Although progressives are rightly concerned about US-coerced compromises and concessions, it is equally important to understand the resilience and continuing successes of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution. Focusing only on the half-empty aspect of the proverbial glass obscures the strength of the resistance and conceals the vulnerabilities of the imperial juggernaut.

On a delegation to Venezuela, the constant refrain from both high-ranking government officials and grassroots Chavistas—supporters of the movement led by former President Hugo Chávez—was that they were urgently “buying time.”

A quarter-century of US hybrid war on Venezuela, especially the unilateral coercive measures (sanctions), has had a corrosive effect. The current fraught détente with Washington is a window of opportunity to recover an economy operating at roughly 30% of its pre-sanctions level.

President Maduro’s kidnapping

The kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores by US special forces on January 3 was “the one scenario we didn’t expect,” according to former Venezuelan Deputy Foreign minister Carlos Ron.

The kidnapping was a military success for the US. But politically Washington had no viable alternative to the Chavistas retaining power.

Abducting a lawful head of state—an egregious violation of international law—is not, however, unprecedented. In 2004, the US flew Haiti’s Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the Central African Republic in what Washington claimed was a voluntary decision, but which Aristide called a kidnapping. In 1990, following a bloody invasion, the US extradited Panama’s Manuel Noriega.

Leading up to January 3, Washington had incrementally tightened its stranglehold over Venezuela. Initial sanctions imposed in 2015 evolved from targeted measures to broad sectoral restrictions, especially on oil and finance. “Secondary sanctions” followed, penalizing non-US actors engaged with Venezuela. By December an outright military “total and complete blockade” piratically seized oil tankers.

US President Donald Trump also designated the so-called Cartel de los Soles as a terrorist organization, allegedly headed by Maduro. A $25-million bounty on Maduro under former US President Joe Biden was doubled in August. The following month, the US commenced extrajudicial murders of alleged drug runners in small boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. By October, Trump suspended all communication with the Maduro government.

Resilience and Continuity

Despite post-kidnapping concessions, it is instructive to consider what hasn’t happened. The political leadership did not splinter, and the country did not descend into chaos. The US-directed fate of Libya in 2011 was not to be repeated in Venezuela.

Venezuela maintained constitutional continuity. Shortly after the strike, then Vice President Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as acting president. Other top leaders—National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez, Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, and Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López—remained in place and unified. The civic-military unity held fast.

Under intense US pressure, high-ranking militants have been replaced. Padrino, who was swapped for Gustavo González López, another committed Chavista, remains influential in his new cabinet position heading the critical agricultural ministry. In this whack-a-mole scenario, the major exception to the government’s strategy of yielding in form to US pressure but maintaining a Chavista essence is the new Vice Foreign Minister for North America and Europe, Oliver Blanco, who is from the opposition.

Another triumph is that a highly divided population did not erupt into civil conflict. Instead, the attack produced a rally-around-the-flag effect, with some moderate opposition figures showing a new openness to the ruling party.

Nor was Noble Prize winner and far-rightist María Corina Machado imposed as president. She had signaled that if she took power there would be a retaliatory bloodbath against Chavistas. Meanwhile, the US effectively abandoned the bogus claim that Maduro headed the Cartel de los Soles.

Diplomatic Thaw and Economic Openings

On March 7, Washington formally recognized the Venezuelan government led by Rodríguez, marking a reversal of its policy since 2019. Trump even informally referred to her as “president-elect,” though the return of Maduro from US imprisonment as the rightful chief remains Venezuela’s national priority. On April 27, the US modified sanctions to allow the Venezuelan government to pay Maduro’s defense lawyers.

Financial easing is proceeding. In the late 1990s-early 2000s, the US bought more than half of Venezuela’s oil exports. Oil sales have again resumed under a highly restructured and controlled system, while the US has also taken steps to shield Venezuelan state assets from creditor seizure. The Rodríguez government is in the process of regaining control of Citgo Petroleum, the “crown jewel” of Venezuela's foreign assets, which the US had seized.

What has been achieved is not a lifting of sanctions, but a controlled reentry into international finance under US licensing and oversight.

