Absent federal action, states and localities have expanded workers’ ability to earn paid sick leave to care for themselves and their families. The results of these efforts over the past dozen years are clear: There have been significant gains in access to paid sick time among private-sector workers. The latest data released Thursday morning from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that these trends continued into 2024: 79% of private-sector workers have the ability to earn paid sick leave, an increase from 63% in 2012.

While these gains are welcome news for millions of working families, access to paid sick leave remains vastly unequal. As shown in the graph below, higher-wage workers have greater access to paid sick days than lower-wage workers. Among the 25% of private-sector workers with the highest wages, 94% have access to paid sick days. By contrast, among the 25% of workers with the lowest wages, only 58% have access to paid sick days. Prior releases have shown that the bottom 10% fare even worse, with only 39% having access to paid sick days in 2023 (though their access has improved, likely from state action).

This unequal access to paid sick days is particularly troubling since low-wage workers are least able to absorb lost wages when they or their family members are sick. Workers may have trouble paying for housing, food, health care, and other necessities (see Table 1 of this report).

While federal inaction on paid sick days continues to erode families’ economic security and needlessly spread illness, cities and states are stepping up for working people and serving as models for jurisdictions throughout the country. Minnesota is the latest example of states granting workers the ability to earn paid sick time in 2024. Measures to provide paid sick time are also on the ballots this November in Nebraska, Missouri, and Alaska.

Given variation in state laws, it’s no surprise that there are significant differences in access to paid sick time across the country, as shown below.

The share with access to paid sick days ranges from only 64% in the East South Central states (Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Tennessee) and 65% in the West South Central (Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas) up to 95% in the Pacific states (California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, and Alaska). Notably, many state governments in the East South Central and West South Central Census divisions have passed preemption laws prohibiting local municipalities from passing paid leave and sick day policies.

There is also huge variation in access to paid sick days across the private sector. Full-time workers are much more likely to have paid sick days than part-time workers (87% versus 55%). Unionized workers have greater access to paid sick days than nonunion workers (84% versus 79%).

Fortunately, there is a relatively simple way to address some of these inequities: The federal government can pass legislation to mandate paid sick leave for all workers. Paid sick leave not only helps reduce transmission of disease, it also provides economic security for workers who might otherwise lose income if they have to take time off from work.

The numbers are clear. The temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in November last year resulted in the release of 109 hostages. Compare that to Israeli military operations, which have managed to rescue 8 hostages while killing three by accident. The military has also recovered the bodies of another 34 hostages, including six killed shortly before the Israelis made it to the underground tunnel where they were being held. Meanwhile, 33 hostages are presumed dead.

By the most conservative accounting, ceasefire tactics have been more effective than military tactics by a factor of 10 in saving Israeli lives.

In starting this most recent war in Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu no doubt was remembering his brother, who led the daring rescue of hijacked passengers at the Entebbe airport in 1976 (and died in the process). Now the younger Netanyahu was facing his own hostage crisis. He decided, like his brother, to pursue force. He entertained fantasies of destroying Hamas, saving the 251 people kidnapped on October 7, and salvaging his own dismal political reputation.

It hasn’t worked out quite that way. The war hasn’t eliminated Hamas, and even the Israeli military cautions that this isn’t possible. The Israeli military has been spectacularly unsuccessful—and in some cases unforgivably negligent—in freeing hostages. Speaking of unforgivable, Israeli forces have also killed nearly 42,000 Palestinians in Gaza. The Netanyahu government has escalated its policy of expulsion in the West Bank and is now poised to go to war with Hezbollah in Lebanon. The recent coordinated explosions of the pagers that the Iran-backed militia purchased to avoid Israeli surveillance, followed by a second set of explosions involving walkie-talkies, could well be the starting gun for the war.

Despite (or perhaps because of) these horrors, Netanyahu is making a political comeback. Although his coalition would lose against the opposition if an election were held today, the prime minister’s Likud Party remains by a thin margin the most popular party in Israel today.

In other words, Netanyahu has some reason to believe that he has a winning strategy: talk tough, be tough, hang tough. He thinks that he can safely ignore the pleas of the hostages’ families, the demands of the demonstrators on the street, and the advice of his own military advisors—not to mention anything that the U.S. government has said. The Israeli prime minister has dismissed evidence that the failures of his own intelligence agencies played a role in the events of October 7. As long as he visits punishment upon Israel’s enemies—Palestinians, Hezbollah in Lebanon, selected targets in Iran—he can secure the support of the Israeli far right and continue to present himself as his country’s savior.

As such, Netanyahu believes that he has two more enemies to fight against: compromise and ceasefire.

Thus, each time Israeli and Palestinian negotiators seem close to a negotiated ceasefire, Netanyahu has pulled the rug out from underneath them. So, for instance, Hamas withdrew its initial insistence on Israel committing to a permanent ceasefire from the beginning. As for the withdrawal of all Israeli forces from Gaza, another key element of the three-part plan put forward by the Biden administration, Netanyahu is now insisting that Israel retain control of the Philadelphi corridor, the section of Gaza that borders Egypt, in order to interdict any potential weapons shipments to Hamas.

This apparently non-negotiable demand from Netanyahu does not reflect any real consideration of Israeli security needs. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, not exactly the most pro-Palestinian voice in journalism, points out that the Israeli military did not consider this supposedly indispensable corridor

important enough to even occupy for the first seven months of the war. Israeli generals have consistently told Netanyahu there are many alternative effective means for controlling the corridor now and that supporting Israeli troops marooned out there would be difficult and dangerous. And they could retake it any time they need. Staying there is already causing huge problems with the Egyptians, too.

Netanyahu’s own defense minister, Yoav Gallant, has reportedly said that “the fact that we prioritize the Philadelphi Corridor at the cost of the lives of the hostages is a moral disgrace.”

So, if his own defense minister can’t change Netanyahu’s mind, what can be done to dislodge the prime miniester from his unyielding position?

Cutting Off the Arms Supply

Since the Labour Party took over in the United Kingdom in July, it has made three consequential decisions related to Israel/Palestine. First, it resumed funding for the UN agency that aids Palestinian refugees. Next, it reversed the Tory decision to challenge the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Netanyahu.

And, at the beginning of September, it blocked a certain number of arms sales to Israel. Not surprisingly, Netanyahu condemned the decision as “shameful” and “misguided.”

In fact, the UK’s move was both tepid and not hugely important. The decision affected only 30 out of 350 export licenses. And Britain supplies just 1 percent of Israeli imports.

Netanyahu wasn’t worried so much about the UK weapons per se but rather the domino effect the decision might have on the three biggest suppliers of the Israeli military. Between 2013 and 2023, the United States provided around 65 percent of the country’s military imports, Germany roughly 30 percent, and Italy a bit under 5 percent.

Italy claims that it has basically stopped arms exports, only honoring existing contracts if they don’t involve the use of those weapons against civilians (no one really knows how the Italians are making this determination). German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has made a great show of pledging military support for Israel, but the country’s Federal Security Council has effectively stopped providing the promised assistance. “Ultimately, the growing concerns [against Israel] are the reason why fewer approvals are being granted, even if no one wants to say it out loud,” an employee of a representative on the Federal Security Council told The Jerusalem Post.

Which leaves the United States. The Biden administration announced $20 billion in weapons sales to Israel in mid-August, after ordering a pause in deliveries of heavy bombs (subsequently reversed) and threatening to cancel shipments if Israel invaded Rafah (it did and the U.S. did nothing).

The weapons that the United States delivers to Israel are its only real leverage over the Netanyahu government. It could be argued that this doesn’t amount to much leverage, particularly when Israel isn’t asking for as much these days. Also, Israel has its own military-industrial complex and can produce a lot of what it uses. Still, the nearly $4 billion that the United States sends Israel every year is a significant chunk of the Israeli military budget ($27 billion and rising). And that should translate into political capital that an American administration could use to influence Israeli policy.

But Biden did not condition aid on Netanyahu signing a ceasefire deal. Talk about a non-transactional president!

Lest anyone imagine that Donald Trump would do any different if he returned to the White House, the infamously transactional candidate suspended that particular aspect of his character when dealing with Israel. During his four years in office, he gave Israel everything it wanted and got nothing in return (other than the adulation of Netanyahu and the Israeli far right).

What Can Be Done?

Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza has generated considerable international condemnation. The UN’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, ruled in July that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory is illegal and must end. The International Criminal Court, meanwhile, has issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu (along with Defense Minister Gallant and three Hamas leaders, two of whom have already been killed).

The UN Security Council has approved several ceasefire resolutions, including one that called for a Ramadan pause, which was ignored. In June, the Security Council passed a resolution introduced by the United States that supports (not surprisingly) the three-part ceasefire plan devised by the Biden administration. Netanyahu has so far ignored this one as well.

Plenty of countries have registered their protests against Israel in other forms. Several European countries—Norway, Ireland, Spain, and Slovenia—recently went ahead and recognized an independent Palestinian state. They join 143 other countries around the world that had already made that decision.

Turkey has executed an about-face from being a key Israeli trade partner to a leader of the economic boycott of the country. Now, Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan is threatening to assemble a Sunni coalition, along with Egypt, in support of the Palestinians.

People around the world have voted with their feet by joining protests. In the days following the October 7 attack and the start of the war in Gaza, there were thousands of pro-Palestinian gatherings in dozens of countries. Demonstrations spread on campuses, particularly in the United States and Europe but also in Australia and India.

