic pleasures.

Much of what unfolds in the years ahead will cause us to grieve. We should do our best to accept that we are confronting a major collapse of a way of living that we had taken for granted. In place of denial and nostalgia, let’s look for opportunities amid inevitable personal transformation—for durable hope, serendipitous grace, the beauty of human kindness, and the practice of compassion.

In its 2024 fourth quarter update, NextDecade, a Houston-based liquefied natural gas company, announced its intention to more than double its export capacity at the Rio Grande LNG facility near Brownsville, Texas. Despite NextDecade’s sunny projections, community members and investors in the project’s owner, Global Infrastructure Partners, and its parent company, BlackRock, should be wary of risks associated with the LNG facility. The proposed expansion could further harm local communities, the region, and pose significant risks to investors.

LNG is primarily composed of methane, a potent greenhouse gas with 80 times the atmospheric warming potential of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. As originally proposed, this project was estimated to emit the equivalent emissions of 44 coal power plants every year, about 163 million tons of carbon dioxide annually. The newly announced expansion would be projected to emit over 300 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent every year, or the equivalent of the emissions from 83 coal plants annually.

Perhaps in an effort to address criticism about emissions, NextDecade’s original proposal included carbon capture and storage (CCS), though some opponents described this as greenwashing from the beginning. The company withdrew its CCS application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in August 2024, yet continues to tout sustainability on its website.

The path forward demands a just transition to clean energy that respects both people and the planet.

The Rio Grande LNG facility sits in a region already burdened by economic hardship and environmental injustice. Its expansion will amplify air pollution, exposing local residents—many of whom are Latino and low-income—to increased risks of respiratory illnesses, cancer, and other serious health conditions.

Several nearby towns and entities formally oppose the project, including Laguna Vista, South Padre Island, Port Isabel, and the Laguna Madre Water District. The Rio Grande LNG terminal is being built on the sacred land of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, yet Rio Grande LNG, regulatory agencies, and banks have failed to consult with that Tribe on its impacts.

Additionally, according to an environmental report,, the facilities will likely significantly degrade local fishing, shrimping, and natural tourism industries, putting communities’ livelihoods at risk. The project also threatens critical wetlands adjacent to the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge, which protects endangered species such as the ocelot and Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle. The noise, light, and industrial activity will disrupt fragile ecosystems and threaten biodiversity. The opposition shines a light on the environmental risks inherent in this project.

Rio Grande LNG has faced significant challenges, including pending approval and permitting of the project from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Some banks and insurance companies have wavered in their support. Long before the expansion announcement, insurance company CHUBB backed out of the project. Societe Generale, BNP Paribas, and La Banque Postale have also pulled financial support from the project in the last several years.

For investors, this means escalating risks: construction delays, legal battles, potentially stranded assets, and the threat of diminished returns. Continuing to pour capital into this project is not just environmentally irresponsible—it is financially imprudent.

The global energy market is also shifting rapidly. Ongoing trade wars and on-and-off-again tariffs could make it difficult for Rio Grande LNG to meet its Final Investment Decision, the last fundraising hurdle a project like this must clear before beginning a new stage of construction. At the same time, LNG demand is projected to peak before 2030, and an oversupply threatens to depress prices. And the methane emissions from LNG production undermine the climate benefits often touted by proponents.

The Rio Grande LNG expansion is a lose-lose proposition. It jeopardizes the health and environment of frontline communities, threatens local economies and endangered wildlife, and exposes investors to financial and reputational risks. The path forward demands a just transition to clean energy that respects both people and the planet.

Investors in Global Infrastructure Partners and its parent company BlackRock can limit the harms associated with this project. Potential investors with each company should decline to invest in the expansion of the Rio Grande LNG terminal for the sake of local residents, the region’s economy, and returns on investments.

This Memorial Day weekend, Veterans For Peace is calling on its members and friends to reflect on the gravity of the day, whose official purpose is to “honor all those who died in service to the U.S. during peacetime and war.” Veterans For Peace chooses to honor ALL who have died in wars, both combatants and civilians. Our hope is that a sober accounting of the casualties of war will mitigate against the tendency to turn Memorial Day—like Veterans Day—into a patriotic celebration of U.S. militarism.

We remember the words of President Dwight Eisenhower, who during World War II, was the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe:

“War is a grim, cruel business, a business justified only as a means of sustaining the forces of good against those of evil.” He also famously stated, “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”

Medal of Honor winner Marine Corps General Smedley Butler took it a bit further:

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the loss of lives.

Veterans For Peace is deeply familiar with the pain that emanates from the loss of those lives. We have lost too many friends in wars in foreign lands, and in their aftermath at home due to suicide and service-related diseases. We have spent countless hours with Gold Star families mourning the loss of their loved ones. We also recognize that the “enemy” killed by our bullets and bombs had family and friends who loved them too. Their pain is no different than ours.

Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates that over 7,000 U.S. service members have died in the wars following 9/11. Perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that more than 8,000 U.S. “contractors” have lost their lives in these conflicts. These hidden deaths reflect the U.S. government’s deception regarding these wars and its disregard for those who perish in them.

The more than 15,000 deaths mentioned above do not account for over 6,000 veterans who died by suicide each year between 2001 and 2022, totaling more than 145,000 people, as documented by the nonprofit Stop Soldier Suicide. Veterans face a 58% higher risk of suicide than non-veterans. While military contractors experience many of the same mental health challenges as veterans, reliable suicide and mental health statistics are not available.

We must help to build a peaceful world based on mutual respect for the human rights of all, as well as for the rights of nature.

Civilian casualties are much greater. We must acknowledge that in modern warfare, it is civilians who make up the bulk of the dead and wounded. The number of civilians killed by the violence in the post-9/11 wars is staggering. Brown University estimates the low end of opposition deaths at 288,923 and civilian deaths at 408,749. The total number of direct violence-related deaths is estimated to be 905,000 people. And even more people die after the wars ends.

A May 2023 Brown University study estimated that there are 3.6 to 3.8 million indirect deaths, with a total death toll of 4.5 to 4.7 million people in post-9/11 war zones. As we mark 50 years since the end of the U.S. war in Vietnam, we will not forget that 3 million Vietnamese died in that unjust and unnecessary war, most of them civilians.

Endless war and suffering persists today, with tens of thousands dying in conflicts that are fueled by U.S.-supplied arms and “intelligence.” The U.S. was an instigator of the terrible war in Ukraine, where hundreds of thousands of young soldiers have perished. The U.S. continues to provide bombs and political cover for the unspeakable genocide in Gaza, where estimates of civilian death range from 50,000 to over 100,000, with an even greater number of life-altering wounds. A generation of young Palestinian amputees and double and triple amputees will be a sober reminder to the world for years to come.

Another victim of war is the U.S. economy, which is greatly distorted by the ever-ballooning military budget, now proposed to reach One Trillion Dollars ($1,000,000,000,000) a year, even as essential social programs vital to poor and working class families are being gutted.

The “modernization” of nuclear weapons is included in the budgets of both the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy, totaling an estimated $946 billion over the next decade, and harkening a no-holds-barred era that could too easily lead to a nuclear war. Eighty years after the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is high time to put an to end to war before it puts an end to human civilization. War must be universally deemed obsolete, illegal, and unacceptable.

Wars will not end, however—and nuclear war will not be averted—unless there is a sea change in the thinking of the U.S. people and our political leaders. We must abandon the military doctrine of seeking “full spectrum dominance” in every corner of the globe. We must embrace the emerging multipolar world and take our place as one nation among many. We must help to build a peaceful world based on mutual respect for the human rights of all, as well as for the rights of nature. As the Vietnam-era poster reads, “War is not good for children or other living things.”

This Memorial Day, let us honor the memory of the dead by pledging to protect our precious planet, its people and its environment. Rather than exalting war, we must come together to abolish war once and for all.

Ted Rall’s cartoon concerns the countless questions about former President Joe Biden’s mental capacity during his 2020 campaign and presidency. Echoing Senator Howard Baker’s Watergate query about what Nixon knew and when, Americans are now asking what Biden’s inner circle knew about his cognitive state and when. Recent reports, including a book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, reveal that aides discussed putting Biden in a wheelchair due to his physical deterioration. Another story highlights Biden’s struggles in his 2023 special counsel interview, which featured numerous verbal stumbles and memory lapses. Biden is a figure more pathetic than Nixons.

The post As Scandals Go, Bidengate Is Low on the Drama Meter appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Friends,

I thought I couldn’t be more shocked and sickened than I already was, but what’s happened this week is truly horrifying.

In the Oval Office, before cameras and journalists, Trump openly lied to the president of South Africa about alleged violence against white South Africans. The Trump regime has also granted refuge to white South Africans while continuing to bar or deport people of color who desperately need refuge.

The regime told Harvard it can no longer enroll foreign students and that its existing foreign students must transfer to another university or lose their legal status in the United States.

Trump auctioned off a personal dinner to foreigners who poured money into his own crypto business. He has also accepted Qatar’s gift of a $400 million “flying palace” (it’s also just for him — no other president in future years can use it).

At Trump’s insistence, House Republicans have passed a giant bill that would, if enacted, be the largest redistribution of income and wealth in American history — from the poor and working class to the rich and super-rich. The bill includes a poison pill that eliminates the power of courts to hold officials in contempt for disregarding court orders.

In recent days, according to Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent of The New York Times, Trump or his team have charged, investigated, or threatened with investigation New York Attorney General Letitia James, Andrew Cuomo, Kamala Harris, Bruce Springsteen, Beyonce, Bono, Oprah Winfrey, James Comey, unnamed “treasonous” Biden aides, the city of Chicago, and the Kennedy Center.

"The more Trump's tyranny is exposed, the stronger the resistance. The worse it gets, the larger the backlash."

Trump seems to have entered into a new and wilder stage of authoritarian neofascism. No holds barred. Nothing out of bounds. Rapacious, racist, nativist, vindictive, corrupt.

If you’re also horrified by all this, know that most other Americans are, too (if polls are to be believed).