Washington has authorized transactions with Venezuela’s central bank and major state banks, reversing the 2019 measures that had effectively cut them off from the global financial system. This policy change allows dollar-denominated transactions and access to US financial channels.

For the first time in years, Venezuela’s core financial institutions can operate in international banking channels. What makes this significant is that it allows oil revenues from US transactions to enter the domestic economy. That in turn helps stabilize liquidity, reducing the need for monetary expansion that had fueled inflation.

On April 16, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) resumed engagement with Venezuela. Previously, the US-dominated IMF had cut Venezuela off from its $5-million “special drawing rights” (SDR). Rodríguez said she will only access its rightful SDR account to be used for social programs and not apply for loans.

Still, the core US sanctions framework remains in place, with most transactions subject to case-by-case authorization. Full unrestricted access to global capital markets has not been restored. What has been achieved is not a lifting of sanctions, but a controlled reentry into international finance under US licensing and oversight.

Prospects

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) continues its consecutive 20-quarter expansion. New and long-considered legislative reforms for hydrocarbons and minerals encourage needed foreign investment vital for economic recovery. Although the changes involved some bitter pills, the rationale is that it is better to compromise than to keep these resources in the ground where they generate no income.

Rodríguez lauded a new amnesty law, creating a “new historical moment… of national reunification.” The long-polarized Venezuelan people yearn for domestic tranquility, according to Jesús Rodríguez-Espinoza, editor of the Caracas-based Orinoco Tribune.

Venezuela has so far escaped the severity of the economic strangulation that Cuba is now suffering or the military pummeling on the scale of Iran. The US-Israeli war in the Middle East may even be creating a temporary opening for Venezuela, as Trump needs the prospect of freely available Venezuelan oil to help calm jittery oil markets.

Trump may have also calculated that engagement with the Chavistas offered greater strategic benefits than assassination or a large-scale invasion, while using the kidnapping to placate domestic hawks pushing for full regime change. Significantly for US imperial objectives, Venezuela’s connections with other counter-hegemonic countries were curtailed.

Washington’s strategy since January 3 has focused on Venezuela’s stabilization and economic recovery. Their deferred third phase, “political transition,” is another word for regime change. Rodríguez has made clear that “free and fair” elections can be held only if the blackmail of US sanctions is removed. Thousands marched in a national “Pilgrimage for a Venezuela Without Sanctions and Peace.”

The kidnapping was a military success for the US. But politically Washington had no viable alternative to the Chavistas retaining power, given their strength, according to former Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Areaza. The only other option for the invader was to face a Vietnam-style guerilla war. The Bolivarian Revolution has persisted and is still fighting. On balance, the glass is decisively more than half full.

When asked to name America’s most sacred place, what comes to mind?

Perhaps the 9/11 Memorial, where grief and resilience coexist in quiet reflection. Or Arlington National Cemetery’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, honoring sacrifice beyond name or rank. For some, sacredness is rooted in heritage. The Black Hills of South Dakota, revered by the Sioux Nation. Seattle's Sakya Monastery. Newport's Touro Synagogue (the nation's first). The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, DC, or perhaps a bar in New York City called Stonewall, where a marginalized group refused to remain invisible.

All are worthy answers.

But for me, the most sacred place in America is far less grand, far less visible, and far more powerful.

This moment is not simply about policy differences. It is about how, and how well, our democratic system functions at its core.

It is the voting booth.

I came to understand this not through theory, but through experience.

In 1971, just two weeks after my 18th birthday, the 26th Amendment was ratified, granting 18-year-olds the right to vote. My generation had watched young men drafted into the Vietnam War, sent to fight and die, without having a voice in the democracy they were asked to defend.

That changed overnight.

I was among the first to step into that new reality.

My first voting booth was simple, a small curtained space with metal levers and switches. As I pulled the close-curtain lever, it made a unique sound, punctuating a sense of autonomy, privacy, freedom, personal power, and my passage into responsible adulthood.

That moment has stayed with me ever since.

Today, as we approach another pivotal election, that sacred space feels more important, and more fragile, than ever.