Meanwhile, in Israel, sentiment has shifted. A week ago, half a million people thronged the streets of Tel Aviv, with 250,000 rallying in other Israeli cities, demanding an immediate ceasefire. The overriding issue in Israel is the release of the remaining hostages. Interestingly, polling for the first time shows that a majority of Gazans now believe that the Hamas attack on October 7 was a mistake. This is a marked reversal since the early days of the war, when both Israelis and Palestinians were convinced that the military actions of their political representatives were correct.

So, at this point, it’s not a question of persuading the people of Israel and Palestine of the importance of negotiations or the need for a ceasefire. The machinery of international law has been mobilized to put pressure on the Israeli government. The country most committed to Israel’s military defense, the United States, has also been pushing for a ceasefire.

The problem is that the Biden administration has not used its most powerful levers of influence—the flow of cash and armaments to Israel—to persuade Netanyahu to bend. The Israeli leader and his right-wing allies listen to the American voices they want to hear—the Republican Party, AIPAC—and ignore what they consider to be a lame-duck administration. Netanyahu would no doubt prefer Donald Trump to win in November. But even if Kamala Harris wins, he doesn’t worry that the Democrats will make any significant changes in U.S. policy, especially if the Republicans manage to win the Senate.

If anything, Netanyahu is moving even further away from compromise. Israel has ramped up operations in the West Bank in the furtherance of its campaign of ethnic cleansing. The Israeli army is preparing for a sustained military campaign against Hezbollah, which is now mulling a response to the two recent waves of bomb attacks—pagers, walkie-talkies—that were the result of an Israeli operation to insert explosive devices in the devices somewhere along the supply chain.

According to the most pessimistic analysis, Israel will eventually settle for a ceasefire in Gaza in order to turn its attention more fully to the West Bank and Hezbollah. Achieving a ceasefire and a hostage deal would also remove the chief obstacle to a national unity government that would give Netanyahu the political cover for these expanded operations.

So, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza is necessary but not sufficient. The Biden administration must attach strings to Israeli aid related to the country’s overall policies of expulsion. Time is running out. Biden must back Palestinian demands for political autonomy before Israel has occupied all Palestinian land. He must push for regional negotiations that address the essential conflict between Israel and Iran that lies behind the dispute with Hezbollah.

It’s not likely that the administration will push anything so ambitious before the election. But when Biden enters his lame-duck period, he will have one last chance to back a ceasefire-plus scenario. He can even shoehorn this effort into the “Abrahamic Accords,” the Trump-era initiative to negotiate the Arab world’s recognition of Israel.

On November 6, regardless of who wins the election on the day before, Biden needs to withdraw all his political capital from the bank and spend it in the Middle East. Netanyahu and his far-right allies are a threat to Israel, to Palestine, to the entire region. Biden gave an enormous gift to the United States when he stepped aside as a presidential candidate. In his lame-duck session after the election, he can make one final, legacy-making gift by applying just the right combination of carrots and sticks to contain Netanyahu and end the horrors in and around Israel/Palestine.

A Florida resident named Isaac Menasche received a home visit this September from a police officer asking whether he’d signed a petition for a ballot measure.

The petition, which Menasche had indeed signed, was for a November initiative overturning a strict abortion ban that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed last year. Now the governor is attempting to discredit those signatures using state-funded cops. According to the Tampa Bay Times, state law enforcement officers have visited the homes of other signers as well.

DeSantis created an elections police unit in 2022 to investigate so-called election crimes. By that August, he’d arrested 20 “elections criminals” for allegedly voting improperly in the 2020 election.

If their rhetoric weren’t so dangerous, it would be funny that Trump is a felon and Musk is an immigrant.

A majority of those arrested—some at gunpoint—were Black. Most had been formerly incarcerated and thought they were eligible to vote, since Floridians had overwhelmingly passed a ballot measure restoring their voting rights. But DeSantis and his GOP allies in the state legislature used every maneuver they could to thwart that popular decision.

If anyone is breaking voting laws intentionally in Florida and elsewhere, it’s white conservatives who’ve been caught engaging in deliberate voter fraud numerous times, including attempting to vote multiple times and voting under the names of their dead spouses.

Further, given that voter intimidation is patently illegal, DeSantis is clearly the one flouting laws.

DeSantis’ fellow Republican, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, is on a similar crusade. He recently authorized police raids on the homes of people associated with a Latino civil rights group called the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), including grandparents in their 70s and 80s.

Like DeSantis, Paxton has been aggressively prosecuting voters of color based on little to no evidence of nefarious intent. The most egregious example is the conviction and harsh sentencing of a Black voter named Crystal Mason. Mason spent six years fighting her case and was acquitted last May because of a lack of evidence.

Bruce Zuchowski, a Republican county sheriff in Ohio, called on supporters to “write down all the addresses of the people who had [Kamala Harris] signs in their yards” so they can be forced to take in migrants—whom he called, in a garbled Facebook post, “human locusts.” Local residents say they feel intimidated.

It’s not just government officials. The extremist Heritage Foundation sent staffers to the homes of Georgia residents thought to be immigrants, in an effort to find voter fraud where none existed. (This is the same behind Project 2025, a playbook for a future Republican president promising the dystopian destruction of federally funded programs.)

And of course, the loudest and most bizarre conspiracy theories come from former U.S. President Donald Trump, who invokes non-existent fraud to explain why he lost the 2020 election. His billionaire backer Elon Musk has added fuel to the fire by amplifying these false claims.

If their rhetoric weren’t so dangerous, it would be funny that Trump is a felon and Musk is an immigrant.

There’s a long and disturbing history of voter suppression aimed at communities of color, from poll taxes to lynchings. Although the 1965 Voting Rights Act was aimed at preventing such race-based suppression, right-wing justices on the Supreme Court gutted parts of the law, opening the door to systematic disenfranchisement and intimidation.

Numerous investigations of voter fraud claims have repeatedly been found to be utterly baseless. So why do Republicans make them?

As a federal judge in Florida concluded, “For the past 20 years, the majority in the Florida Legislature has attacked the voting rights of its Black constituents. They have done so… as part of a cynical effort to suppress turnout.” And that’s precisely the point.

There are strict laws in place against voter intimidation. And while the Biden administration is ready to enforce them with a small army of lawyers, it’s critical that voters know their own rights and ask for help if they believe their right to vote is under threat.

Although the Michigan Republican Party experienced a severe cash shortage under ex-chair Kristina Karamo, that appears to have been solved for the time being. Karamo was removed as chair this year due to her poor fundraising ability. With current chair Pete Hoekstra, the state GOP found the money to begin flooding inboxes with campaign mailers.

Some houses in my neighborhood in Hazel Park received six pieces of campaign mail or more per week. Most of these mailers contain the standard accusations, that Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is “failed, weak, and dangerously liberal.” Some showcase the logo of a political advocacy group called FAIR and a report from the Center for Immigration Studies, both anti-immigration groups with Michigan connections and ties to white nationalists.

FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform) is quoted on these mailers alleging “Harris Hints Big Amnesty Bill on the Way.” The mailer summarizes an argument from the FAIR-affiliated think tank the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) that amnesty for undocumented immigrants “would cost Social Security $1.3 trillion, destroying benefits for American seniors.” Part of this cost would come from immigrants who had been paying into the system through payroll taxes suddenly receiving citizenship. The CIS admits that many undocumented immigrants “are currently paying into the system without accruing any benefits in return...” Many publications have criticized the center’s methodologies and conclusions in previous reports, such as Snopes, Factcheck.org, and NBC News. Wired ran an article classifying the group as a “fake think tank.”

Putting out mailers with two hate groups prominently cited is a clear example of dogwhistle politics.

FAIR was founded by a Petoskey ophthalmologist named John Tanton in 1979, who also co-founded CIS in 1985. He had been active in the environmentalist group the Sierra Club, but shifted his focus to restricting immigration. Tanton, who died in 2019, promoted eugenics—the idea that the human race could and should be perfected through selected breeding and sterilization. While some anti-immigrant activists couch their arguments in terms of economics or nation security, Tanton made his arguments explicitly in terms of race. He was against immigration from non-white countries and was quoted in The New York Times to that effect. “One of my prime concerns,” he explained, “is about the decline of folks who look like you and me... for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”

That emphasis on racial opposition to immigration at FAIR and CIS was not unique to Tanton. Dan Stein, the current head of FAIR, defends the 1924 Immigration Act, a piece of legislation enthusiastically supported by the Ku Klux Klan. Stein argues that the replacement of that law by the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act was done as a way to “retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance and hubris…” Stein would prefer an immigration system modeled on the 1924 act, one that explicitly favored not just whites, but Anglo-Saxon ones at that.

The CIS, which is also on the advisory board of the Donald Trump-affiliated Project 2025, has recommended notable bigots to supporters. In its weekly listerv, it has promoted Holocaust deniers, Islamophobes, and white nationalists. Both FAIR and CIS are listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as anti-immigrant “hate groups.” When an offended CIS filed suit against the law center over this designation, the lawsuit was dismissed.

The inclusion of FAIR and CIS on campaign mailers comes at an awkward time for Michigan Republicans, who have been trying to make inroads with Arab, Black, and Hispanic voters. They are trying to balance appeals to those groups with a commitment to their base, who are overwhelmingly white. Putting out mailers with two hate groups prominently cited is a clear example of dogwhistle politics. Most will think nothing of the presence of the two groups, but anyone with ears properly attuned will get the message.

Never in its history of war, and military occupation has Israel been so incapable of developing a coherent plan for its future, and the future of its victims.

Even a quick glance at headlines in international media reveals the depth of the Israeli dilemma. While Tel Aviv continues to carry out a genocidal war against the Palestinian people in Gaza, it seems to have no idea what to do beyond simply destroying the Strip and its people.