Resistance is more important than ever.

I feel enormous gratitude to the judges who are trying to stop this. Most have shown themselves to be principled, steadfast, and courageous.

We should also be grateful to the public servants still in their jobs who are standing up to this.

And to everyone else who is pushing back.

Grateful to all communities that are protecting their residents and neighbors from Trump’s vicious dragnet.

Thankful to all the people fighting his attacks on Medicare and Medicaid. Teachers, public employees, workers, and grassroots groups fighting his attacks on the poor.

To the professors, administrators, and students joining together to fight his attacks on higher education.

Appreciative of all who are planning to protest on June 14. It’s Trump’s birthday, on which he’s trying to justify a huge military parade using the pretext of the 250th anniversary of the start of the Continental Army that fought against King George III.

On that day we will join together to tell the world and affirm for ourselves that we do not abide kings.

The more Trump’s tyranny is exposed, the stronger the resistance. The worse it gets, the larger the backlash. The crueler and more vicious his regime becomes, the more powerful the alliances being formed at every level of society to stop him.

We will sweep vulnerable Republican lawmakers out of office in 2026 or before.

We will support groups like the ACLU that are taking Trump to court.

We will spread the truth.

Tyrants cannot succeed where people refuse to submit to them. We will not submit. We will emerge from this stronger than we were before, and more committed to the common good.

Be safe. Be strong. Hug your loved ones.

A person escapes slave labor, torture, rape, and murder, and illegally crosses a border to a land where such crimes are outlawed, to a land where people have the right to work for wages and are protected by the law. Anyone in this “Free Land” who harbors or aides such an escapee is subject to federal prosecution, fines, and imprisonment. Yet to turn them over to federal authorities returns these people to a life of wanton violence and suffering.

This was the United States in 1850 when Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law, legislation requiring that all escaped slaves be returned to the slave owner and that officials and citizens in free states must cooperate. Aiding or harboring a slave meant prison and steep fines. Habeas corpus was suspended under this law. Citizens were required to return a runaway slave to the chains of bondage or face the wrath of the federal courts.

Americans in 1850 had to decide where they stood, with the newly passed federal law or with their conscience. The risk was great, for both the runaway slaves and those Americans who might help them.

Our choice on such a momentous issue determines not just our place on the right or wrong side of history but determines the fate of people impacted by our decision.

Today, the Republican Party, the very party which grew from the outrage over the wickedness of the Fugitive Slave Act, now seeks to criminalize every aspect of helping a person who has fled a life of torture, violence, and suffering. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 has been updated and amended for the fleeing refugees of 2025.

On April 25, 2025, U.S. officials arrested Hannah Dugan, a Wisconsin judge, and charged her with helping a man in her court evade immigration authorities. It is alleged she hindered immigration agents who appeared in the courthouse to arrest the man without a judicial warrant. She faces numerous federal charges.

We are only four months into Trump’s Second Term of Cruelty. Where will we be a year from now? Two years from now? How draconian will the laws be then?

Americans living in the border states of the 1850s were called upon to answer the question of what they would do when a runaway slave appeared in their community. Would they violate federal law and help, or would they turn the desperate families back over to the slaveholders, to the “manstealers,” as the bounty hunters were then called.

Many in the border state of Pennsylvania—Quakers, Amish, Brethren—followed their faith and funneled these runaways to freedom. In Lancaster County, Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens allegedly hid slaves in a cistern in his backyard as he facilitated their road to freedom. He was an oathbound member of Congress violating U.S. law to save lives.

In retrospect, it is easy to know what the right thing to do was in the case of slavery and The Underground Railroad. That issue today is clear for us. We know where we would stand: for freedom, for those fleeing slavery. But back then the issue was not so clear. Our choice on such a momentous issue determines not just our place on the right or wrong side of history but determines the fate of people impacted by our decision.

Will we help or hinder a person in need?

Will we violate immoral law to save a life?

Will we risk fines and imprisonment?

These questions were asked and answered by many Americans in 1850. How will we answer them today?

So often we wish to be part of a moment of great historical importance, a moment when we have to take a risk to save another, to take a stand when others wouldn’t. We feel certain we would know the right thing to do. If only such a moment would come our way.

Today, that moment comes not in the form of storming a beachhead or taking a hill in battle. It is not marching for civil rights in Birmingham or Selma. And it is not hiding a runaway slave in your attic, though the similarities to that particular act of conscience are striking. Today it is whether to provide shelter and safety to a refugee fleeing violence in their home country, a person illegally in the United States.

How will we respond this time? In this century? In this historic moment?

Is a refugee illegally entering this country to flee institutional violence different than a slave illegally entering a free state to escape slavery? Especially when that institutional violence has been precipitated by the U.S. repeatedly intervening and destabilizing the home country of the refugee?

In 1958, legendary peace activist Philip Berrigan asked a youth retreat group the following question: “What's it going to be with you? Are you going to go through life playing both ends against the middle, playing cozy, not committing yourself, sitting on the fence?”

That question is as potent, and as dangerous, today as it was then. For us, and for the victims in the breach.

Federal unions are facing a do-or-die moment: President Donald Trump is trying to stomp out worker power by destroying federal labor rights and firing federal workers. The best tool organized labor and workers have for saving themselves—as well as everything from school funding and racial equity to cancer research and social security—is to shut things down.

At the end of March, Trump signed an executive order intended to eliminate federal unions and retroactively cancel collectively bargained contracts for nearly a million federal workers. Without their union protections, even more workers will be fired. Those who remain will be at constant risk of the same fate. Black workers and women, who make up a large proportion of the federal workforce (particularly entry-level positions), stand to lose the most. On May 16, a federal appeals court lifted the temporary block on Trump’s order, allowing Trump to deny collective bargaining rights to federal workers while the matter is litigated in the courts.

Many people ask, “Can Trump legally do that?”

A better, more urgent response is: “Will we let Trump do that?”

“If federal workers were to go on strike, could they win and save their jobs?” Recent history says yes.

Trump’s order is a massive overreach of presidential authority, and federal unions have already filed a lawsuit challenging Trump’s action. More egregiously, the order is a blatantly illegal attempt at retaliation. The White House’s own statement verifies that Trump took away labor rights because the unions “declared war on President Trump’s agenda” by publicly disagreeing with the administration’s policies and continuing to file employee grievances. To be clear, this is their legal right.

It is a positive sign that unions immediately decided to fight back, unlike some of the other institutions targeted by Trump. The universities and law firms that preemptively surrendered to Trump’s shakedowns have tarnished their reputations and credibility while forfeiting massive sums of money. This has only emboldened Trump to demand more control and sent shockwaves through our democracy. Belatedly, those institutions have begun to follow the example set by unions, though the outlook is still grim. Lawsuits, rallies, and petitions are necessary and important tools of resistance, but they have not been sufficient to stop Trump’s authoritarianism and dismantling of government.

Federal workers have a unique, nonviolent, and powerful tool at their disposal: withholding their labor.

Strikes, slowdowns, sickouts—workers have many ways to withhold their labor to protest injustice in the workplace. Federal employees have no legal right to strike, which is why they have generally avoided this tactic. The last time there was a major strike by federal workers was in 1981. President Ronald Reagan crushed the strike by firing and replacing air traffic controllers who walked off the job, a moment widely viewed as the beginning of the labor movement’s decline.

But there is much that separates the strike under Reagan from what federal workers face today under Trump. Reagan had both public sentiment and the law behind him when he fired over 11,000 federal workers. As of April 2025, Trump had the lowest approval rating compared to the same period of any other second term president since polling began. Moreover, Trump’s retaliatory order to strip the rights of federal workers is not supported by legal precedent, and he has fired over 279,000 federal workers to much public outcry.

A strike by federal workers has high stakes. It risks the union being dissolved and striking workers being barred from working for the federal government in the future. But, with Trump’s mass firings and revocation of basic rights for federal workers, federal unions (and many workers’ middle class jobs, pay, and benefits) may disappear anyway.

This raises a follow up question: “If federal workers were to go on strike, could they win and save their jobs?”

Recent history says yes.

Public school teachers in West Virginia went on a nine-day strike in 2018 over abysmally low wages and rising healthcare costs. Strikes by public teachers have been illegal in West Virginia for decades, explaining why even their union leaders did not support the strikes initially. Undeterred, rank and file teachers took matters into their own hands by launching a “wildcat strike” (a work stoppage not authorized by the union). Even though the state attorney general declared the strike “unlawful” and threatened legal action, he never took steps toward enforcement, likely because of the heavy public support for the strikes. Even though the strike shut down schools across the state, parents and students viewed striking teachers as fighting for the common good against dysfunctional government leadership. The teachers won pay raises and a freeze on increases to health insurance premiums. Despite not having a legal right to strike, teachers took action anyway—and they won resoundingly. This inspired teachers in other red states to go on strike for better funding and conditions in their schools.

Essential federal workers provide another example from 2019. In a failed effort to secure funding for a border wall, Trump shut down the federal government for more than a month. Without a federal spending bill in place, federal workers were either furloughed or forced to work for 35 days without pay. What ultimately ended Trump’s shutdown was a small group of air traffic controllers. Throughout the ordeal, the air traffic controller union leadership strongly disavowed any idea of striking, both publicly and privately, worried that it would trigger serious legal consequences for the union. But after performing high stress jobs for a month without pay, and once other labor movement leaders began to call for a general strike, air traffic controllers started to call in sick, grounding flights in major metros. Within hours of the sickout, Trump reached an agreement on a new spending bill. If coordinated with the intention of creating a work stoppage, these sickouts ran the legal risks described previously. But support for ending the shutdown was high, and the public blamed Trump for causing the crisis.

An act of civil disobedience is not a risk to be taken lightly. But when government employers took deeply unpopular actions that hurt workers and communities, teachers and federal employees braved the legal risks and found a way to win.