The six-month countdown to the midterms has begun.

This election carries a different kind of weight. In recent years, the balance of power that defines our system of government has shown visible strain. A legislative branch often mired in gridlock has struggled to provide consistent oversight of the executive. At the same time, a Supreme Court reshaped by a series of deeply consequential appointments has issued rulings that revisit and, in some cases, reverse long-settled precedents, altering the landscape of rights and federal authority. Layer onto that ongoing disputes over election integrity and the certification of results, and it becomes clear that this moment is not simply about policy differences. It is about how, and how well, our democratic system functions at its core.

Across the country, we are witnessing debates and decisions that directly affect who can vote, how they vote, and whether those votes are counted without interference. In some states, new legislation has shortened early voting periods, limited the use of ballot drop boxes, or imposed stricter identification requirements that can make participation more difficult. Court decisions have reshaped long-standing protections related to privacy and bodily autonomy, raising broader questions about how constitutional rights are interpreted and applied. We have also seen documented efforts to challenge certified election results and pressure officials to overturn outcomes, actions that test the durability of norms once considered settled.

This is not about party. It is about participation.

The voting booth remains one of the last places where power is perfectly equal. No wealth, status, or platform can amplify one person’s vote over another’s. Inside that space, each voice carries the same weight.

The voting booth.

A place where a mother of six in Jackson, Wyoming can vote her conscience without fearing a husband who prefers her silent and pregnant.

A place where a senior in a Florida group home can vote his mind despite the cable news chatter and groupthink that dominate the evening dining table.

A place where a devout Christian can still feel safe, without judgment, following her beliefs by supporting a woman’s right to choose.

A place where an assembly line worker from West Virginia can go against the grain and cast a vote that supports his gay nephew, a kid he knows deserves basic human rights just as much as any guy on his bowling team.

The voting booth is where private belief becomes public direction. Where individual dignity translates into collective decision-making. Where democracy is not debated, but practiced.

And yet, participation is not guaranteed.

Even in recent high-turnout elections, tens of millions of eligible Americans chose not to vote. Some out of frustration. Some out of disillusionment. Some out of the belief that their voice does not matter.

But absence has consequences.

A sacred place means nothing if it stands empty.

The voting booth does not defend itself. It does not speak unless we do. It does not protect rights, norms, or institutions on its own. It simply offers the opportunity.

What we do with that opportunity is everything.

This election, like many before it, will shape policies, priorities, and the direction of the country. Reasonable people will disagree on outcomes, candidates, and solutions. That is not a weakness of democracy. It is its design.

But participation is not optional if democracy is to endure.

The most sacred place in America is still there, waiting, quiet, unassuming, and powerful as ever.

The question is whether we will show up.

Vote.

Pop culture has long memorialized the Warner Brothers cartoon gag in which Wile E. Coyote, lured by his nemesis the Roadrunner, races off a cliff. Instead of immediately falling, Coyote keeps running, then looks down and realizes there’s nothing beneath him but empty space. His expression turns from anger to panic, whereupon he plummets. Coyote’s belated moment of realization is a trendy metaphor for our response to inevitable, though not yet fully realized, consequences of foolish behavior.

For the past couple of decades, we at Post Carbon Institute have been pointing out that energy is the basis of the economy, that oil is our foremost energy source, and that a transition to alternative energy sources will necessarily be slow and incomplete. Given that oil is a depleting, polluting, non-renewable resource, industrial society is due for a reckoning at some point. We are all in an extended Wile E. Coyote moment.

But now, as the United States’ war on Iran has set off a global energy crisis, humanity has arrived at a more immediate and critical Coyote moment. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has issued a report suggesting that continued oil shortages could reduce global economic growth by 2% and raise inflation by 2.3%. Some analysts say the IMF warning is far too weak and that the crisis could trigger a global recession or worse.