Even the country's Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, who could soon be officially wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC), indicated on multiple occasions that Israel has no post-war plan in Gaza.

"Since October, I have been raising this issue consistently in the Cabinet, and have received no response," Gallant said in the clearest possible language last May.

Others suggest that Netanyahu and his far-right government might have a plan but, in the language of the Washington Post, it is a 'no workable plan' or, according to Vox, "is no plan at all."

Netanyahu's 'not workable' plan, or ‘no plan’ at all, is inconsistent with the wishes of the U.S. administration.

True, both Israel and the U.S. are in full agreement regarding the war itself. Even after Washington had finally begun shifting its position from wanting the war to continue, to asking Netanyahu to conclude his bloody task, American weapons have continued to flow at the same rate.

The Americans, however, are not convinced that destroying Hamas, fully demilitarizing Gaza, taking control over the Gaza-Egypt border, shutting down the UNRWA refugees’ agency and the 'de-radicalization' of the besieged Palestinian population is the right approach.

But Netanyahu himself must have already known this, if not at the very start of the war, at least nearly a year into the genocide. His exhausted army kept moving from one phase to another, declaring 'tactical victories,' without achieving a single strategic goal in Gaza.

The most optimistic estimation of the Israeli army is that their war, which has practically destroyed all of Gaza, has resulted in a stalemate. A more sober reading of the war, according to former Israeli Prime Minister General Ehud Barak, is that Israel must end it before “sinking into its moral abyss.”

Yet, more delusional plans, pertaining to both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, continue to be leaked to the media.

The first major leak was a taped recording of a speech by extremist and very influential Israeli minister in Netanyahu's cabinet, Bezalel Smotrich.

"I am telling, it is mega-dramatic. Such changes change a system's DNA," Smotrich told a group of Israeli Jewish settlers last June, according to the New York Times.

The minister's "carefully orchestrated program" hinges on transferring the authority of the West Bank from the occupation army to a group of civilians under the leadership of Smotrich himself. The goal is to seize more Palestinian land, expand the illegal settlements, and prevent any possible continuity of a viable Palestinian State.

In fact, the plan is already underway. On May 29, Israel appointed Hillel Roth, a close ally of Smotrich, as the deputy in the West Bank Civil Administration.

The plan for Gaza is another episode of cruelty, but also delusional. It was revealed in an article by the editor of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, on September 9.

Aluf Benn wrote that Netanyahu's plan also consists of the hiring of an Israeli ‘governor of Gaza,’ Brigadier General Elad Goren, who became the ‘Head of Humanitarian-Civilian effort’ in the Strip on August 28.

Using a combination of tactics, including starvation, military pressure and the like, Netanyahu wants to drive the population of northern Gaza to the south in preparation of formally annexing the region and bringing back Jewish settlers.

These are not the only plans that have been leaked or, at times, communicated openly by Israeli officials.

At the start of the war, such ideas as ethnically cleansing the Gaza population into Sinai were advocated openly by Israeli officials, and were also the main topic of discussion in Israeli evening news programs.

Some Israeli officials spoke of fully occupying Gaza, while others, like Israel’s Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, floated the idea of dropping a nuclear bomb.

The plan of totally evacuating Gaza did not work simply because Palestinians would not leave, and Egypt had rejected the very insinuation that ethnically cleansing Gazans was an option. Additionally, the total depopulation of northern Gaza also did not work, partly because Israel was massacring civilians in both north and south at comparable rates.

Israel’s new plans will not succeed in achieving what the original plans have failed to achieve, simply because Israel continues to face the same obstacle: the steadfastness of the Palestinian people.

However, much can still be learned from the nature of the Israeli schemes, old and new, mainly the fact that Israel regards the Palestinian people as the enemy.

This conclusion is not only gleaned through statements by top Israeli officials, including President Isaac Herzog himself, when he said that “an entire nation out there (..) is responsible.”

Almost every Israeli scheme seems to involve killing Palestinians in large numbers, starving them or displacing them en masse.

This means that the Israeli war has always been a war against the Palestinian people. The Palestinians themselves know it. Shouldn’t the rest of the world also know it by now?

Democrats say they are defending democracy against the Republicans. The United States says it’s a model democracy. How to explain the rise of Kamala Harris? So unpopular in 2020 that she had to drop out before the first primary, she was appointed by her senile predecessor, who then stepped aside in a classic bait and switch after he nailed down the nomination and then handed it to her. Some democracy.

The post What Kind of Democracy Is This? first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The massive unfolding attack in Lebanon targeting personal electronics belonging to members of Hezbollah, which has so far killed at least 20 people and wounded roughly 3,000, is already beyond doubt Israel’s work. The attack that began on Tuesday has continued into a second day, with more reports of other personal communication devices exploding, killing at least nine people and injuring dozens of others at a funeral on Wednesday for people who had been killed in the first attack the day prior.

The ongoing attack, which can only be described as terrorist in nature, is unprecedented in its scope and method, but the nature of its indiscriminate attack is far from unique for Israel. In fact, Israel’s doctrine of inflicting massive harm to civilians is named after the area of Beirut, Dahiya, where this very attack was centered. The most recent development marks a shocking advancement in Israel’s wholesale disregard for human life but it is not new, even if you would never learn that from reading the Western press.

Western Media Spin

The New York Times team of Patrick Kingsley, Euan Ward, Ronen Bergman, and Michael Levenson covered the attack, and while they did name Israel as the culprit, it worked to include Israel’s blatantly false PR angle that it was a targeted attack.

The Times reported:

According to American and other officials briefed on the attack, Israel hid explosive material in a shipment of Taiwanese-made pagers imported into Lebanon. The explosive material, as little as one or two ounces, was inserted next to the battery in each pager, two of the officials said. The pagers, which Hezbollah had ordered from the Gold Apollo company in Taiwan, had been tampered with before they reached Lebanon, according to some of the officials. According to one official, Israel calculated that the risk of harming people not affiliated with Hezbollah was low, given the size of the explosive.

The Times also wrote that “the blasts appeared to be the latest salvo in a conflict between Israel and Hezbollah that escalated after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7,” giving this an aura of mere military activity, rather than a blatantly imprecise and deadly attack on a civilian population. American whistleblower Edward Snowden, cited on this site yesterday, correctly summarized the focus and impact of the attack:

What Israel has just done is, via *any* method, reckless. They blew up countless numbers of people who were driving (meaning cars out of control), shopping (your children are in the stroller standing behind him in the checkout line), et cetera. Indistinguishable from terrorism.

Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst Marwan Bishara provided a reality check, perhaps most pertinent for Western audiences:

For our viewers around the world, it is probably helpful to do some “role-play” here. Imagine if 1,200 people, active in the Pentagon, State Dept. and CIA, had pagers explode in their faces, arms, and abdominals. How would you think the U.S. would feel about that?

The Times notes Israel’s “long history of using technology to carry out covert operations against Iran and Iranian-backed groups” as if it were some impressive technological achievement. But really, in order to understand what Israel is doing here, we must look at its track record of indiscriminate attacks. And this is, in fact, not only historically relevant but strategically and geographically relevant as well.

The Path From Indiscriminate Attacks to Genocide

The name of the Dahiya Doctrine stems from the Dahiya quarter of Beirut that Israel targeted and leveled during the 2006 war, a quarter where many families affiliated with Hezbollah lived. In 2008, then military Chief of Northern Command Gadi Eisenkot (later chief of staff and centrist minister), coined the doctrine and outlined “what will happen” to any enemy that dares attack Israel:

What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on… We will apply disproportionate force on [the village] and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.

Israel applied this method already in its 2008-9 Gaza onslaught. The United Nations “Goldstone Report” of 2009 concluded that Israel had conducted a “deliberately disproportionate attack, designed to punish, humiliate, and terrorize a civilian population,” and noted that the Dahiya Doctrine “appears to have been precisely what was put into practice.” Just to reiterate: “Punish, humiliate, and terrorize.” That last word, “terrorize,” should give us all pause, especially in this particular context.

The recent Gaza onslaught has in its way been the implementation of this doctrine into full-blown genocide. This is not surprising, since the vein of deliberate harm to civilians as a logic of “warfare” has been in the DNA of this doctrine to begin with.

So now, Israel is blowing up pagers. The prospect of this being called an act of terror by Western media appears to be very low. That is still considered a radical notion, when it comes to Israel because terror is a political term that is only reserved for enemies of the West. For the readers of The New York Times, it is just a “latest salvo” and not a reflection on the nature of Israel itself.

Is Trump Lying or Just Losing It?

Trump is now the oldest presidential candidate ever nominated by a major party.

I’m not a young man, but I’m a little younger than Trump — and hopefully doing better in the noggin!

Trump has confused President Biden with Obama so many times, he had to put a statement claiming it was intentional.

He confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi.

Before picking him as his running mate, he called JD Vance “JD Mandel.”

During recent legal proceedings, Trump was unable to distinguish E. Jean Caroll — the woman a jury conclude he raped — from his ex-wife Marla Maples.

Trump rambles about windmills killing whales, and whether it’s better to be electrocuted or eaten by a shark. He used his convention speech to praise Hannibal Lecter! What?

If your father or grandfather behaved like Trump, you would be taking away the car keys, not handing him the nuclear codes.

And Trump still insists the 2020 election was “stolen” by a vast conspiracy, even though his own lawyers, his Justice Department, and his attorney general told him it wasn’t true. Is Trump lying? Or does he simply have no grasp of reality?

Trump has a family history of dementia. And the most telling evidence that he may be succumbing to it is his paranoid thirst for revenge, on which he is centering his entire campaign.