As federal workers and their unions consider the path ahead, these words of a striking West Virginia teacher echo even louder today: “We understand this was a do-or-die moment. If we didn’t do it, there might not be a tomorrow to fix it. If we didn’t do it, we would have failed our kids, our schools, and our community.”

On January 1, 2025 I published a report called “Defending Society Against the MAGA Assault: A Prospectus for Action.” I am happy to say that many of the proposals I made there for what I called “social self-defense” are already being initiated. Recent and upcoming Strike! Commentaries take stock of what has been accomplished so far and lay out strategic perspectives on the next phase of the struggle to protect society against MAGA devastation.

What We Can Expect

U.S. President Donald Trump and his enablers are conducting an “administrative coup” against Congress, courts, and civil society. This assault is being conducted on multiple fronts. It seeks unlimited power; the demolition of any possible base to restrict its power; unlimited accumulation of wealth for its followers; and a cultural revolution to enshrine autocracy, repression, racism, sexism, hatred, cruelty, and disinhibition as internalized values of the American people. So far it has met significant but spotty resistance.

Trump’s actions have been and will most likely continue to be unpredictable, ill-considered, self-contradictory, and often self-destructive. The sheer incompetence and vacillation of Trump’s behavior make his future actions likely to have effects that contradict their intentions. Furthermore, his actions go out into a world order that was already deeply enmeshed in what has been called “the polycrisis,” marked by great power geopolitical struggle over control of lesser countries and global economic networks. Trump’s erratic behavior and the chaos of the polycrisis render any predictions uncertain. At most we can identify a range of possibilities that we must prepare for. Even then, the timelines for the manifestation of such possibilities remain for the most part obscure.

Growing opposition may develop the power to limit and ultimately overcome Trumpian tyranny.

A Trump presidency that successfully creates a new national and international order is one of the least likely outcomes. Also unlikely is a basic course correction that changes the overall thrust of the Trump administration so far. More likely is that Trump, in the face of declining power and support, will increasingly utilize repression and violence. Internally this would mean a fuller suspension of civil liberties and the rule of law; a more brutal war on dissent; martial law; use of the military in domestic conflict; and a mobilization of violent MAGA supporters for direct vigilante action. Internationally it would mean escalating use of violence, leading to accidental or deliberate wars—not excluding accidental or intentional nuclear escalation. This is all happening in a context of global economic chaos that is already widely expected to lead to significant recession with the looming possibility of stagflation or depression.

Trump’s actions are already having harmful effects on a wide range of people. Some of these are specific, like the firing of federal employees and the destruction of the programs they administer that are depended on by tens of millions of people. Others affect almost everyone, like the stagflation emerging from tariff gyrations and the suspension of the rule of law that is making everyone, including everyday people who are law-abiding citizens, vulnerable to arbitrary targeting and arrest. Given reasonable expectations about the future, these harms are destined to rapidly escalate.

Where will all this lead? Trump may establish a lasting fascist dictatorship that demolishes all bases of effective opposition—the very definition of totalitarianism. Certainly this is possible if potential opposition forces are sufficiently intimidated and submissive.

Conversely, growing opposition may develop the power to limit and ultimately overcome Trumpian tyranny. This could happen in any of several ways.

1. Growing opposition could interfere by a variety of institutional and direct actions that would make it difficult or even impossible for the Trump regime to implement its objectives, creating a situation of deadlock or dual power.
2. If democratic institutions remain sufficiently robust, Trump’s supporters could be voted out of office in 2026 or thereafter; this could be followed by legislative reversal of Trump’s actions or even impeachment of top officials.
3. Unpopular dictatorial regimes have often been swept from the stage of history by mass “people power” uprisings or “social strikes” mobilizing the whole collective power of the people against the regime. We have seen this most recently in South Korea, where the president’s attempt to establish a dictatorship was rapidly defeated by mass mobilization of the people in the streets, supported by trade unions, parliament, and the courts.

Social Self-Defense

The goal of social self-defense is to make a persistent fascist dictatorship less likely and its restriction and elimination by direct counteraction, electoral repudiation, or social strike more likely. Because of pervasive uncertainties, we can’t know precisely what process will achieve that objective. Fortunately, while different tactics can at times lead to tensions, efforts to change the balance of power in various ways are for the most part synergistic. We know that a chain will break at its weakest link, even if we don’t know what link that will be. Thus the overall strategy for social self-defense is to change the balance of power by strengthening the forces opposing the regime and putting increasing pressure on the regime and its allies.

A variety of polls around the end of Trump’s first 100 days show that popular repudiation of Trump has begun. Trump’s overall approval ratings, already low on election day, have fallen sharply, especially among independents and non-MAGA Republicans. More important, two-thirds of respondents view the Trump regime so far as “chaotic” and think Trump is engaging in “overreach” of his legitimate powers in area after area. While a majority still support the deportation of “illegal immigrants,” large numbers oppose the many publicized Immigration and Customs Enforcement abuses of due process. Large majorities say Trump must obey the courts. A majority fear the impact of Trump’s tariffs on inflation. Many fear or are already feeling the impact of Trump policies on them personally.

As detailed in the previous two Strike! commentaries, over the course of 100 days participation in anti-Trump demonstrations has increased from hundreds to millions. The demands echoed broad popular concerns, drawing together fear of autocracy, opposition to billionaire domination of government, and direct personal impacts through gutting of government services and economic chaos. These mobilizations combine the specific concerns of specific constituencies, concerns shared by multiple constituencies, and broad, widely shared concerns about the destruction of democratic governance.

These days of action have been coordinated in two ways. Two very similar coalitions involving about 200 organizations initiated and promoted the Hands Off! And Mayday mobilizations. The 50501 actions and the Tesla Takedowns were organized on Reddit and other social media by self-organized groups. Leadership for all of them primarily took the form of setting dates, framing raps, and communicating with local groups and activists. So far coordination has focused on specific days of action. While individual organizations have more extensive programs of action, so far the social self-defense movement as a whole is only beginning to develop means of continuous coordination and planning. Local groups, often drawing together or cutting across distinct national organizations, initiate and recruit for both nationally and locally initiated activities.

Historical experience has repeatedly shown that unified opposition from civil society institutions plays a critical role in the resistance to authoritarianism. Trump’s agenda is totalitarian in that it aims not only to devastate the constitutional order, but to destroy all bases of potential opposition in civil society. He has targeted universities and other educational institutions, medicine, law firms and the American Bar Association, media, courts, organized labor, and virtually every other institutional sphere of civic life. The response of these institutions has been vacillating and ambivalent—exemplified by Harvard’s effort to submit to Trumpian demands, followed by its statement of refusal and suit against government interference, then followed by its proposed new restrictions on freedom of expression. There are stirrings of collective resistance, however. For example, faculties at Big 10 universities have voted for a Mutual Defense Compact to jointly resist and support each other. Business has been ambiguous, divided, and largely paralyzed, initially swinging to support Trump, then backing away, especially after the tariff debacle. Future developments will depend on the balance between outrage at Trump’s attacks on civil society and fear of his vengeance against those who oppose him.

The governance system has so far provided important but limited protection of society against the MAGA assault. Many rulings by lower courts have forbidden, or at least stayed, illegal and unconstitutional Trump initiatives. Supreme Court decisions have been ambiguous, attempting to limit blatant illegality without providing a consistent defense of constitutional governance, perhaps out of fear of opening the door to outright defiance and a serious constitutional crisis. The Republican-controlled Congress has forcefully abetted Trump’s attacks on law, the Constitution, and people, with only a handful of legislators opposing even the most extreme measures and many more playing attack dogs on those who Trump targets.

Most Democratic politicians have followed the dubious advice to try to work with Trump rather than take him on. A few members of Congress have started making serious efforts to encourage a mass opposition to Trump and MAGA, exemplified by the massive rallies held by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). A slowly increasing number of Democratic politicians, under substantial pressure from enraged members of their own party, are starting to join them. Similarly, a few blue state governments have taken significant initiatives to challenge Trump’s depredations, while many of them and nearly all red states have acquiesced or furthered Trump’s agenda.

A Movement-Based Opposition

If there is one thing we can confidently assert, it is that Trump is unlikely to voluntarily remove himself from power. He is unlikely to abdicate, and his allies are unlikely to purge him. Even his growing unpopularity and self-inflicted wounds will not automatically lead to his removal from office. That will require an opposing force that can take what steps are necessary to diminish and eventually terminate his power.

Unfortunately, the Democratic Party has so far proven not to be such a force. Despite exceptions, most of its leadership has deliberately acquiesced in Trump’s juggernaut. The Democrats’ deep dependence on corporate and fossil fuel monied interests has impeded any effort beyond rhetoric to appeal to the interests of ordinary Americans, let alone to stand up to the likes of Trump and Elon Musk. The result is that, as polls demonstrate, most people regard the Democratic Party with scorn. A recent Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that nearly 70% of Americans view the Democratic Party as out of touch “with the concerns of most people”—a higher share than said the same of either Trump or the Republican Party. Just 40% of Democrats approved of the way their leaders in Congress were handling the job, compared with 49% who disapproved, according to a Quinnipiac University poll. In a Harvard survey, only 23% of the young Americans polled who voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris approve of congressional Democrats’ performance.

The Democratic Party, unless and until it makes significant changes, will be a poor vehicle for the anti-Trump resistance. But given the structure of America’s legally enforced two-party system, a progressive third-party challenge in the electoral arena, if it drew significant support, would most likely split and thereby weaken the anti-MAGA vote.

There is a natural synergism between large national actions that draw public attention and demonstrate broad public support and frequent or continuous small actions that show the opposition to be more than occasional flashes in the pan.

A possible solution to this predicament might be a “movement-based opposition” rooted in civil society. Sometimes called a non-electoral or independent opposition, such a movement-based opposition would be a convergence of social movements that performs some of the classic functions of an opposition party without the goal of taking power in government. It would draw diverse constituencies out of their silos to combine their power but use direct action rather than electoral politics as its means to exercise that power. Like a political party, it would bring together different constituencies around common interests, expose existing leaders and institutions, and present alternatives. Such a non-electoral opposition played an important role in blocking Trump’s attempted coup in January 2021.