Oil is a key ingredient in most consumer products and their packaging; expensive oil therefore translates to price hikes for toys, car parts, electronics, clothing, and more. It powers or is a critical input into essential elements of industrial society, including the food system. And oil moves everything: Global supply chains depend on transportation by truck, rail, ship, and air, and over 90% of transport energy is oil based. That means an extended crisis would likely lead to stagflation, in which the economy is hobbled simultaneously by inflation and slow growth or economic contraction. When prices for food and medicines are eventually impacted, no one will remain unaffected.

America’s status as oil-production king and its cushion of reserves have indeed helped it weather the early stages of the crisis. But the nation won’t be insulated from serious economic damage for long.

However, for the moment, the stock market is hardly signaling imminent economic peril; instead, the Dow Jones is near peak levels. Further, the US, which started the war, seems somewhat spared from its consequences, when compared with many other countries. And oil prices, while higher than before the hostilities, are nowhere near inflation-adjusted historic peaks.

What’s keeping Coyote airborne?

American Oil Un-Exceptionalism

Myanmar, Bangladesh, Slovenia, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, and Vietnam are rationing or restricting the purchasing of fuel. Germany’s Lufthansa airline has cut 20,000 summer flights due to rising fuel costs. The examples could be multiplied: Countries in Asia, Europe, and Africa are already experiencing symptoms of energy scarcity, while Australia faces dire impacts to its agriculture.

But in America, the worst fallout so far is expensive gasoline. Before the first attacks on Tehran in late February, the average price of gas in the US was $2.98 a gallon. It’s now above $4—a political worry for the president and other Republicans, but a price that’s not quite as high as ones motorists faced in the 1970s. US airlines have raised their checked baggage fees in response to higher fuel costs. Yet, otherwise, business hums along more or less as usual. Why have Americans seen so few repercussions?

Two reasons are widely cited. The first is that the US is currently the world’s biggest oil producer and is therefore far less vulnerable to shortages than nations that import most, or all, of their fuel. The second is that the US has the world’s second-largest strategic petroleum reserve (after China), which, in an emergency, can be brought to market to lower prices and avert scarcity.

However, these two pillars of US energy resilience are shaky. First: Even though the United States produces over 13 million barrels of oil per day, it uses almost 20 million barrels. Further, the kinds of oil extracted from American wells are not always the kinds that the nation’s refineries are set up to use. So, oil companies export light crude and import heavier crude to produce the blends of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel that the US market demands. The result: America is the world’s second-largest oil importer, even though its politicians love to brag about “energy independence.”

Second: Strategic petroleum reserves are only meant to last a relatively brief time. Currently, the US has about 400 million barrels of oil stored in four underground salt caverns along the Gulf of Mexico. That’s 20 days’ worth of total American consumption at current rates. Therefore, the government has limited ability to influence oil prices during a months-long supply crunch.

America’s status as oil-production king and its cushion of reserves have indeed helped it weather the early stages of the crisis. But the nation won’t be insulated from serious economic damage for long.

Oil-Price Roulette

Oil has been trading at roughly $100 a barrel since the start of hostilities, a price somewhat lower than ones seen in June and July 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz would intuitively seem a much graver threat to world oil supplies. Given that a fifth of the world’s petroleum flow is now unavailable, why haven’t prices shot even higher?

WTI Crude Oil Prices are shown from 2021-2026. (Graphic via Trading Economics)

One factor is the so-called TACO trade. US President Donald Trump has repeatedly shown the tendency to make threats and then back away; hence the meme “Trump Always Chickens Out” (TACO). The term “TACO trade” gained currency during 2025, when the president announced steep tariffs, then canceled or moderated them, ostensibly to leave time for negotiations but also perhaps in response to negative impacts those announcements had on stock prices (stock market activity appears to influence Donald Trump’s behavior more than most other factors). Savvy stock traders learned that if, instead of taking Trump’s most belligerent threats seriously, they bet against price dips, they could make more money.

We’re all dancing somewhere off the end of history’s biggest cliff, sensing that something isn’t quite right but blaming that sensation on people whose politics we disagree with.

The TACO trade has also followed Trump’s recent statements about the Iran War. When he said, in a late-night Truth Social post, that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” if a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz was not immediately reached, many oil traders sat tight, assuming Trump would renege on his threat. He did. If Trump’s backdowns happen on a Tuesday, as on April 21, the internet explodes with “TACO Tuesday” comments.