Before President Biden ended his campaign, the media were obsessed with questioning his physical and mental fitness — and not without reason. When will they focus on Trump’s age and mental decline with the same fervor?

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Wednesday announced that the Federal Open Market Committee is lowering the federal funds rate by 50 basis points, yielding an effective rate of 4.88%. Finally. The Fed should have provided interest rate relief months ago. While this overdue move is welcome, we must reiterate that Powell’s deferral of interest rate cuts has hurt the clean energy transition and inflicted other economic harms.

I wrote at length about this problem in January 2024:

It has become ever more apparent over time that rising interest rates are hampering efforts to decarbonize energy supplies and electrify transportation, housing, and other key sectors. High interest rates have had the dual effect of rolling back productive investment and lowering consumer demand, causing substantial drops in the stocks of major solar, wind, and other renewables-based companies; undermining the deployment of offshore wind projects; delaying the construction of electric vehicle (EV) factories; and slowing the installation of heat pumps.

In effect, Powell is exercising veto power over the Inflation Reduction Act and ruining “the economics of clean energy,” as David Dayen explained recently in The [American] Prospect. President Biden’s signature climate legislation contains hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies for green industrialization, but repeated interest rate hikes have driven up financing costs enough to outweigh them. As Dayen noted, this is especially the case because the law’s reliance on tax credits requires upfront investment decisions.

Last month, Dominik Leusder explained why rate hikes have been particularly destructive for the green transition. Leusder drew attention to the capital-intensive nature of renewable power projects, which “tend to trade lower operating costs (the input into wind farms and solar plants is ‘free’) against higher (in relative terms) up-front costs.” As he noted:

By one estimate, 70% of the expenditure for an offshore wind farm derives from capital costs, compared to 20% with a gas turbine plant. This means that the vast majority of IRA-related projects require a lot of debt-financed spending up front. As the cost of the debt increases with higher interest rates, so does the levelized cost of energy (LCOE), a measure of the average cost of producing a unit of energy (kilowatt- or megawatt-hour) over the lifetime of the plant. And it does to a greater degree with renewables, the swift adoption of which is premised on them being cheap and profitable for investors.

As a result, a lot of the much-needed expansion in renewables capacity and storage—which is highly time-sensitive given the escalating effects of the climate crisis—is offset until borrowing costs adjust to the point where new projects become viable. What is more, while rates are high, the larger and better capitalized firms can gain a higher market share. Their deeper balance sheets also make it easier to accept higher borrowing costs now in the hope of refinancing these loans at lower rates later. The concentration of market power in the renewables sector would have all the usual implications for consumer welfare and innovation, the latter being seen as key to the energy transition.

His essay goes on to detail the devastating global impacts of the Fed’s monetary austerity, which hits developing countries especially hard, and is worth reading in full. At home, Powell’s maintenance of a higher-for-longer interest rate environment has also exacerbated the housing affordability crisis.

Ironically, raising the cost of borrowing did little to alleviate inflation (the stated reason for the rate hikes). This should come as no surprise. The cost-of-living crisis of 2021 to 2024 wasn’t the result of a wage-price spiral of the kind that neoliberal economists like Larry Summers and Jason Furman said can only be contained through demand destruction (i.e., engineering higher unemployment). Instead, as I wrote earlier this year:

[I]t was fueled by sellers’ inflation, or corporate profiteering, and exacerbated by the elimination of the pandemic-era welfare state. When the onset of Covid-19 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine upended international supply chains—rendered fragile through decades of neoliberal globalization—corporations bolstered by preceding rounds of consolidation capitalized on both crises to justify price hikes that outpaced the increased costs of doing business. That safety-net measures enacted in the wake of the coronavirus crisis were allowed to expire only made the situation worse.

Given that the recent bout of inflation “is inseparable from preexisting patterns of market concentration, progressives have argued against job-threatening rate hikes… and for a more relevant mix of policies, including a windfall profits tax, stronger antitrust enforcement, and temporary price controls,” I pointed out. “Unlike the blunt instrument that Powell has been wielding ineffectively, those tailored solutions—the last two of which are within the Biden administration’s ambit—have the potential to dilute the power of price-gouging corporations without hurting workers.”

It’s noteworthy that during Powell’s August 2024 speech at the annual gathering of central bankers in Jackson Hole—where he signaled Wednesday’s pivot on monetary policy—the Fed chair excluded any mention of how the consolidation of corporate power contributed to rising prices in his explanation of the latest inflationary period.

This is significant because the Fed’s traditional inflation-fighting tool (i.e., raising interest rates to increase unemployment until demand and prices decrease) is ill-suited to confront our worsening polycrisis. It couldn’t effectively combat the supply shocks and corporate profiteering underlying the 2021-2024 cost-of-living crisis (disinflation occurred without mass joblessness despite Powell’s actions, not because of them). It also cannot solve cost-of-living struggles stemming from the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis.

The Roosevelt Institute’s Kristina Karlsson and Lauren Melodia showed in a 2022 paper that besides warming the planet, fossil fuel-based energy systems are inherently price volatile and a significant driver of inflation. The upshot is that shifting from coal, oil, and gas to renewables can permanently lessen inflationary pressures. Dovish monetary policy can help propel investment in wind, solar, and other green power sources.

NEWS RELEASE FOR RELEASE THURSDAY, September 19, 2024, 11:00 AM FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT: Michael Swerdlow or Ralph Nader, 202-387-8030 or info@csrl.org New Report Reveals Corporate Capture in NPR and Local Stations Report Calls for New Approach to Public Media to Ensure Stable Public Funding and Community Representation  The Center for Study of Responsive Law…

Note: At the conclusion of our historic sit-in at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, we at the Uncommitted National Movement asked Vice President Harris to respond by September 15 to requests to meet with Palestinian American families in Michigan who lost loved ones to U.S.-supplied bombs in Gaza and to discuss their demands for halting arms to Israel and securing a permanent ceasefire. In response to the campaign’s failure to address these requests, Uncommitted National Movement leaders released the following statement on Thursday, Sept. 19, 2024.

The Uncommitted National Movement was born out of historic anti-war organizing by people across our country witnessing a genocide unfold in Gaza against Palestinians whose humanity we recognize as no different than our own. We came together, first in Michigan, and then in state after state to insist that even through our pain and grief, we must organize to save lives, advance policies that build rather than destroy, and create a future where not another bomb from our country drops on a civilian anywhere in our world. We are proud to have grown our movement, even as our government continues to send bombs that destroy families. Our organizing around the presidential election was never about endorsing a specific candidate; it has always been about building a movement that saves lives.

Our organizing around the presidential election was never about endorsing a specific candidate; it has always been about building a movement that saves lives.

Today, the Uncommitted National Movement announces that as we continue advocating for lifesaving policy change which ends the bombing of Gaza and ends U.S. support for the Israeli military's war crimes, Vice President Harris’s unwillingness to shift on unconditional weapons policy or to even make a clear campaign statement in support of upholding existing U.S. and international human rights law has made it impossible for us to endorse her. At this time, our movement 1) cannot endorse Vice President Harris; 2) opposes a Donald Trump presidency, whose agenda includes plans to accelerate the killing in Gaza while intensifying the suppression of anti-war organizing; and 3) is not recommending a third-party vote in the Presidential election, especially as third party votes in key swing states could help inadvertently deliver a Trump presidency given our country’s broken electoral college system.

For months, we have urged Vice President Harris to shift her Gaza policy so we could mobilize voters in key states to save lives and our democracy. The DNC and the Vice President’s campaign fumbled even a small gesture to unite our party ahead of November by rejecting the simple request for a Palestinian American speaker. Now, the Vice President’s campaign is courting Dick Cheney while sidelining disillusioned anti-war voices, pushing them to consider third-party options or to sit this important election out.

The Uncommitted movement began in Michigan with 1.5 million voter contacts in three weeks, delivering 101,000 anti-war votes and was one of the first organized efforts to spotlight Biden’s electability issues. Nationally, we grew to 740,000 pro-peace voters, securing a historic 30 delegates to the DNC. Since then, we’ve expanded to over 300 “Ceasefire Delegates”—Harris supporters who have joined our fight to end Democratic Party leadership’s policy of backing bombs. Their efforts have been supported by our Not Another Bomb campaign, which has brought together dozens of organizations and mobilized over 100,000 people in 35 states nationwide.

We must block Donald Trump, which is why we urge Uncommitted voters to vote against him and avoid third-party candidates that could inadvertently boost his chances, as Trump openly boasts that third parties will help his candidacy.

In our assessment, our movement’s best hope for change lies in growing our anti-war organizing power, and that power would be severely undermined by a Trump administration. Seventy-seven percent of Democrats and 61% of Americans oppose weapons aid for Israel's assault on Gaza, which is preventing a ceasefire and blocking the reunification of Palestinian and Israeli captives with their families. Trump himself has bragged about accelerating the genocide against Palestinians and promised to intensify the suppression of pro-Palestinian activism in the U.S. We must block Donald Trump, which is why we urge Uncommitted voters to vote against him and avoid third-party candidates that could inadvertently boost his chances, as Trump openly boasts that third parties will help his candidacy.

We urge Uncommitted voters to register anti-Trump votes and vote up and down the ballot. Our focus remains on building a broad anti-war coalition both inside and outside the Democratic Party. Pro-war forces like AIPAC may want to drive us out of the Democratic Party, but we’re here to stay. Movements have long worked to rid the Democratic Party of hateful forces—segregationists, anti-union, anti-choice, and anti-LGBTQ proponents, the NRA, and Big Oil—and we will work in that legacy to rid our party of AIPAC’s pro-war extremism.