The movement for social self-defense is already performing in a rudimentary way the functions of such an opposition both nationally and locally. It draws together different constituencies, defines common interests and concerns, pools their power, and coordinates joint actions. So far it does so only intermittently, with reluctance to define itself as the leading protagonist of the struggle to defeat Trump’s assault on society. It is positioned, however, to acknowledge what it has become and start to act like a continuous opposition. That movement-based opposition would include all those who participated in and those who called and coordinated Hands Off!, 50501, Mayday, and similar actions locally and nationally.

The elements of the movement-based opposition already include a significant infrastructure of communications, research, publicity, training, and member mobilization. These have proven effective in the early 2025 days of action. These groups cooperated with each other and developed an effective division of labor, for example with some providing de-escalation training; some guidance to local groups for media outreach; some training on legal dimensions of protest; and others helping with the nuts and bolts of posters, picket signs, food, water, and porta-potties.

Such cooperation can be extended and made continuous. For example, different partners can produce materials and organize actions focusing in rotation on their concerns and constituencies, with the other partners featuring or joining them. This is in large part what happened with the May Day days of action, with the wider movement turning out for events that were focused on workers and immigrants, as well as on the whole MAGA threat to democracy and human well-being. Partners can form a “shadow cabinet” of spokespeople from each participating sector who could amplify the concerns of each sector while providing a common voice for the movement-based opposition as a whole. All the activities of the movement-based opposition can support its individual elements while unifying them into a coordinated bloc.

Expanding the movement-based opposition is crucial for amassing the power to effectively counter MAGA. The starting point is to focus attention on the harms that are being done to individuals, constituencies, and the people as a whole. This was central to the message of Hands Off!, 50501, and Mayday actions, which called out specific harms to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid recipients; veterans; federal employees; and other MAGA-targeted groups while relating them all to the MAGA attack on constitutional governance.

An important next step is to convey why supporting and joining the movement-based opposition is an effective way to fight against that harm. That involves developing the mass power needed to counter MAGA and to block particular harmful initiatives. The opposition needs to encourage and support harmed constituencies to organize themselves and participate in the wider movement. Such self-organization is already under way, for example the federal workers cross-agency, cross-union organization Federal Unionists Network; the lawyers National Law Day of Action; and military veterans’ “Unite for Veterans, Unite for America” rally planned for June 6; and the outreach to workers growing out of the May Day day of action. These constituencies are already to a considerable extent organized, such as the large proportion of veterans who are linked online through social media organized by military units and the seniors linked through senior centers and senior residence facilities.

The movement-based opposition aims to halt and undo the harm that has been done by the Trump regime, but it is not directed toward returning to the world as it existed before Trump.

There is a natural synergism between large national actions that draw public attention and demonstrate broad public support and frequent or continuous small actions that show the opposition to be more than occasional flashes in the pan. Some of these have been emerging locally, like regular small weekly demonstrations and large signs regularly displayed on highway overpasses.

The extraordinarily peaceful demonstrations for social self-defense have projected power and discipline while discouraging attempts at governmental or vigilante repression. Carefully designed civil disobedience actions, like those by union members in Philadelphia on May Day and those planned by a climate coalition for this summer, can escalate the pressure without arousing public fears of even more chaos. Such actions can be a way of influencing and recruiting harmed constituencies. For example, sit-ins by present and future Social Security recipients could help mobilize large numbers of others to write letters, make phone calls, take part in demonstrations to protect Social Security, and join the wider movement.

While intended to increase his power, many of Trump’s actions have actually undermined it. To take one example, his threats to Canada have led to majority disapproval in the U.S. electorate while provoking a wave of anti-U.S. nationalism and the unexpected election of a prime minister dedicated to freeing Canada from U.S. domination. At some points combined opposition from courts, powerful institutional actors, and the public have forced him to back down. Examples include withdrawal of the nomination of Matt Gaetz for attorney general; the retreat of Elon Musk in the face of massive unpopularity and the economic harm done to Tesla by anti-MAGA protests and boycotts; the unexpected freeing of Mohsen Mahdawi; and Trump’s repeated backdown on parts of his tariff proposals in the face of massive business and consumer opposition. With sufficient mobilization and good targeting, social self-defense can defeat further Trump initiatives by mounting opposition that undermines his “pillars of support.” It can make his supporters quail and threaten to withdraw their support if he doesn’t back down. This process does not need to wait until Trump is removed from office. What is necessary is to make his initiatives undermine instead of increasing his power.

Trump’s plunging popularity means that if there are fair elections they are likely to end Republican dominance of Congress in 2026 and defeat Trump’s successor in 2028. The current electoral system is highly unequal, however, and MAGA is working hard to further distort it, among other things adopting measures that will simply exclude millions of citizens from the vote.

The weakness of electoral opposition is further augmented by the failure of the Democratic Party to mount an effective opposition that would mobilize large numbers of people and institutions to ensure fair elections and the defeat of all candidates who continue to support Trump. Although it does not run candidates for office, the movement-based opposition can have a major impact on the electoral process. It can dramatize the harmful effect of MAGA actions on millions of people. It can encourage them to register and vote. It can pressure Democrats to court their support by forcefully opposing MAGA. And it can dramatize and resist efforts to exclude people from voting and make the electoral system more unequal. Ending Republican control of even one house of Congress in the 2026 elections would put a significant brake on the Trump juggernaut.

In many parts of the world, when institutional democracy has been unable to overcome dictatorial regimes, people have turned to what has been variously called “people power” uprisings, general strikes, or as I will call them here, “social strikes”—strikes by society as a whole against the forces that threaten it. These involve mass withdrawal of acquiescence manifested in general strikes, occupations of capital cities, shutdowns of commerce, and other disruptions of everyday life. In cases like Poland, Tunesia, Brazil, and most recently South Korea these have successfully brought down dictatorial regimes.

Popular uprisings have recently been broached by such mainstream figures as New York Times columnist David Brooks and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. In the event that electoral and direct action techniques are not sufficient to defend U.S. society against the MAGA assault, such social strikes may be necessary. A movement-based opposition can play a critical role in laying the groundwork for such actions. It can draw in mass participation from people in all walks of life; cultivate an understanding of the need for cooperation and solidarity; develop the ability to coordinate action; and organize escalating actions that can culminate in social strikes.

The movement-based opposition aims to halt and undo the harm that has been done by the Trump regime, but it is not directed toward returning to the world as it existed before Trump. That is clearly not what the people want, and it offers little hope of solving our real problems. The movement-based opposition includes many different groups with different visions of the future. It is based on agreement about the immediate aim, plus agreement to disagree about other things. It should encourage discussion of areas of disagreement while bracketing them when they might interfere with immediately necessary collaboration. The process of working together and defining common interests itself can help identify new areas of agreement and encourage mutual acceptance of differences. Social self-defense against the MAGA juggernaut can be the starting point for creating the world we want beyond MAGA. As Abraham Lincoln said of the Civil War, it can become the means for a new birth of freedom.

This is part of a series of Strike! Commentaries on social self-defense against the MAGA juggernaut. It originally appeared on the Labor Network for Sustainability website on January 21, 2025.

What does mowing the lawn have to do with world events?

Well, one of my life skills is the ability to make minimal and possibly absurd connections, linking the trivial and the profound. Thus, a few years back (when I still mowed my own lawn), I wrote this poem. It’s called “Buddha’s Lawn”:

I mow the lawn and feel gratitude
my neighbors
haven’t pigeonholed me as a crazy old coot.
I’m stalled in my transition
from a lifestyle and sense of order based on
killing things,
like weeds, mice, whatever,
to one based on reverence for all stuff,
however weird.
It’s a cool day but
I work up a sweat.
On the lawn, I pick up a shred
of burst red balloon, a used napkin,
a transparent plastic juice container.
This stuff is all just litter
and the weeds are still weeds.
If I really let myself
see them differently,
I’d be the crazy neighbor, right?

You know, value everything, including the disposables of life. I guess I’ve always had this wacky inner protest going on, not against order and cleanliness per se, but against the clank of the trash can: “throwing stuff away,” then assuming it’s permanently gone from our universe, rather than floating in a river somewhere or buried in a landfill.

Is it possible, I quietly (secretly) ask myself, to actually value... somehow... trash, weeds, mice, bugs, or anything—everything—else that doesn’t fit into a properly civilized, middle-class universe? This secret question is mixed with confusion, even shame, because, well, I’m sort of a slob, indifferent to dust and disorder and the like, but also, at the same time, a participant in and benefactor of humanity’s exploitation of Planet Earth.

So, I tell myself: Just mow the damn lawn, toss out (or maybe recycle) the litter, and do your best to fit in. I try, I try, but my strange, soul-deep uncertainty persists. And a larger, far more troubling question quickly emerges. Where do we draw the line between valuing and dismissing... whatever?

And my uncertainties turn social. They turn political. I grew up in the Christian church, and heard its values espoused: “Do unto others as you would have them do un o you.” And, oh yeah: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

Could anything resonate more clearly? This was deep, unyielding: Don’t submit to simplistic anger but dig, when you are hurt and offended, for understanding, for healing. Love is not a simple concept—a sploosh of kumbaya and the problem’s solved. It may well be life’s deepest challenge.

But as Christianity became a world religion, its cross got turned upside down and became a sword. And along came the Crusades. Let’s retake the Holy Land, man! Loving thy enemy apparently meant killing him—and his family, his children. Millions of people died. And the wars rolled on and on. Conquest and dehumanization became fully embedded as the religious values of the powerful. Human ingenuity—scientific progress—mostly fed the urge for war, culminating in the creation, and use, of the atomic bomb. And 12,000 or so nuclear bombs now sit here and there around the planet, continually upgraded, patiently waiting to end the world.

But even as ending the world remains on hold, non-nuclear wars continue, making the news virtually unbearable to read. For instance, over 50,000 Palestinians,—maybe 100,000 or more—have died in Israel’s genocidal assault.