However, the longer the crisis drags on, the harder real shortages will bite oil-importing economies worldwide. And there are reasons to expect the impasse between the US and Iran to continue. Trump’s instinct is to bully and bluster, but every time he attacks Iran or threatens to do so, oil prices rise (despite the muting effect of the TACO trade) and the stock market dips. Both trends are political kryptonite. However, it would be even worse politically for Trump if he were to accede to a long-term Iranian peace deal that looks like a defeat for America. So, the standoff persists, with the Strait of Hormuz blocked, 20% of world oil supplies offline, and the global economy held hostage.

The strait has been closed for over two months. Analysts say that if it remains shut to tanker traffic for months longer, oil prices could soar to $200, which would almost surely send the global economy into contraction.

Dow Derangement Syndrome

An acute Wile E. Coyote moment is also happening in global stock markets. Many people (including most investors) tend to think of stock prices as a barometer of the overall soundness of the economy. Others disagree, pointing out that stock prices just measure future profit expectations of listed companies, not current employment or wages, much less the health of the biosphere. Further, stock ownership is highly concentrated, so market booms often benefit only the wealthy. Nevertheless, the opinions of the rich tend to be amplified throughout society, so even many non-investors watch the Dow Jones and S&P 500. And, despite the Iran war and resulting higher oil prices, and despite warnings from experts about rising fertilizer costs and the possibility of global food shortages, the Dow seems to be doing just fine. The major market indexes dipped significantly between late February and late March but have recovered since then and are once again near record highs.

The market’s resilience is puzzling for another reason as well. Most investment action during the past couple of years has centered on artificial intelligence (AI). Nvidia, which makes computer chips for AI, is now the world’s most valuable company by market capitalization, even though the AI industry is struggling to be profitable. Many analysts say that AI is a classic financial bubble—and a historically big one.

So, are investors stupid, or what? A more nuanced take might be that they exhibit herd mentality, and that they tend to chase short-term profits, hoping to sell shares just before prices plunge.

Here’s another factor. According to some analysts, the markets are simply high on cash. Governments created enormous amounts of money to stanch problems created by the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and the Covid-19 epidemic, and much of that money eventually found its way to investors. When the US federal government racks up giant fiscal deficits, it is creating new money, much of which winds up inflating bubbles.

In short, the market runs on investor sentiment, which is now detached from both consumer sentiment and business prospects—as well as from long-term biophysical reality.

But sooner or later, reality imposes itself.

Look Down

In the cartoon, it’s not until Coyote looks down that he realizes his predicament. This sudden awareness triggers his fall.

Of course, in the real world, temporary ignorance can’t cancel gravity. Actual coyotes don’t hover until they glance groundward. However, the human economy can do something like that—because it’s a hybrid of a real-world component comprised of energy and material flows (which ultimately depend on nature), and an imaginary-world component comprised of money, prices, hype, and speculation. This hybrid semi-reality can run up ecological deficits and undermine the conditions of life for future generations while still maintaining affluence and entertainment for hundreds of millions of mostly clueless people. For now.

It’s our bigger, longer-playing Coyote moments to which we should be paying most attention—climate change, resource depletion, chemical pollution, and the disappearance of wild nature. Markets and prices are of little help in shifting our awareness in that direction: Cutting down an old-growth forest for timber can result in corporate profits and a bump in GDP, but the human and environmental impacts that will linger for generations don’t figure into this quarter’s P&L reports. We’re all dancing somewhere off the end of history’s biggest cliff, sensing that something isn’t quite right but blaming that sensation on people whose politics we disagree with. We do anything we can to avoid looking down.

Returning to the main subject of this article: Will oil prices skyrocket? Will Trump continue to TACO? Will the economy crater? Or will the US and Iran reach a deal and open the strait, so that normalcy can resume? Your guess is as good as anyone’s. But if you’re starting to have nagging worries, you’re not crazy and you’re not alone. Do something. Plant a vegetable garden. Talk to your neighbors about sharing tools and skills. Examine your oil dependency and see how you can reduce it. Imagine how your life might look if the economy were smaller, not bigger, and start making adjustments. Most of all, focus on building community with those around you.