Building on the work of ‘Uncommitted,’ we invite stakeholders in the Democratic Party coalition—progressives, civil rights, labor, racial justice, reproductive rights, climate, immigrant rights, disability justice, people of faith, young people and more—to join us in our campaign to push our Democratic Party leadership to align with the majority of Democratic voters who support the urgent call for a stop to illegal and morally reprehensible weapons transfers through our campaign, "Not Another Bomb," both now and in the next administration.

“His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.” —from Profile of Hitler created by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the US intelligence service during WWII.

Imagine if this piece started with this headline: Vance Urged Routh to Purchase AK-47 Used in Trump Assassination Attempt.

If I were a big-time pundit, that libelous headline would make news. But I’m not a big-time pundit and the headline is untrue, but that’s OK according to the logic J.D. Vance has used to justify his lies about the Haitian citizens of Springfield, Ohio. I would be justified in spreading falsehoods, according to Vance, as long as they served a higher calling. In my case, banning assault rifles.

Vance has admitted he is spreading lies about Haitians eating dogs and cats. But he feels righteous in doing so. Here’s how he put it to Dana Bash on CNN:

“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

Vance, however, ignores how he has directly added to the suffering of the people of Springfield, who have faced a series of bomb threats due to his repeated fabrications. That’s apparently justifiable collateral damage in service to a loftier goal, and fellow Republicans officials have been more than willing to follow along. They keep repeating the big lie that Haitian immigrants are eating American pets, claiming it raises the profile of the immigration issue. That, they believe, is a solid justification for spreading the lie.

Creating a Vance-like “Story” About Vance

Let’s concoct a Vance-like lie, I mean “story,” in the name of banning AK-47s. The “story” is about how Vance met Ryan Wesley Routh and encouraged him to purchase his weapon. To give this lie an air of truth we build upon what Vance said after the recent Georgia school shooting by a 14-year-old using a AR-15-style rifle: “Now, look, the Kamala Harris answer to this is to take law-abiding citizens’ guns away from them.” Which is a lie. That isn’t Harris’s position.

To make the story more potent we add two embellishments. First, we put into Vance’s mouth something he might have said, though we have no record of him saying it: “The Constitution gives you the right to own an AK-47, and we will not let the Democrats take that right away from you.”

Secondly, we mix in a bit of “some claim” hearsay, the kind Trump/Vance repeatedly use: “Some claim that when Vance defended the purchase of AK-47s, Routh was in the audience.”

So, one real statement from Vance plus two we made up equals a more powerful “story”—one lie perhaps big enough to take off like a “cat meme.” All in the service of our desire to end gun violence in the United States.

Most of us were brought up to know such fiddling with the truth is utterly immoral. But using Vance’s amoral logic, our made-up “story” of Vance and Routh is justified because we want to protect the American people from gun violence.

Vance, Trump, and McCarthyism

Vance’s shameless lies, and Trump’s too, are deepening the deterioration of American politics that harkens back to Senator Joe McCarthy’s red-baiting crusade. During the 1950s, lies about Communist Party affiliations were used to destroy the livelihoods of political opponents and enhance the political power of the liars.

But take heart, maybe the tide is turning. Bill Maher recently said, “It’s over for Trump. I just think he’s going to lose.” Maher too sees a Trumpian parallel to McCarthy, whose public support eventually collapsed after it became clear his claims about Communist infiltration were lies. But what Maher failed to mention was that McCarthy went down only after he attacked the Army. At that point, the most popular person in America, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, turned on him, as did most of the elite political establishment, including McCarthy’s fellow Republicans.

Today, however, the Republican elites are still sucking up to Trump, which means more Trump/Vance lies will be disgracefully repeated by their Republican sycophants, large and small.

Fortunately, we’re not yet near the dark days of McCarthyism and much further from Nazi Germany. At least until this November. In the meantime, you’ve got to wonder if Trump, Vance, and the Republican elite have memorized the OSS profile of Hitler, or if they conjured it up again on their own.

“The man suspected in the incident... camped outside the golf course in West Palm Beach with food and a rifle for nearly 12 hours, according to court documents filed Monday. He is accused of lying in wait for the former president before a Secret Service agent opened fire, thwarting the potential attack.”

The guy was apparently waiting to assassinate Donald Trump—attempt No. 2 this election season to kill the former president. The would-be alleged assassin was thwarted before he fired a shot, but still...

What the hell?

Mass killings, political assassination attempts or, indeed, any resort to violence, especially when such phenomena start to become “normal,” indicate a social problem that transcends gun availability.

Something is crazy-wrong in the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave. I think it amounts to this (to put it in advertising terms): The kwik-option to make your point—to win the argument—is way too readily available. Hate someone’s politics? Feel ignored? Feel your interests being threatened? There’s a far simpler “solution” available than actually tying to address the issue in the real world: Just kill it!

While I support more stringent gun-control regulations, I have minimal faith in a purely bureaucratic fix to this enormously psycho-spiritual issue. America is the inheritor of the delusion of empire—not just geopolitically but domestically. Our country was born not just in a cry for freedom (for some), but also in slavery and genocidal land theft. This hellish facet of our history hasn’t gone away. Our national belief in violence may hide behind the words on the Statue of Liberty—“Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...,”—but this belief is at the core of who we are and how we act.

Let me put this another way: This is the god we worship.

We have a trillion-dollar annual military budget and—certainly throughout my lifetime—have launched unbelievably horrific wars around the world. We’ve claimed the mantle of global colonialism. We support our “interests” (excuse me, our security and our values) with, as Vice President Kamala Harris put it, “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”

This is how you get cheers: We run things, man. We run the planet. Hurray! My point here is that this attitude spreads—domestically—like a social disease. If you are a stalwart, unskeptical patriot, you have no choice but to worship the god of violence. And maybe, just maybe, you feel the presence of this god not just abstractly, at the level of the national government, but within your own soul. Hold a gun in your hand and suddenly you have the agency of the commander-in-chief. What could happen next is not hard to imagine. Indeed, as we know, it happens all the time.

In other words, mass killings, political assassination attempts or, indeed, any resort to violence, especially when such phenomena start to become “normal,” indicate a social problem that transcends gun availability. For God’s sake, why is this happening? It’s a social problem that is, you might say, spiritual in nature, and must be addressed as such—whatever that means.

At the very least, it means that, as a society—as a species—we need to move seriously beyond our worship of the god of violence, or what theologian and author Walter Wink has called “the myth of redemptive violence.” We need to move beyond our unquestioned assumption that it settles conflict and fixes problems. Talking to one another—negotiating with the enemy, transcending conflict by working to create a world that works for everybody—can be unimaginably complex. It doesn’t make for quick and easy headlines or movie plots.

Indeed, in the real world, violent “solutions” always cause further harm, even if some temporary good is also accomplished. Violent victories come with repression and eventual backlash. But you wouldn’t know this from the myth of redemptive violence, which endlessly portrays violence—well, “good violence”—as consequence free.

As I wrote several years ago:

Strike up the orchestra. Here’s how it plays out: John Wayne, the Ringo Kid, has climbed atop the stagecoach and the Apaches are tearing after them as the music swells. In two minutes of the 1939 John Ford classic Stagecoach, I counted 15 Indians dying, each one flying dramatically off his horse. There are hundreds of them, hooting, armed with rifles, but they never hit anyone. They have almost no impact on the valiant stagecoach, on which four white men return fire at the savages with grim precision. One of them actually has a wry smile on his face, relishing his opportunity to do so. They blast away. Eventually the cavalry shows up and the Indians flee.

Yeah, the myth of redemptive violence is God’s gift to scriptwriters. And worse. It’s God’s pseudo-gift to lost souls who decide that their best hope is to blast all their problems off Planet Earth.

I write these words believing only this: Violence will never fully go away, but national policy must transcend war. All we can do is keep pushing beyond that myth of redemptive violence—toward redemptive connection and understanding.

I end with the words of a 12-year-old boy named Jose, who was in a writing class I convened for a while, many years ago, at a Chicago elementary school. I learned much about the nature of gang life from his words, including the ritual of tossing someone’s shoes over a telephone wire, as a memorial, if he’s shot, if he’s killed.

In a writing exercise, Jose wrote:

One of my friends he got stabbed with a pencil because he was in a gang, but now he isn’t in a gang because he doesn’t want his family to see his shoes dangling from a telephone wire. And he wants to go back and fix all the things he has done wrong and now he never wants to have a relation with a gang member. Now he is in my house to play video games.

America, America: It’s possible to transcend war. It’s possible to stop worshiping the god of violence.

10 Worst Things About The Trump Presidency

Donald Trump left office with the lowest approval rating of any president ever. But some people now seem to be suffering from amnesia.

Let me jog your memory. Here are 10 Worst Things About the Trump Presidency — in no particular order.

#1. Trump fueled division and sparked a record uptick in hate crimes.

#2. Murder went way up under Trump. He presided over the largest ever single-year increase in homicides in 2020. A number of factors might have contributed to that, but a big one is…

#3. Gun sales broke records under Trump, who has bragged about how he “did nothing” to restrict guns as president in spite of…

#4. Under Trump, America suffered more than 1,700 mass shootings.

#5. Trump said there were “very fine people” among the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville.

I’m halfway to ten. If you think I’m missing something big, leave it in the comments.

#6. Trump allied himself with the Proud Boys, a violent hate group who helped orchestrate the Jan 6 Capitol attack.

#7. Trump’s not wrong when he says…

TRUMP: I got rid of Roe v. Wade.