And, as Truthout reports:

Many Palestinians say that the starvation is even worse than Israel’s bombardments, having been starved by varying levels of Israel’s blockade for 19 months and with food costs constantly on the rise. The total aid blockade ushered in the worst conditions of the genocide so far; one Palestinian reporter said in March that children in the region are so hungry that they’re drawing pictures of food in the sand.

...According to an assessment by the United Nations-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, nearly 71,000 children are expected to experience acute malnutrition in the next year due to Israel’s blockade.

This is humanity’s flow of indifference to much—or all?—of life. I can’t let go of it. And I can’t stop noticing it at the miniscule level of “weeds” and “litter” and every other aspect of nature that doesn’t matter. What I’m saying is not, oh gosh, be good to the weeds, be good to the discarded cigarette butts and plastic straws—but rather, notice them and ponder, with deep wonderment, the meaning of nature, the meaning of life.

What if we started collectively seeing that discarded plastic straw not as simply an assault on our sense of order—clean sidewalks!—but as a minute particle of the living planet? How far upward might this awareness flow?

Live 12 noon Saturday and available via streaming afterwards:

Tune into “DeProgram” with fiery political cartoonist Ted Rall and brilliant CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, diving headfirst into the expanding war between President Trump and Harvard University over Kristi Noem’s ban on foreign students, which account for 27% of the student body. Trump’s moves to block international students from Harvard and other elite universities has sparked a fierce debate, with the administration arguing it’s a matter of national security and economic protection. Critics, including Harvard, slam it as xenophobic, claiming that it guts academic freedom and global collaboration. The policy, tied to Trump’s broader immigration crackdown, has led to lawsuits, with Harvard alleging the ban stifles its First Amendment rights and unfairly targets students from the Middle East and Asia. Protests have erupted on campus, and faculty are pushing back. Rall and Kiriakou unpack the legal, cultural, and political fallout of this high-stakes showdown, cutting through the noise with their no-BS analysis. Will Harvard’s defiance crush the White House, or will the school succumb to pressure? Tune in for a raw, unfiltered take on a fight shaking the nation’s intellectual core. Plus:

Art Spiegelman claims PBS censored him over anti-Trump content, raising free speech alarms.
Five years post-George Floyd, police killings continue to climb, fueling calls for reform.
Tensions spike as Israel eyes a potential strike on Iran’s nuclear program, risking regional chaos.

The post DeProgram: Trump vs. Harvard! Plus Art Spiegelman, Police Killings and Israel vs. Iran appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

On November 7, 1938, Polish Jew Herschel Feibel Grynszpan shot diplomat Ernst vom Rath in the German embassy in Paris.

Grynszpan’s family had been made stateless by German and Polish governments, and were stranded in miserable conditions along with thousands of Jewish refugees at the Polish-German border.

The shooting of vom Rath provided the trigger for the Nazi pogrom across Germany of Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass”—attacks of Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues. This date is thought to mark the progression from German persecution of Jews to the beginning of the Holocaust.

The poisonous identification of Jewish identity with the Jewish supremacist state of Israel—with its knee on the neck of Palestinians—to proclaim Judaism cognate with murderous nationalism—has its victims.

Today’s moment, the murder of two Israeli embassy employees in Washington, D.C. at an event sponsored by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), has all the elements to enable increased persecution of U.S. citizens and residents who advocate for the safety and rights of 2 millions residents of Gaza, and the rest of occupied Palestine.

Just as with Grynszpan’s crime, the effect of this killer’s decision will be out of his hands, and the cause of his desperation will only matter to those who already care.

The wretched, amoral lunatics who have command of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) will have a clear field to “investigate” the curriculum of universities that host Palestinian studies, and criminalize the slogans “Free Palestine” and “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free.”

We can count on crimes being committed by Pam Bondi (DOJ) and Kash Patel (FBI) in exploitation of this moment. The crocodile tears of this Proud Boy-aligned Christian nationalist government as they express solidarity with Jews against “antisemitism” will challenge our gag reflex.

The conflation of protesters for Palestine with “terrorists,” already in full force by the Departments of State and Education with expulsion of international students who have spoken out and organized, will be untrammeled by due process. Or due process will be twisted with the power of a state unbound by ethics in their determination to “make an example.”

The day following the Washington shooting, the AJC’s Ted Deutch was on MSNBC’s afternoon “Dateline White House” program, instructing that permitting campus demonstrations for Gazans’ right to live allows us to “tolerate hatred and antisemitism that leads to this violence.” Deutch made the rounds of Fox and CNN also.

In his morning MSNBC program appearance, he said, efforts must “double down” to insure that “what we saw last night never happens again and that words of antisemites, incitement that we’ve seen at too many places around the world, be treated as it is, that this could be the deadly result if we don’t act.”

The AJC, once fully cognizant of the dangers of turning the heterogenous Jewish people spread across the world in to a nationality, made sure in the aftermath of these pointless deaths that suppressing “delegitimization” of Israel was the focus, not Jewish rights to safety in their countries.

Since October 7, 2023, the world has watched the methodical torture of 2 million people in Gaza by the Israel Defense Forces, month after month of civilian displacement; destruction; hunger; disease; and killing by bomb, artillery, drone, and bullet. U.S. Air Force member Aaron Bushnell, in February 2024, immolated himself in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington to protest America’s assistance in the misery. In December 2023 and September 2024 fatal self-immolations were enacted in front of Israel’s consulates in Atlanta and Boston.

The world watching—protesting, agonizing in helplessness—the horror of premeditated and systematic destruction of the people of Gaza has the obvious hazard of endangering Jews. A gossamer sense of object permanence is exhibited when Zionist advocacy at one moment proclaims Israel the state of the Jewish people, and the next decries hostility to Israel a symptom of some mysterious eternal human disease of antisemitism.

It is certain that the Washington killings will be used to maximize the sense of dread and siege in Jewish spaces, shaped to legitimize the Zionist stance that Israel is rational and her opponents crazed, irrational, bloodthirsty.

After the 9/11/2001 attacks, journalist James Bennett contacted Benjamin Netanyahu, then out of office.

That evening, I tracked down Benjamin Netanyahu, the once-and-future Israeli prime minister, to ask what the attack meant for U.S.-Israeli relations. “It’s very good,” he replied, with startling enthusiasm. Then he caught himself. “Well, it’s not very good, but it’s going to generate immediate sympathy.”

The poisonous identification of Jewish identity with the Jewish supremacist state of Israel—with its knee on the neck of Palestinians—to proclaim Judaism cognate with murderous nationalism—has its victims. Today, Zionist partisans in the United States of America, in and out of government, have their “bloody shirt.” Mazel tov!

At the end of a rushed, chaotic process, House Republicans passed a bill early Thursday morning that fails the people they promised to help. It would raise costs on millions of families across the country, making it harder for them to meet basic needs and weather life’s ups and downs—while showering ever larger tax breaks on the wealthiest households.

The bill will drive up hunger and deepen poverty, including among children, and take access to life-saving healthcare away from millions of people. The Senate must reject it.

Congressional Budget Office data and other analyses make the House Republican agenda’s harmful impacts crystal clear: about 15 million people losing health coverage; millions losing food assistance or having their food assistance cut, including 2 million or more children; the 10% of households with the lowest incomes made worse off while the richest get richer by tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars each year; and trillions of dollars added to our debt over the decade, worsening our long-term fiscal picture and increasing the risk to our economy.

In 2027, it gives households earning more than $1 million a year an average tax cut of roughly $90,000, while low-income households receive an average of just $90 from the tax cuts.

The bill’s SNAP provisions are so extreme that some states, faced with backfilling deep federal funding cuts that total billions of dollars a year nationally, could take steps to dramatically take food assistance away from large numbers of people and could even decide to end their SNAP programs entirely. Simply put, House Republicans are walking away from a 50-year, bipartisan commitment to ensure that children in families with low incomes get the help they need, no matter what state they live in—with potentially devastating impacts on their health, education, and future success.

The extreme health provisions would lead to an unprecedented drop in health coverage and drive up health costs for millions. Make no mistake—the main way the bill cuts more than $800 billion from healthcare is by taking away Medicaid and affordable marketplace coverage from people who are eligible.

The bill also makes higher education more expensive for millions by driving up the cost of student loans and reducing the level of Pell education grants for college students.

The bill directs some of its harshest cuts toward people who are immigrants and their families. House Republicans falsely claim that they are restricting access to basic needs programs for people who don’t have a documented status. But the reality is that people without a documented immigration status already do not qualify for these benefits. The cuts in federal benefits will fall entirely on immigrants in the country lawfully—including some pregnant women and children who need food assistance. Refugees, people granted asylum, and victims of trafficking—people who have had to prove that they face persecution in their home countries or have been victimized by sex or labor traffickers—are among those who would see their food assistance, Medicare benefits they paid into, and affordable health marketplace coverage terminated. And the bill will also take away the Child Tax Credit from millions of U.S. citizen children in immigrant families.

The House Republican bill showers more tax cuts on the wealthy, extending the highly skewed provisions of the 2017 tax law and adding permanent expansions for wealthy households, while leaving millions of children in working families with low incomes out of even the temporary increase in the Child Tax Credit. In 2027, it gives households earning more than $1 million a year an average tax cut of roughly $90,000, while low-income households receive an average of just $90 from the tax cuts—even while these households bear the brunt of cuts to Medicaid and SNAP and face higher prices due to the president’s tariffs, which the bill does nothing to address.

There’s a better path forward, but it requires the Senate to tear up this legislation and start again, rejecting any proposals that raise costs on families, take health coverage and food assistance away from families who need them, or drive up poverty and the number of people who are uninsured.

You probably saw the cringe-worthy spectacle a few months ago: U.S. President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House. The Ukrainian president's pained expression as he described facing down Russian President Vladimir Putin—an authoritarian bent on destroying democracy and consuming land that isn't his—while Trump, who clearly identifies more with the aggressor than the victim, publicly humiliated him. Trump celebrated this awful spectacle as "good television." Once a desperate attention seeking reality show host, always a desperate attention seeking reality show host.