When the lights go out in Havana, the foreign cameras arrive to film the darkness.

They come for the blackout glow: candles in apartment windows, families sleeping on balconies, mothers fanning infants through another airless night. They come for the line outside the pharmacy, the bus that never comes, the refrigerator gone warm.

They come for the darkness.

A recent CBS segment on Cuba offered viewers a familiar script: a “failed” island, an aging revolution, refugees in Florida, and Washington once again contemplating what to do with the place 90 miles away. But the segment was also built on an omission so large it swallowed the truth: that while these cameras speak of shortages and collapse, babies are dying under a policy designed to create both.

If the Cuban system is truly destined to fail on its own, why has so much power been invested in making sure it does?

A new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research has found that the expansion of US sanctions beginning in 2017 was likely the primary cause of a dramatic rise in infant mortality in Cuba. According to the report, Cuba’s infant mortality rate surged by 148% from 2018 to 2025. Had the rate remained stable, approximately 1,800 babies who died during those years would likely still be alive.

Read that again. Babies.

The report links the rise to the tightening of unilateral US coercive measures under the first Donald Trump administration, the continuation of most of those measures under Joe Biden, and further escalation under the second Trump administration. Instead of telling that story, prime-time segments like CBS recycle Cold War clichés.

In this segment, people are invited to remember prerevolutionary Cuba as a lost paradise. But beyond the casino lights were cane cutters; domestic workers; rural families without doctors; children without schools; Black Cubans denied the full rights, dignity, and opportunities the government claimed to promise; workers, surviving in an economy where much of the wealth flowed upward. For many Cubans, the revolution was a rupture with dependency.

It is common in US media to shrink the Cuban Revolution into one beard, one speech, one man. As if millions of lives, shaped by inequality, dictatorship, and foreign domination, could be reduced to nothing more than a personality cult. Fidel Castro was central to Cuba’s history, but so were peasants who wanted land, teachers who crossed mountains to teach literacy, doctors who stayed in poor neighborhoods, workers who believed sovereignty meant something more than a flag.

Like any other country, Cuba has real internal problems. Bureaucracy exists. Economic errors exist. Frustration is real. Emigration is real. And yet, these realities are routinely seized upon by Washington as the ready-made justification for intervention, pressure, and policies that deepen the very conditions they claim to condemn.

For decades, the United States has built an external wall around the island brick by brick. Sanctions. Financial penalties. Shipping restrictions. Fuel pressure. Banking obstacles. Threats against companies that trade. Punishments for third countries. Obstacles to medicine, parts, credit, investment, and entrepreneurs. Policy papers described the logic openly generations ago: Create hardship, provoke desperation, generate political unrest.

This is where media like CBS plays a critical role by showing the suffering while obscuring the system that produces it. By rendering US policy as background noise rather than as an active force shaping the very reality being filmed. And this is not an isolated editorial choice. It is a pattern.

But when infant deaths rise sharply during a period of intensified external strangulation, honesty demands more than repeating those talking points. It requires naming cause and responsibility. And it requires asking a more uncomfortable question: If the Cuban system is truly destined to fail on its own, why has so much power been invested in making sure it does?

You don’t spend decades trying to suffocate something that poses no alternative. Why isolate, sanction, and punish a model you believe is irrelevant? Unless the fear is not that it will fail. Unless the fear is that it might, even with all its contradictions, suggest a different way of organizing society. One where people are not reduced to clients, markets, or consumers to be captured, but honored as human beings to be nourished, protected, and allowed to flourish.

When I walked through Havana during a blackout, I saw neighbors calling across courtyards, playing dominoes by candlelight. Someone on the corner had a speaker with half a battery and enough music for three buildings. Two young people kissed along the Malecón. Someone cursed the government. Someone cursed the blockade. Someone cursed both. Someone laughed. I saw human beings remain stubbornly human.