It is entirely because of Trump’s judicial appointments that 1 in 3 American women of childbearing age now lives in states with abortion bans.

#8. One of Trump’s Supreme Court justices was Brett Kavanaugh, a man accused of sexual assault by multiple women.

#9. Trump’s White House interfered in the FBI’s investigation of Brett Kavanaugh’s alleged sexual assaults.

And now: #10. Trump has been convicted of committing 34 felonies while in office. The criminally false business filings he got convicted for in New York? All of them were committed while he was president.

I’m sorry, did I say the 10 Worst Things About the Trump Presidency? I meant 15.

#11. Trump’s failed pandemic response is estimated to have led to hundreds of thousands of needless deaths. By the time Trump left office, roughly 3,000 Americans were dying of covid every day. That’s a 9/11-scale mass casualty event every single day. How did Trump screw up so badly?

#12. Trump’s White House discarded the pandemic response playbook that had been assembled by the Obama administration.

#13. Trump disbanded the National Security Council’s pandemic response team.

#14. Trump repeatedly lied about the danger of covid, saying it was no worse than the flu or that it would go away on its own.

But behind closed doors, Trump admitted he knew covid was deadly.

#15. Trump promoted fake covid cures like hydroxychloroquine and even injecting people with disinfectants.

After Trump’s “disinfectant” remarks, poison control centers received a spike in emergency calls.

That’s fifteen things. Should I keep going? Ok, I’ll keep going. The 20 Worst Things About the Trump Presidency.

#16. Trump presided over a net loss of 2.9 million American jobs — the worst recorded jobs numbers of any U.S. president in history.

#17. Trump profited off the presidency, making an estimated $160 million from foreign countries while he was president.

#18. Trump also billed the Secret Service over $1 million for the privilege of staying at his golf clubs and other properties while they protected him. That’s your money!

#19. Trump caused the longest government shutdown in U.S. history when he didn’t get funding for his border wall, which he said Mexico was going to pay for.  

#20. Under Trump, the national debt increased by about 40% — more than in any other four-year presidential term — largely because of his tax cuts for the rich and big corporations.

You didn’t really think I was stopping at 20, did you? We’re going to 25 —

#21. Trump separated more than 5,000 children from their parents at the border, with no plan to ever reunite them, putting babies in cages.

#22. The Muslim Ban. Yes, Trump really did try to ban Muslims from entering the country.

#23. Trump sparked international outrage by moving the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem while closing the U.S. mission to Palestine.

#24. Trump tasked his son-in-law Jared Kushner with drafting a potential Middle East “peace plan” with zero Palestinian input.

#25. And finally, Trump recognized Israel’s occupation of the Goh-lahn Heights, which is considered illegal under international law.

So there you have it, folks: The 25 Worst — Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Did I mention the impeachments? We’ve got to do the impeachments. Let’s go to 30.

#26. Trump broke the law by trying to withhold nearly $400 million of U.S. aid for Ukraine in an effort to extort a personal political favor from Ukraine’s Pres. Zelensky. Trump wanted Zelensky to interfere in the 2020 election by announcing an investigation into the Bidens. Delaying this aid to Ukraine weakened Ukraine and strengthened Russia.

#27. Trump personally attacked and ruined the careers of everyone who stood in the way of his illegal Ukraine scheme, including Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman.

#28. To cover up the scheme, Trump ordered the White House and State Department to defy congressional subpoenas.

#29. For these reasons, on December 18, 2019, Trump became the third U.S. president to be impeached. He was charged with Abuse of Power and Obstruction of Congress.

#30. Even while he was being investigated for trying to get Ukraine to interfere in the U.S. election, Trump publicly called for China to interfere in the election.

So those are the 30 Worst Things —

I’ll go to 35.

#31. Long before Election Day, Trump started making false claims that the election would be rigged.

#32. After losing, Trump falsely claimed the election was stolen, even though his own inner circle, including his campaign manager, White House lawyers, and his own Justice Department and attorney general told him it was not.

#33. Trump kept telling his Big Lie even after more than 60 legal challenges to the election were struck down in court, many by Trump-appointed judges.

#34. Trump ordered the Department of Justice to falsely claim that the election “was corrupt.”

#35. Trump and his allies used threats to pressure state leaders in Arizona and Georgia to falsify the election results.

We may go to 40.

#36. When none of the previous schemes worked, Trump and his allies produced fake electoral votes cast by fake electors in multiple swing states. His former White House chief of staff and Rudy Giuliani are among the many members of his inner circle who have been criminally indicted for this scheme.

#37. Trump tried to bully Vice President Pence into obstructing the certification of the election.

#38. Trump invited a mob to the Capitol on Jan 6 with his “be there, will be wild” tweet.

#39. Sworn testimony alleges that when Trump was warned that members of the crowd were carrying deadly weapons, he ordered security metal detectors to be taken down.

#40. Knowing the crowd had deadly weapons, he ordered them to go to the Capitol and…

TRUMP: …fight like hell.

#41 — Yes, yes, I know, bear with me.

Trump betrayed his oath to defend the nation by doing nothing to stop the Jan 6 violence. Instead, according to witness testimony, he sat and watched TV for hours.

#42. On January 13, 2021, Trump became the only president ever to be impeached twice. This time he was charged with incitement of insurrection. It was a bipartisan vote.

#43. The majority of senators — 57 out of 100 — voted to convict Trump, including 7 Republican senators.

So that’s the two impeachments and the Big Lie, but wait, we haven’t dealt with Russia, right? So we’re going to 50.

#44. In a likely obstruction of justice, Trump pressured then FBI Director James Comey to stop the FBI’s investigation into Trump’s National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn. This was documented in the Mueller report.

#45. When Comey didn’t bend to Trump’s will, Trump fired him.

#46. Trump tried to shut down the Mueller investigation by ordering White House Counsel Don McGann to fire Mueller. McGann refused because that would be criminal obstruction of justice.

#47. When news got out that Trump tried to fire Mueller, Trump repeatedly told McGann to lie — to Mueller, to press, to public — and even create a false document to conceal Trump’s attempt to fire Mueller.

#48. Trump ordered his staff not to turn over emails showing Don Jr. had set up a meeting at Trump Tower before the 2016 election with representatives of the Russian government.

#49. Trump convinced Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about Trump’s plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, and Cohen served prison time for lying to Congress.

#50. Trump was not charged for criminal obstruction of justice because it’s the Justice Department’s policy not to indict a sitting president, but more than a thousand former federal prosecutors who served under both Republicans and Democrats, signed a letter declaring there was more than enough evidence to prosecute Trump.

So those are the 50 Worst Things About the Trump Presidency. Now I could go on…

And I will! The 75 Worst Things About the Trump Presidency.

#51. Trump said he’d hire only the best people, but…

His campaign chair was convicted of multiple crimes.

So was one of his closest associates.

His deputy campaign chair pleaded guilty to crimes.

So did his personal lawyer

His National Security Adviser

The Chief Financial Officer of his business

A campaign foreign policy adviser

And one of his campaign fundraisers.

They all committed crimes, and Trump pardoned most of them.

#52. Trump said he’d drain the Washington swamp. But he appointed more billionaires, CEOs, and Wall Street moguls to his administration than any administration in history

#53. Trump intervened to get his son-in-law, Jared Kushner top-secret clearance after he was denied over concerns about foreign influence.

#54. Trump hosted a Russian Foreign Minister to the Oval Office, where Trump revealed top-secret intelligence.

Oh, and Trump’s economic policies!

#55 Trump promised that the average American family would see a $4,000 pay raise because of his tax cuts for the wealthy and big corporations. How’d that work out? Did you get a $4,000 raise? Of course not! Nobody did!

#56. Trump vowed to protect American jobs, but offshoring increased and manufacturing fell.

#57. Trump said he would fix America’s infrastructure, but it never happened. He announced so many failed “infrastructure weeks” they became a running joke.

#58. Trump said he would be “the voice” of American workers, but he filled the National Labor Relations Board with anti-union flacks who made it harder for workers to unionize.

#59. Trump’s Labor Department made it easier for bosses to get out of paying workers overtime, which cheated 8 million workers of extra pay.

#60. Trump repeatedly suggested he might serve more than two terms in violation of the Constitution — and continues to do so.

#61. Trump called Haiti and African nations “shithole” countries.

#62. Trump tried to terminate DACA, which protects immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. Luckily this was struck down by the courts.

#63. Trump called climate change a “hoax.”

#64. Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement.

#65. Trump rolled back more than 100 environmental protections.

#66. Every budget Trump proposed included cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

#67. Trump tried (and failed) to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which would have resulted in 20 million Americans losing insurance. And striking down the ACA’s protections for the roughly 130 million people with pre-existing conditions could have driven up their insurance premiums or led to a loss of coverage.

#68. Trump made it easier for employers to remove birth control coverage from insurance plans.

#69. By the end of Trump’s term, the number of people lacking health insurance had risen by 3 million.

#70. Trump lied. Constantly. He made 30,573 false or misleading claims while president — an average of 21 a day, according to Washington Post fact-checkers.

#71. Trump allegedly took hundreds of classified documents on his way out of the White House, reportedly including nuclear secrets, which he then left unsecured in various parts of Mar-a-Lago, including a bathroom. He was even caught on tape showing them off to people.

#72. Trump seriously discussed the idea of nuking a hurricane.

#73. When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, Trump delayed $20 billion of aid and allowed Puerto Rico to be without power for 181 days.

#74. Trump suggested withholding federal aid for California wildfire recovery and said the solution was to “clean” the “floors” of the forest.

#75. Trump pulled out of the Iran deal, placing Iran on a path to developing nuclear weapons.