It's worth asking: Why would any world leader willingly walk into that gilded trap of an Oval Office—where, notably and ironically, "none of the items on the mantle in Trump's Oval Office were made in the U.S."—knowing they'll likely face an inept man-child who ignores shared reality and acts as though the universe revolves around him?

South Africa just gave every world leader a roadmap for navigating Trump without losing their dignity or falling into his reality TV traps.

Then South Africa's president showed up and delivered a masterclass in strategic diplomacy.

While it's important to talk about the falsehoods regarding "white genocide" that Trump kept repeating during this meeting—as many outlets are doing—I think we also need to examine the brilliance of how President Cyril Ramaphosa handled this, shall we use the very diplomatic language of, challenging leader.

Reading the Room (and the Racist)

This visit came days after the administration's theatrical welcome of white South African "refugees"—an absurd spectacle given that South Africa, where the white population at 7% of the total still owns 50% of the land and where a majority of crime impacts non-white South Africans, is hardly experiencing white genocide. The real genocide Trump ignores? Gaza, which the United States explicitly supports.

But rather than falling into the cruel trap Trump and Vance set for Zelenskyy, South Africa's president read Trump perfectly and knew exactly how to handle this obvious and simple man.

The Blueprint: Three Brilliant Moves

Move 1: Disarm with Humor

The South African president joked that he was sorry he couldn't bring Trump a plane, to which Trump replied, "I wish you would have." Any observer knows it would be a massive conflict of interest for a U.S. president to accept a plane from a foreign leader. Unfortunately, this isn't hypothetical, as Trump officially accepted a luxury plane gifted by Qatar's leader on the same day on May 21. But Trump, existing in his gold-plated self-centered universe, just enjoyed the joke. Brilliant—point out actual corruption while flattering the ego.

When an ABC reporter had simply asked about the Pentagon's announcement regarding this controversial Qatari gift, Trump unleashed his predictable (and with its frequency, less interesting but no less dangerous) attack on the press: "What do you have to do with the Qatari jet? They're giving the United States Air Force a jet. Okay? And it's a great thing… You are a terrible reporter. Number one, you don't have what it takes to be a reporter. You're not smart enough."

But humor? That disarmed him completely. The South African president got Trump to openly joke about foreign governments buying influence, something that would send any other president scrambling for damage control. All it took was the right tone and one luxury plane as a punchline.

Move 2: Bring the Right White Men

Recognizing Trump's racism (evident in everything from unlawful abductions that did not follow any due process and sent likely majority innocent people to El Salvador to the inconceivable resurgence of the Nazi salute in Trump's White House to the targeting students of color who speak out about the atrocities in Gaza) and sexism, the president knew he'd need white men to make Trump listen. But not just any white man—he brought golfer Ernie Els.

When Trump presented misleading clips and questionable papers (which reporters noted had nothing to do with his claims), he again predictably attacked the press: "If the news wasn't fake, like NBC, which is fake news, totally, one of the worst, ABC, NBC, CBS, horrible... if we had real reporters, they'd be covering it."

But Els? Trump actually listened to Els, who gently educated this president averse to historical realities: "It's been 35 years since the transition. President Ramaphosa was right in the middle of the transition time, 1990 and before that... There was a lot of stuff happening in the apartheid days. You know, we grew up in the apartheid era. But I don't think two wrongs make a right. President Mandela, when he came out of prison... didn't come out with hatred, you know, and really unified our nation with his sport."

A white man who has captured Trumps attention because of golf, that colonial relic spread by the British colonial elites during the 18th and 19th centuries, became the vehicle for Trump to hear about South Africa's real issues rather than his fantasized "white genocide" narrative.

Move 3: Speak the Language of Wealth

Understanding that people who hoard wealth only hear from other wealth hoarders, President Ramaphosa brought South Africa's richest man, Johann Rupert. Surrounded by the Oval Office's imported gold, Rupert could speak Trump's language while delivering hard truths: "We have too many deaths. But it's across the board. It's not only white farmers. It's across the board... The crime is terrible, sir... but the biggest murder rate is in the Cape Flats. Gangs."

With a billionaire as messenger, Trump was momentarily forced to confront reality rather than his distorted fantasy of South Africa.

The Lesson Plan

So what can other world leaders learn from this diplomatic parkour?

1. Use humor to disarm while pointing out actual violations: it catches Trump off guard when reporters can't.
2. Bring a white man who does something Trump cares about: Your options are limited to golf, wrestling, or maybe real estate, but stick to sports
3. If possible, bring wealth: the ultra-rich can only hear from other ultra-rich

There you have it. South Africa just gave every world leader a roadmap for navigating Trump without losing their dignity or falling into his reality TV traps.

The question now is: Who will be smart enough to follow it?

Greenland does not, on the face of it, seem to be the kind of place that a superpower like the United States would regard as a vital component of its security. With fewer than 60,000 inhabitants in an area roughly one-quarter the size of the contiguous United States, it is the least densely populated nation on Earth. Its only industries of note are fishing and, to some extent, tourism, and its northernmost point is as close to the North Pole as Los Angeles is to Denver.

Yet President Donald Trump insists the United States needs Greenland “very badly,” to the extent that he won’t “rule out” using force to attain it.

Such covetousness almost certainly owes at least something to the prospect of access to the mineral resources, including lithium, that Greenland is believed to harbor. But Trump himself has suggested a different motivation, musing in an interview about “Russian boats and… Chinese boats, gunships all over the place… going up and down the coast of Greenland.”

A world that has warmed enough for the Arctic Ocean to be truly ice-free is a world that will be experiencing even more droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, and other extreme weather events, at the potential cost of millions upon millions of dollars in damage and extensive loss of life.

Trump’s obsession with annexing Greenland is a confounding solution to a problem that doesn’t even exist.

Moscow and Beijing undeniably have an increasing number of vessels operating year-round in Arctic waters. In Russia’s case, that’s hardly surprising: Russia accounts for 53% of the region’s coastline. But its interests, and indeed those of China’s, have little to do with Greenland and a lot to do with its own Arctic waters, specifically the seaway along its north coast that Russia refers to as the Northern Sea Route (NSR). As sea ice decreases in thickness and extent as a result of climate change, the NSR is slowly opening up. As a result, Moscow sees this passageway as a potential source of riches and national pride and even a way to reorder international trade.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has declared that the NSR will ultimately “replace the Suez Canal” as the favored transit route between Atlantic and Pacific. It is presently a long way short of that: Just under 40 million tons of goods shipped through the NSR in 2024, almost exclusively on Russian and Chinese vessels, compared to 525 million tons that transited Suez. But it is far more than the 7 million tons that traveled the passage in 1987.

The Northwest Passage—the frequently narrow, shallow, and twisting pathway through the islands of Canada’s High Arctic—tells a similar story on a smaller scale. From the 16th through the 19th centuries, multiple expeditions perished in the ice of the Northwest Passage; after it was finally navigated for the first time in 1906, there were just 67 further transits over the course of the 20th century. Thanks to melting sea ice, there were 41 transits of the Northwest Passage in 2023 alone.

While both the Northwest Passage and NSR are more navigable than in the past, both are still challenging to sail through during all but the very warmest weeks of the year. Even as the Arctic heats up four times faster than the rest of the globe, its seas are unlikely to be consistently ice-free during summer before mid-century at the earliest. The anticipation of such an eventuality, however, has led to a jockeying for position and influence, and a rumbling discord among Arctic powers.

Canada and Russia regard the Northwest Passage and NSR respectively as their national waters, and they intend to dictate who can use them and when. Moscow requires any vessel that wants to transit the NSR to apply for permission up to four months in advance and mandates icebreaker escorts for most ships—often at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars.

The United States chafes at such restrictions, arguing that both waterways are international straits, open to vessels from all nations.

“We’re concerned about Russia’s claims to the international waters of the Northern Sea Route,” said then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in 2019, adding with a swipe at Canada that “we recognize Russia is not the only nation making illegitimate claims.”

Interestingly, China is broadly in accord with the U.S. position; but, as is its wont, the country is playing the long game. Notwithstanding Trump’s talk of Chinese gunships off Greenland, Beijing’s interest in the Arctic thus far appears to be entirely mercantilist. Particularly since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China is the only country whose commercial vessels transit the NSR with some regularity. In 2012 the Chinese icebreaker Xue Long even explored the feasibility of crossing from Atlantic to Pacific across the Arctic Ocean via the North Pole.

It is of course possible that further melting will lead to increased tensions in which Arctic territory becomes an especially valued possession. But other threats are far more urgent. While the rest of the world is not heating up as rapidly as the Arctic, it is still warming. And a world that has warmed enough for the Arctic Ocean to be truly ice-free is a world that will be experiencing even more droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, and other extreme weather events, at the potential cost of millions upon millions of dollars in damage and extensive loss of life.

It is, to put it mildly, unfortunate that Donald Trump continues to insist that climate change is a “hoax.” Because reducing emissions rapidly is a far better way to protect Americans than idle threats to invade an ice-covered island.

The left is in shambles everywhere while hard-right and far-right parties are riding high in polls across the world. I contend that globalization is at the heart of these developments, and thus it is critical that the left comes to terms with what has gone wrong with its approach to neoliberal globalization and develops in turn an alternative vision of world order.

Globalization came to be a dominant force in our lives sometime around the 1980s. It coincided with the rise of neoliberalism, although globalization is not a 20th-century phenomenon. The 19th century contained a huge burst of globalization. In fact, between 1850 and 1913, the world economy was probably as open as it became in the late 20th century. Tariffs fell, free trade agreements proliferated, trade flows skyrocketed, information flows accelerated, and migrants flowed to all corners of the globe. Neither Europe nor the U.S. had any restrictions on migration. In the U.S., no visas or passports were even needed to enter the country.

That wave of globalization was interrupted because of World War I, and the next wave of globalization did not occur until the early 1980s. In many ways, the new wave of capitalist globalization was more intense than the one that had preceded it as it was characterized by massive financial deregulation and the acceleration of capital flows while trade integration became more rapid than ever. By the 1990s, the new wave of globalization had reached such heights that the world was increasingly becoming a global village. Let’s call it the neoliberal hyper-globalization wave.

The problem with the reformist left vis-à-vis neoliberal globalization remains. That is, it advances a critique of the consequences of capitalist globalization but seems to accept the phenomenon as inevitable and unalterable.

However, there was one huge qualitative difference between the 19th-century and the late 20th-century waves of globalization. While capital movements exploded during the late 20th-century wave of globalization and multinationals moved across the world in search of cheaper labor, labor migration was severely restricted. In contrast, migration became truly globalized in the late 19th century. And the late 20th-century wave of globalization, which was supposed to produce unrivaled benefits for all, also had another dark side: While it was not openly imperialistic as the 19th-century wave of globalization, it was based nonetheless on highly exploitative structures that were not much different from those of colonialism. After all, capitalism has always nurtured dependence, inequality, and exploitation.

Under the neoliberal hyper-globalization wave, the Global North took advantage of the weakness of the Global South by trapping millions of its workers in a relentless cycle of exploitation while offshoring had dramatic impacts on the standard of living of average citizens back in the Global North as well-paid industrial jobs became few and far in between, wages stagnated, and the social safety net was torn apart, partly because of less government revenues due to neoliberal tax cuts for corporations and the rich and partly on account of simple ideological reasoning. Austerity for the masses but subsidies, tax breaks, and bailouts for industry and the financial sector is a central aspect of the ideological agenda of neoliberalism. And while some developing nations did benefit from the great connectivity in the global economy that has been unleashed since the early 1980s, it is primarily the elites in the Global South, as much as it is in the Global North, that gained the most from the neoliberal hyper-globalization wave.

Enter politics.

By the late 1990s, grievances over the direction of the capitalist world economy united people to demand change and an anti-globalization movement surfaced across the globe, protesting specifically against the neoliberal hyper-globalization wave. Protests and demonstrations against the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund became a common feature of the anti-globalization movement across a large number of countries from 1995 to 2018. The anti-globalization movement was inspired by left-wing ideologies and was impressively transnational. Latin America’s anti-globalization movement was especially successful, resulting in support and eventually electoral victory for left-wing parties in scores of countries in the region. Indeed, a database on political institutions reveals that in the early 1990s, 64% of Latin American presidents came from a right-wing party. But a decade later, that number had shrunk to half.

The anti-globalization and anti-capitalist movement was no less prominent in Europe. In the summer of 2001, more than 300,000 people from all over Europe gathered in Genoa, Italy to voice their opposition to the G8 Group, while the Italian police unleashed violence of a dimension unknown up to that point in postwar Western Europe. In the spring of 2002, more than half a million people in Barcelona mobilized against the European Union Heads of State and Government under the banner against Capital and War.

The left is historically obligated to advance an alternative vision of a world order beyond capitalism.

The anti-globalization movement had come of age. The prospects for radical change had never looked more promising than they did during the first decade of the new millennium. The winds of change were still in the air in the second decade of the new millennium as the rise to power of the Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza) party in Greece brought hope to leftist movements worldwide, although it was abundantly clear to anyone willing to pay close attention to Greek politics at the time that the leadership of the party had made a decision to switch its ideological profile from radicalism to pragmatism in anticipation of its coming to power.

There is indeed one impressive thing about the rapid and sweeping changes brought about by the neoliberal hyper-globalization wave, and that is none other than the fact that the world now spins faster. Extraordinary social, political, and ideological changes can happen from one decade to the next. And, lo and behold, by the end of the second decade of the new millennium, not only did the radical left critique of globalization lose its appeal for the working class and huge chunks of youth, but anti-globalism emerged as a major ideological tenet of the extreme right.

However, the backlash against globalism by hard-right and far-right parties was not based on a scathing critique of neoliberal capitalism but was seen instead as a political project advanced by Marxism and the radical left with the double aim of destroying national culture and replacing the nation-state with institutions of global governance. This is of course an evasion of what capitalist globalization is all about, but it would be naïve to think that the backlash against globalism by the far-right does not have socioeconomic roots. The anti-globalist sentiment that brought President Donald Trump to power in the United States and scores of other authoritarian political figures across the world is driven by both cultural and socioeconomic factors and is nurtured by the “us versus them” mentality. The far-right of course is not anti-systemic and in fact enjoys the support of digital moguls like Elon Musk. As such, it is fooling voters on the economy with promises of a new order. The far-right’s anti-globalism stance begins and ends with the imposition of draconian measures against immigration and the creation of a culture of cruelty.

The anti-globalism of the far-right is perverse and irrational, and thus it may speak volumes of the need of a widely and publicly educated citizenry to sustain democracy, but it also calls attention to the gross political failures of the reformist left parties that came to power during the height of the anti-globalization period. Indeed, while the contradictions of neoliberal globalization led to electoral victories of left parties in scores of countries across the world during the last couple of decades, the shift to global neoliberalism was not countered by the parties of the reformist left that came to power. They may have criticized neoliberal hyper-globalization while they were in opposition, but they did very little once they came to power to combat its destructive effects. At the very best, they increased spending on social programs but did not try to diminish the spread of globalization on their economies and societies. Subsequently, by failing to tame, let alone shrink, capitalist globalization, they quickly saw their political fortunes decline and found citizens changing sides. This is the principal factor that has activated a turn to the far-right across the globe, including the United States, although Trumpism also needs to be considered in light of the peculiar social, cultural, and ideological features of the country.

The problem with the reformist left vis-à-vis neoliberal globalization remains. That is, it advances a critique of the consequences of capitalist globalization but seems to accept the phenomenon as inevitable and unalterable. In doing so, it leaves the field open for far-right populists to make inroads with disgruntled voters by appealing to their worst instincts as in the case of immigration.

We also know that pressure “from below” to tame or even reverse neoliberal globalization, a view that was held by the main body of the anti-globalization movement of the 1990s and 2000s, is a flawed strategy. The way out of neoliberal globalization is by developing a new globalization that is free from the destructive tendencies of capitalist accumulation and operates through political processes in which democracy and globalization are in a symbiotic relationship and thus support and reinforce each other.

The left is historically obligated to advance an alternative vision of a world order beyond capitalism. A world order where the rights of labor are at the pinnacle of human society and thus the means of production are collectively owned by workers while the exploitation of nature is seen as injustice.

In sum, systemic change for ending neoliberal hyper-globalization is a prerequisite but such a project mandates anti-systemic consciousness and a comprehensive political program for a new world order. If the left fails to develop the courage to engage itself economically, politically, ideologically, and culturally in the making of an alternative world order, capitalist globalization will continue to reign supreme, and the far-right will be its main political beneficiary.

By Ralph Nader May 23, 2025 The chronic lies of Der Führer Trump, hour by hour, day after day, are having deadly and costly impacts on the American people, with many more casualties in the pipeline of wreckage he and his henchman Elon Musk have wrought since January 20. Trump’s lies, threats, and fake promises…

Credit where due: I am ever impressed by the feral energy of U.S. President Donald Trump and his crew, who are able to do an extraordinary amount of damage every single damned day. And somehow their energetic cruelty seems to drain my own reserves: I want to stay in bed. But we fight as best we can, and so here’s my assessment of one dire day, and more importantly what we still might be able to do about it.

It began, early Thursday morning, with House passage of the budget bill, which somehow managed to get even worse in the wee hours. Among other things, a single sentence was amended in such a way as to potentially kill off most of the rooftop solar industry in the U.S. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin explains:

While the earlier language from the Ways and Means committee eliminated the 25D tax credit for those who purchased home solar systems after the end of this year (it was originally supposed to run through 2034), the new language says that no credit “shall be allowed under this section for any investment during the taxable year” (emphasis mine) if the entity claiming the tax credit “rents or leases such property to a third party during such taxable year” and “the lessee would qualify for a credit under section 25D with respect to such property if the lessee owned such property.”

That arcane piece of language was enough to knock 37% off the share price of SunRun today, the biggest rooftop installer in the country. And it was only a cherry on the top of this toxic sundae, which would essentially repeal all of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Nuclear power gets a little bit of a reprieve, and of course ethanol (Earth’s dumbest energy source) does great. But it’s a wipeout far greater than anyone expected even a few weeks ago. Here’s how Princeton’s Jesse Jenkins and his team at REPEAT (Rapid Energy Policy Evaluation and Toolkit) sum it up:

• Increase U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 0.5 billion metric tons per year in 2030 and more than 1 billion metric tons per year in 2035.
• Raise U.S. household and business energy expenditures by $25 billion annually in 2030 and over $50 billion in 2035.
• Increase average U.S. household energy costs by roughly $100-160 per household per year in 2030 and roughly $270-415 per household per year in 2035.
• Reduces cumulative capital investment in U.S. electricity and clean fuels production by $1 trillion from 2025-2035.
• Imperil a total of $522 billion in announced but pending investments in U.S. clean energy supply and manufacturing.
• Reduce annual sales of electric vehicles by roughly 40% in 2030 and end America’s battery manufacturing boom.
• Substantially slow electricity capacity additions, raising national average retail electricity rates and monthly household electricity bills by about 9% in 2030—and as much as 17% in some states (including Texas, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania).

In the midst of all this, the Senate—ignoring its parliamentarian—bowed to the wishes of the auto industry and told California (and the 11 states that had followed it) that it couldn’t demand the phaseout of internal combustion vehicles by the middle of the next decade. (This is among other things federalism in reverse).

“Attacking these waivers will devastate our ability to advance the use of electric vehicles in the state,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a press conference after the vote, flanked by California Gov. Gavin Newsom and other officials. “We won’t let it happen, not when we’re facing an air pollution and climate crisis that’s getting worse by the day.”