Honestly, there’s so much more, from exchanging “love letters” with North Korea’s brutal dictator to publicly denigrating a Gold Star military widow and making her cry, to the way he attacked journalists, to late night tweet binges.

Look, I can understand why a lot of people want to block all of this out of their memories. But we cannot afford to forget just how terrible Trump’s time in the White House was for this nation.

And we sure as hell can’t afford to put him back there.

Political cartoonists and analysts Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) take on the week in politics.

First up, Israel’s Mossad launches a fearsome attack against Hezbollah by blowing up their pagers and walkie-talkies throughout Lebanon, injuring thousands of people and killing at least a dozen. Does this impressive act of international terrorism cross a red line for supporters of Israel against Gaza? What happens next in the Middle East?

Springfield, Ohio has made headlines, most of them probably false, about the allegation that Haitian migrants have been chowing down on the locals’ cats and dogs. Ted relates what he heard from relatives who live in Springfield and Scott and Ted dissect Trump’s ability to touch upon big truths even while lying like the day is long.

Finally, the Federal Reserve Bank has decided to cut short-term interest rates by 0.5%. How much will juicing the economy help Kamala Harris’ campaign?

Watch the Video version: here. (Will be live 9/18/24 8:00 Eastern time)

The post DMZ America Podcast #164: Pager Rager, Dogging Cats, Half the Point first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

On this edition of The Final Countdown, hosts Ted Rall and Steve Gill discussed several topics from around the world. The American political landscape is complicated, and to add to the political chaos in the United States there has been a second assassination attempt on former president Trump.  Censorship is raising its ugly head again as well.  To defend democracy is it necessary to suspend free speech?   In the final hour The Final Countdown team will discuss interest rate cuts by the Fed, and the unprecedented attack in Lebanon using consumer electronics as booby traps.   In the opening segment, Ted and Steve discuss the turbulent American political scene. Journalist and political insider Angie Wong  will speak to Ted Rall and Steve Gill about the second assassination attempt on former President Trump in just under three months.     Then The Final Countdown team speaks to reporter and international journalist Rachel Blevins.  The United States famously has the First Amendment that protects free speech, but despite that guarantee speech is under attack once again. At the top of the second hour The Final Countdown hosts analyze the happenings with the Fed.  Will they cut interest rates?  The team then speaks to CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou regarding the newest drama in the Middle East.  Is booby trapping thousands of consumer electronics a legitimate tactic or is it an act of international terrorism?  John will give his expert analysis.The post The Final Countdown – 9/18/24 – Federal Reserve to Make First Rate Cut in Two Years first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

           If someone said something I found annoying or offensive, my mother taught me, the appropriate response was to allow them to finish speaking and reply with a calm, considered counterargument. Now you’re supposed to talk over them until they shut up.

Or, better yet, cut their mic and show them the door.

Censorship has become a bipartisan norm. Why waste the time and energy to conceive and articulate an intelligent rebuttal when you can make your opponent shut up?

            Alan Dershowitz, a nationally-known former Harvard Law professor, announced that he was leaving the Democratic Party because the party’s organizers allowed pro-Palestinian speakers to address its convention in Chicago. “They had more anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist people who were speaking, starting with [Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]–a miserable, anti-Zionist bigot,” Dershowitz said on “Talkline with Zev Brenner.” “Then of course they had [Senator Elizabeth] Warren, who is one of the most anti-Jewish people in the Senate. Then they had Bernie Sanders, one of the most anti-Jewish people in the Senate.” (Sanders is Jewish.)

            “[B]y giving them platforms, what it says is that when AOC does call Israel a genocidal country and rails against it, she now has the imprimatur of the Democratic Party,” he argued.

            On the opposite side of the ideological divide, high-profile podcaster and ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson caught flak for hosting Darryl Cooper, a Holocaust revisionist, on his show on the social media platform X. Representative Mike Lawler of New York, told The Jewish Insider: “Platforming known Holocaust revisionists is deeply disturbing.”

            I’m a leftist. Some of my fans lost their minds when I invited former Klansman David Duke to guest on my old talk-radio show on KFI Los Angeles. Feeling betrayed, they accused me of amplifying and tacitly endorsing a voice of the racist alt-right. I recall the exchange as vigorous, challenging and a rare opportunity to hear ideas on both sides of a variety of issues aired in an intelligent format.

            The way I saw it, many Americans share Duke’s far-right views whether they hear them on the air or not. This was a chance to expose the existence of these thoughts to blissfully unaware liberals and workshop arguments against them. I would do it again in a heartbeat—but I’d become the target of even more venom now.

Platforming speech is not the same as endorsing what is said.

            Platforming is the act of providing a means of public expression. A newspaper that publishes an interview with or even just a short quote by a person gives them a platform. A college that invites someone to give a speech or participate in a panel discussion is engaged in platforming, as is a cable network that decides to add a channel to its lineup.

            None of these actions is a tacit endorsement.

            Nor can it be.

            Unless it limits its opinionists to a single voice or aggressively enforces a rigid set of ideological strictures upon a group of them—no one need apply unless they are, for example, socially liberal, fiscally conservative and opposed to military adventurism except in Myanmar—any newspaper’s decision to simultaneously platform one writer who disagrees materially with a second writer (and a third and a fourth) means that, by definition, there are contrasts and disagreements. Inherently, because no institution can simultaneously endorse conflicting points of view, no endorsement has occurred

            Many news stories include quotes by both a Democrat and a Republican. If platforming the Democrat is an endorsement, how should one explain the appearance of the Republican? Most universities host speakers representing a range of views on a variety of subjects, many of them controversial. It makes no sense to imply that those institutions agree with everyone they invite on campus.

            Until fairly recently, most Americans appreciated the value of showcasing a spectrum of ideological and stylistic views in public fora. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously wrote in 1926 that the solution to offensive speech was “more speech, not enforced silence.” Today what we call Brandeis’ counter-speech doctrine—the answer to bad speech is good speech, not censorship—is in grave danger. Rather than argue against their opponents, cultural and journalistic gatekeepers are increasingly resorting to telling those with whom they to disagree to STFU.

            Censorship drives dangerous rhetoric underground. It conveys a sense that purveyors of “mainstream” opinion are contemptuous of others, unable to defend their views, possibly intellectually feeble, and just plain bullies. Mostly, it doesn’t work.

            After the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, Twitter suspended 70,000 accounts, including that of President Donald Trump. Facebook acted similarly. A year later, in 2022, liberal censors claimed victory. “The best research that we have suggests that deplatforming is very powerful,” Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University, told NPR. “It means that really prominent actors who helped stoke the Stop the Steal campaign that led to the insurrection have much less reach, get much less audience and attention. And that is very, very, very important.”

            Was it? Donald Trump, the biggest January 6er of them all, is also the undisputed kingpin of the Republican Party, in whose primaries he ran unopposed. Running neck and neck with Kamala Harris, he may easily be reelected.

            The belief that editors, producers, tech CEOs and other gatekeepers control enough outlets to deny their enemies an outlet to a significant audience is a profoundly flawed assumption. To whatever extent this was true in an era of four television news networks and cities with a morning and afternoon paper and not much else—and, even then, there were underground presses and alternative newsweeklies like The Village Voice—the Internet has blown that idea to smithereens. Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based cable news network whose American channel was shut down after the War on Terror-era Bush Administration leaned on U.S. broadcasters, disseminates live news from Gaza and other global hot spots via its website, which is one of the biggest in this country. InfoWars, Alex Jones’ “fringe” news site, gets 19 million views daily despite Jones’ epic legal defeat at the hands of parents whose children were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School, who were awarded $1 billion. Any government or other corporate entity that tries to control information narratives in an era of fragmented media is playing whack-a-mole with a million rodents.

            As long as there’s an audience for what someone has to say, you can’t keep a good—or bad—man down.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

The post Refusing to Censor Speech Isn’t the Same as Agreeing with It first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Last spring, Justice Samuel Alito had drafted an opinion dropping federal charges against many of the January 6 insurrectionists who violently stormed the Capitol. The ruling in Fischer v. United States had not yet been released. Then The New York Times published a startling story: Alito himself had flown the flag of insurrection at his home. (He briefly blamed it on his wife: “She is fond of flying flags.”) Days later, it was reported that he had flown such flags at his vacation home as well.

Awkward! Grounds for recusal? Time to rethink the ruling? Nah. Instead, Chief Justice John Roberts quietly took Alito’s embarrassing name off the opinion and slipped his own name onto it instead.

That is just one of the gobsmacking revelations from a story by Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak that appeared in The New York Times last weekend. The lurid news of the day quickly overwhelmed it—the gunman arrested outside Donald Trump’s golf course, the continued smear campaign by former President Trump and Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) against the Haitian immigrant community in a small city in Ohio, and more.

Throughout American history, overreach by the Supreme Court has provoked a response.

But we must not let these revelations fade from view. They paint a damning and indelible picture of how John Roberts, for all his vaunted “institutionalism” and piety about calling “balls and strikes,” steered the court to shield Trump from accountability for his misdeeds.

Call me naïve. At the beginning of this year, I thought I had few illusions about the court. I had just published a harshly critical book, The Supermajority. But I felt confident in asserting that the court was a conservative court, a Federalist Society court, even a Republican court—but not a MAGA court. It had not yet shown an appetite for excusing Trump from the reach of the law.

So I, along with most legal observers, assumed that the justices would let Trump’s trial proceed. I thought there was a good chance it would be unanimous, that Roberts would work behind the scenes to ensure that the court spoke with one voice on major issues of presidential power and constitutional law. That’s what other chief justices did, most notably Warren Burger in United States v. Nixon, the Watergate tapes case and the closest analogue to the Trump trial ruling.