The 1970 Clean Air Act permits California to receive waivers from the Environmental Protection Agency that enable the state to enact clean air regulations that go further than federal limits.

Oh, and then at day’s end the Department of Homeland Security told Harvard that 27% of its student body couldn’t study there beginning in the fall because they came from foreign countries.

If you add it up, this is all an effort to keep America precisely where it is now. It’s the Make America Immobile Act. Trump is doing his best to freeze things in place: on behalf of oil companies that want to keep pumping oil, on behalf of automakers that want to keep churning out SUVs. That depends, among other things, on shutting down research at universities, because they keep coming up with things that point us in a different direction, be it temperature readings demonstrating climate change or new batteries that enable entirely different technologies. If America lived alone on this planet that would be truly terrible; luckily for everyone else, there are other places (China, and the E.U.) that are not making the same set of stupid decisions. But if this stands it will kill the future for America.

It will also, of course, kill the present. I’m not bothering to talk about the deep cruelty of the Medicaid cuts (and the fact that they will destroy America’s rural hospital system). There’s also the not-small matter of the intense attacks on transgender people the bill contains. And I won’t bother gassing on about the utter grossness of handing over yet more money to the richest among us. (The top 0.1% of earners gain $390,000 a year on average, while Americans making less than $17,000 lose on average about $1,000. This is, among other things, Christianity in reverse).

So, our job is to do what we can to make it… less worse. The U.S. Senate still has to pass its own version of the bill. Given the GOP majority, they’ll pass something very bad. Perhaps, at Trump’s urging, they’ll rush it through in the next 24 hours; more likely it will take a little longer. We need to put as much pressure as we can on that process, in order to take out the most egregious parts of the bill. Here’s what Third Act sent out on Thursday, and here’s the link we want you to use to register your opposition with Senators. It comes from our very able partners at Solar United Neighbors, who have done as much as anyone in America to help people build clean energy. Fill it out so you can get a call script and the numbers to use. Again, here’s the link. If you want a little inspiration, check out Will Wiseman’s video of rural Americans talking about one particular part of the IRA that’s helping change their lives.

I’m not going to bother pretending that this is guaranteed to work. The bad guys here are riding hard and fast, and they’re trying to shock and cow us into submission. But—don’t go easy. If they can summon the feral energy to wreck the country, we can summon the humane energy to try and save it.

LIVE 10 AM Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

On today’s “TMI Show with Ted Rall and Manila Chan,” we dive into the powder keg of the nuclear standoff between Iran, Israel and the U.S. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are throwing down the gauntlet, vowing a “devastating and decisive response” if Israel dares to strike their nuclear sites. This fiery warning follows U.S. intelligence reports hinting that Israel might be gearing up to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, escalating tensions as Tehran and Washington head into a critical fifth round of nuclear talks in Rome today. At the heart of the clash: Iran’s refusal to halt uranium enrichment, now at 60% purity—way past the 3.67% limit set by the 2015 JCPOA, which Trump ditched in 2018. Iran insists its program is for civilian use, but the West and Israel see a clear path to nukes, raising fears of a preemptive strike that could spark a regional firestorm. With the IAEA meeting in June and the JCPOA’s October deadline looming, these talks are a global flashpoint. Will diplomacy work, or are we on the brink of a new war in the Middle East? Tune in for a no-holds-barred breakdown!

Plus:

• Harvard’s international student ban rocks the academic community.

• House Republicans’ “One Big Beautiful Bill” sparks Senate debate.

• The U.S. penny’s production ends.

The post TMI Show Ep 145: “Iran Warns Israel: Back Off!” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Last year, roughly 6 million American families used the Low-Income Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, to help pay their heating or cooling bills. LIHEAP is a program that helps people from Louisiana to Maine and has an amazingly bipartisan support. This support extends to energy providers.

In April of this year, the staff at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) who run LIHEAP were fired by Secretary of HHS Robert F. Kennedy Jr. One of those fired employees was brought back last week to distribute the remaining LIHEAP funds for the current fiscal year.

Why would Collins thank Kennedy, or anyone else, for simply following the law?

This week Secretary Kennedy testified on HHS spending for the next fiscal year before the Senate Appropriations Committee chaired by Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine. In fiscal year 2025, Maine received $41.6 million in LIHEAP funding.

At the hearing, Collins praised the Trump for administration for releasing the already appropriated funds and asked Kennedy, “Will you work with this committee in trying to restore LIHEAP so that we can avoid, literally, seniors and low-income families not being able to keep warm in the winter?” Kennedy responded:

Yeah, absolutely, and I’m from New England myself. My brother, for 40 years, has run Citizens Energy, which provides low-cost home heating oil to families in New England. And so many people have come to me over the years and said to me, thank you, your brother saved my life because I didn’t have to choose between food and heat. I was on the Navajo reservation three weeks ago, and Navajo President Buu Nygren said to me, at this point, if we cut LIHEAP, Navajo will die from it. So, I understand the critical historical importance of this program. President [Donald] Trump’s rationale and the [Office of Management and Budget]’s rationale is that President Trump’s energy policies are going to lower the cost of energy so that everybody will get lower cost heating oil, and in that case, this program would simply be another subsidy to the fossil fuel industry.

Kennedy went on to add that if there was not a drop in energy prices, he would spend the monies that Congress appropriated. Concluding his remarks, Kennedy said that “Do that, and I will work with you to make sure that those families do not suffer in that way.”

Collins’ advocacy for LIHEAP is positive, and she should be commended for raising the issue with Kennedy. However, her remarks fell drastically short of what is needed at this moment. Collins was pleased that the Trump administration released already appropriated funds and that Kennedy said he would spend any monies Congress appropriated. This is only doing what the law requires nothing more. Why would Collins thank Kennedy, or anyone else, for simply following the law?

In her remarks, posted on her Senate webpage, Collins did not challenge Kennedy and Trump’s assertion that the energy policies of the Trump administration are going to reduce energy prices to the level that LIHEAP will no longer be needed. Even if there is a major drop in energy prices (this is a big if), would that drop make such a difference that LIHEAP would not be needed in the next fiscal year? The answer is obviously no.

It was good that Collins spoke up for LIHEAP. However, in her questioning she did not challenge the nonsensical reasoning of the Trump administration. Instead, Sen. Collins, who certainly should know better, played along acting as if Trump was normal. As she had done many times throughout her career in the Senate, Collins asked for assurances and hoped for the best. When dealing with the Trump administration, this approach is simply not good enough.

The horrific images of children starving in Gaza, due to Israel's cruel, inhumane blockade of all humanitarian aid since early March, shock the world's conscience. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's recently announced plan to distribute aid, while forcing Palestinians in Gaza to move yet again, is a spurious cover for his and U.S. President Donald Trump's ethnic cleansing scheme.

Yet concrete action to end this calamity is hard to organize. How does a genocide end? And specifically, how do people of conscience, acting with majority support of the U.S. public, organize to end it?

The lack of true democracy in the United States, so evident in domestic policy on many issues, is even worse in terms of foreign policy, especially regarding the mostly ironclad support for Israel. However, cracks are showing, and they must be exploited quickly.

Will any of these efforts, along with many others, overcome powerful political forces that perpetuate genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid against the Palestinian people?

Earlier this month, U.S. Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) brought his S. Res. 224, calling for an end to the humanitarian blockade on Gaza, to the Senate floor. The resolution had the support of all Democrats, except Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, and the two Independents who caucus with the Democrats, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Angus King (I-Maine).

The resolution was predictably blocked from getting a vote by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair James Risch (R-Idaho), but was significant as no other legislative measure in the year and half since the war on Gaza began has garnered such widespread, albeit partisan support (no Republicans supported it, nor have any called for a cease-fire or cutting off U.S. weapons to Israel).

A companion resolution in the House of Representatives will be introduced very soon, and while both would be nonbinding, they represent progress in the long struggle to exert pressure on Israel, and Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem are keenly aware of U.S. political developments. Additionally, the Senate will likely soon vote on Joint Resolutions of Disapproval (JRDs) to stop specific U.S. weapons transfers to Israel. Sen. Sanders forced such votes twice since November, and while they failed, the upcoming votes should attract more support, and add to the pressure on the Israeli government, which of course is opposed by most Israelis.

Legislative initiatives are far from the only strategies and tactics being employed by peace and human rights activists. Other recent and upcoming events and opportunities include the following:

Activists led by Montgomery County, Maryland Peace Action showed up at new U.S. Sen. Angela Alsobrooks' (D-Md.) "Sick of It" rally protesting the Trump-Musk cuts to health programs, and had a strong showing about also being sick of the Gaza genocide, including confronting the senator. It may have had some impact, as she later signed onto Sen. Welch's resolution, after having been largely silent on the genocide in Gaza, and voting against Sen. Sanders' most recent JRDs.

The impressive anti-genocide commencement speech by George Washington University student Cecelia Culver has received significant media coverage. She is now shamefully being investigated by the university. Similarly, New York University student Logan Rozos condemned the Gaza genocide in his commencement speech, and the university is withholding his diploma. Both students, along with other students similarly persecuted for speaking out for an end to the horrors in Gaza, deserve support and solidarity.

Reprising and expanding an effort from last year, New Hampshire peace activist Bob Sanders is conducting a cross-country bike ride to raise awareness of the dire situation in Gaza.

Veterans for Peace and other allies are supporting a 40-day fast for Peace in Gaza.

Groups in Philadelphia will hold a People's War Crimes Tribunal on May 31, building on the difficult but necessary advocacy aimed at Sen. Fetterman.

Lastly, Do Not Turn on Us is a new initiative calling on military and National Guard personnel to refuse unlawful, fascist orders. While more aimed at stopping fascism in the United States, it certainly is a contribution to the overall movement to establish peace, human rights, and the rule of law, domestically and internationally.

Will any of these efforts, along with many others, overcome powerful political forces that perpetuate genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid against the Palestinian people? No one can know for sure, but all are worthy of support and persistence. As Ms. Culver stated, none of us are free until Palestine is free.