After all, we all thought, Trump v. United States was legally easy. Indeed, the possibility of criminal charges was the stated reason why Republican senators did not vote to convict him of the January 6 charges in Trump’s second impeachment trial.

Many of us, too, sensed there was a deal afoot—a unanimous ruling that Trump could not be thrown off the ballot by one state under the 14th Amendment and a principled ruling on the criminal trial.

Behind the velvet curtain of the court, though, there was no deal. Roberts wrote a memo in February—before the court had even announced that it would hear Trump’s appeal—declaring that the court would give the former president a huge win. “I think it likely that we will view the separation of powers analysis differently” from the appeals court, he wrote. As Kantor and Liptak summarized, “In other words: grant Mr. Trump greater protection from prosecution.”

They detailed myriad other ways that Roberts steered rulings Trump’s way. He froze out Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The ruling was sloppy and immunized vast areas of potential presidential wrongdoing. The Times noted that NYU Law professor Trevor Morrison had discovered that Roberts selectively edited a quote from a key earlier ruling to help Trump.

The resulting ruling tells future presidents that they can break the law, plainly and flagrantly. As long as they conspire with other government officials, it will be effectively immunized. (Order your White House counsel to pay hush money, as Richard Nixon did, not your campaign manager, and you’ll be off the hook.)

The opinion has widely and correctly been scorned as one of the worst in American history—a rip in the constitutional fabric. The Times’ tick-tock makes clear that this was not a baffling anomaly. Rather, it is the biggest, most visible, and perhaps most consequential in a series of actions taken by a corrupted court. It follows Citizens United, Shelby County, and other rulings that systematically undid key democratic protections.

Throughout American history, overreach by the Supreme Court has provoked a response. Dred Scott did in the 1850s—it helped lead to a civil war. Reactionary rulings such as Lochner did in the early 20th century. Trump v. United States should join with the Dobbs abortion rights ruling to spur a similar backlash today.

We’ve argued for an 18-year term limit for Supreme Court justices, because nobody should have too much public power for too long. And we’ve urged a binding code of ethics, which would have forced Justices Alito and Clarence Thomas to step out of these key cases. These reforms are widely popular. Most recently, a Fox News poll this summer found that 78% support term limits.

The court is a broken institution. It’s time to fix it. The latest revelations remind us that otherwise, the fix is in.

There are now 801 billionaires based in the United States with a combined wealth totaling $6.22 trillion, according to an Institute for Policy Studies analysis of the Forbes Real Time Billionaire List.

The total number of billionaires is down 11 people as of September 13, 2024 from April when Forbes published their 38th annual World’s Billionaire List. Despite that decline in the number of billionaires, the total wealth of the exclusive nine-figure-club grew by $500 billion over the last five months.

The top five billionaires and by individual wealth are:

1. Elon Musk of Tesla/X and SpaceX with $252.5 billion
2. Jeff Bezos of Amazon with $204.8 billion
3. Larry Ellison of Oracle fame moving into number three spot with $197 billion, surpassing Marc Zuckerberg
4. Mark Zuckerberg of Meta with $182 billion
5. Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway with $141 billion

There are now a total of 12 billionaires with more than $100 billion each. For context, the first person to cross the $100 billion personal wealth threshold—Jeff Bezos—only did so in 2018.

When Forbes started tracking wealth in 1982 there were only 13 billionaires on the Forbes 400 list and it took $75 million to join the list. Today, a person needs have a minimum of $3.2 billion to make the cut.

Among the wealthiest families on the Forbes list:

• Walton: Six members of the Walton Family have a combined wealth of $349.3 billion
• Mars: Six members of Mars family have combined wealth of $142.7 billion
• Koch: Two members of Koch family have a combined wealth of $141.6 billion

Many top billionaires have seen their wealth surge since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.

On March 18, 2020, Elon Musk had wealth valued just under $25 billion. By the start of the next year he became the richest person in the world with a net worth of $185 billion.

After a decline of his assets from the acquisition of Twitter (now X) and falling Tesla valuations, Musk’s wealth has almost reached its 2022 peak with $252 billion.

Jeff Bezos saw his wealth rise from $113 billion on March 18, 2020 to $204 billion in the September 13, 2024 survey.

Three Walton family members—Jim, Alice, and Rob—saw their combined assets increase from $161.1 billion on March 18, 2020 to $286 billion this September.

In late 2020, a report titled Saving Gaza Begins With Its Water stated:

The water crisis in Gaza is a problem of daunting proportions, with grave implications for the more than 2 million inhabitants of the Palestinian enclave... The Coastal Aquifer from which Gaza pumps water is diminishing; but more dangerously, it is experiencing significant deterioration from seawater and highly saline groundwater intrusion, as well as sewage pollution.

Fast forward to 2024: Gaza’s water scarcity pollution is severely worsened by its forced closure of water and wastewater treatment plants due to Israel’s blockade of fuel to Gaza to run the plants in its 2023-2024 war.

The authors of Saving Gaza Begins With Its Water end on a cautiously positive note. “The crisis of water in Gaza also holds promise,” they wrote, ...“because Gaza’s water problem will require cooperation between antagonists, to their mutual benefit. There is no solution that can be achieved by Gaza or Israel in isolation” because one of Israel’s water sources is the same Coastal Aquifer.

But this affirmative conclusion presumes that the people of Gaza have not been annihilated by Israeli bombing, inflicting a daily death rate greater than any major war of the 21st century, combined with the induced famine across all of Gaza by Israel’s blockades of food aid, and rampant disease including the recent polio virus. At the current rate of killing and death, 15-20% of Gaza’s people could be dead by the end of the year, a United Nations expert stated and almost entirely exterminated within a few years.

What can be done? Nothing without Israel and the United States agreeing to end their totalistic war.

Prior to the current war, Gaza had more than 150 small-scale desalination plants to produce potable water. By mid-October 2023, Israeli missile attacks destroyed the drinking water desalination plants; and its almost total blockade cut off fuel to run the other water treatment plants, as well as metal parts to repair them. Gaza’s drinking water production capacity dropped to just 5% of typical levels.

With no power to run Gaza’s five wastewater treatment plants, sewage has flowed freely through the streets, causing a record increase in cases of diarrheal illnesses. By December 2023, cases of diarrhea among children under five in Gaza jumped 2,000%, because of which children under five are over 20 times more likely to die from the illness than from Israeli military violence.

More than three-quarters of Gaza’s 2.2 million people are internally displaced to southern Gaza and, even there, continually forced to re-locate because of Israeli bombing. In some of the most overcrowded shelters in southern Gaza, there is one toilet per 600 internally displaced persons and little to no running water.

Every human being in Gaza suffers soul-shattering existence from this war variably described as genocide, ecocide, domicide (destruction of homes), and scholasticide (destruction of schools and universities). Indeed, two American trauma surgeons, who have volunteered for surgical missions in crisis situations all over the world, stated that they have never seen cruelty like Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Women and their children are its gravest victims. Daily in Gaza children are having one of both legs amputated without anesthesia. More than 25,000 children have lost one or both parents.

Recently members of the Uncommitted National Movement spoke at a press conference during the Democratic National Convention and accused the Biden administration of “hypocritical action” in saying they are working on cease-fire while providing the weapons massacring Palestinians in Gazan. At the same conference, American doctors who had volunteered in Gaza pleaded with Kamala Harris to “embrace an arms embargo on Israel and an immediate cease-fire.” The doctors attested that the killing and suffering is on “an entirely unprecedented scale.” None has seen anything “so horrific, so egregious, so inhumane.”

Impacts of War on Women

As of early 2024, The U.N. estimated that some 700,000 women and girls in Gaza experience menstrual cycles but lack adequate access to basic hygiene products like pads, toilet paper, soap, running water, and toilets because of the war nor privacy to manage menstrual hygiene. These conditions put women and girls in Gaza at grave risk of reproductive and urinary tract infections. The challenge of trying to find an available bathroom is especially difficult for pregnant women who have pressure on their bladder, and women who have just given birth and are going through weeks of postpartum bleeding.

By early March 2024 Relief/Web reported: There has been a steep rise in malnutrition among the more than 155,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women. Every day about 180 women give birth in unimaginable conditions, no longer having health-care facilities to deliver their babies. Many mothers who have given birth since the beginning of Israel’s war are too malnourished to produce milk for their newborns.

Although mothers and adult women are tasked with sourcing food, they are the ones who eat last, less, and least.

What can be done? Nothing without Israel and the United States agreeing to end their totalistic war. Dima Nazzal, a systems engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology, believes that while rebuilding Gaza is “a daunting prospect,” with “cooperation, coordination, and courage, it is not unachievable.” But first the war must be ended.

Israel has sought security through militaristic means since its founding: expelling 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 (the Nakba—“catastrophe” in Arabic), claiming Palestinian land by force, enforcing apartheid conditions for Palestinians in Israel, establishing colonizing settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and now omnicide in Gaza. The only way for Israel to live in security is through a political compromise, in the spirit of Isaiah 59:8, that guarantees the human and political rights of the Palestinians who have lived on the land of Palestine for thousands of years. Without justice—the U.S. ending its criminal trafficking of weapons to Israel, a permanent cease-fire, the U.N. recognizing Palestine as a state and then organizing the rebuilding of Gaza with supportive countries—there can be no peace.

Pat Hynes gave a talk on the plight of women in water-starved Gaza during a conference on Memorial Day weekend sponsored by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom entitled Water on the Frontlines for Peace. This piece is a much abbreviated and updated version.