Why does CBS not cover that? Because they film the darkness. But the real story is not the candle in the window. It is the hand that cut the fuel, the policy that constricted the hospital, the silence that normalized preventable deaths, and the infants whose names will never appear in the broadcast.

When you grow up in this country one thing that’s wired into you early is that the government can’t do anything right. The free market is the only way things get done. Public is a dirty word. By the time you’re an adult, it sits in your head like it’s always been there. You don’t question it any more than you question gravity.

The problem is that it puts so many solutions out of reach and out of our imagination.

If we look around at the things that make our society work and our lives better, we can see we’ve been duped from the start. This didn’t all come from some pure, untouched version of the free market. Our roads, our bridges, libraries, fire departments, the internet, Social Security. All of these things happened because we came together as people and decided we wanted them.

These weren’t accidents. They weren’t side effects of private competition. They came out of a period when ordinary people had power. Real power. Power to demand that the systems they paid for actually delivered. The government was the instrument of that power. Not a side player. Not a check writer. Not a referee. A doer. A builder of things, on behalf of the people who built it.

In 1981, more than 40% of the hospitals in this country were owned by federal, state, or local government. Cities and counties ran their own hospitals.

That’s the idea we don’t name anymore. The idea that the public has the right to organize, to own, and to demand. That’s the competing idea. And without it, the system has no counterweight.

That tension mattered. It forced decisions. It forced investment. It forced the country to build.

Now that pressure is gone. Not completely, but enough that it doesn’t function anymore. There’s no real counterweight shaping outcomes. And what you’re left with is a system that just expands in the direction of profit. Profit over efficiency. Profit over outcomes. Profit over people.

You can see it most clearly in healthcare. We spend nearly six trillion dollars a year on it. Six trillion. And we are not the healthiest country on earth. We are not even close. We are paying the most and getting the least. That’s not an efficiency problem. That’s a power problem.

We’ve run this experiment for decades now. Consolidation, extraction, pricing that has no relationship to reality. It’s not competitive in any meaningful sense. It’s a closed loop. The product isn’t working. People feel it every day. They don’t need a study to tell them.

And here’s the thing nobody remembers. We used to own a lot of this. In 1981, more than 40% of the hospitals in this country were owned by federal, state, or local government. Cities and counties ran their own hospitals. States ran academic medical centers. The federal government ran the VA, military hospitals, the Indian Health Service. We the people owned the means of caring for ourselves.

That’s what made the whole system function. Not the charity of it. The leverage of it. We knew what it cost to set a bone. We knew what it cost to do a bypass. We knew what it cost to deliver a baby. Because we ran the hospitals where it happened. We paid the salaries. We bought the supplies. The numbers were public and the numbers were real.

You can’t lie to someone about the price of something they already produce. Public ownership wasn’t an alternative to the market. It was the thing that kept the market honest. It was the public’s seat at the table. It was the public’s power over the price. Strip it out and the private side stops competing and starts extracting. That’s not a hypothetical. That’s what happened. We sold the seat. We lost the power. The bills came due.

There was a time when we knew certain things were too important to leave entirely to the market. We didn’t let private companies own nuclear weapons.

Today that public share is closer to 15%. Most of the rest has been sold off, shut down, or absorbed into chains. What’s left is doing the hardest work the private system refuses to do. Public hospitals still handle most of the trauma care and most of the burn care in this country’s cities. They are the safety net. They are also the proof that we know how to do this. We just decided to stop.

Same thing starting to happen with AI. Something as transformative as the Industrial Revolution, arguably bigger, is being built and controlled by a handful of private actors. Massive margins. Massive control. No real public stake. No real competition in the way we used to understand it. No seat at the table for the rest of us.

There was a time when we knew certain things were too important to leave entirely to the market. We didn’t let private companies own nuclear weapons. We didn’t let them build private armies with that kind of power. We understood the scale of the risk. The consequence of getting it wrong.

AI sits in that category. Healthcare sits in that category. These are not normal sectors. They shape everything else. And the question of who owns them is the question of who has power in the country that comes next.

It’s not about fairness. Fuck fairness. This is about power. About whether ordinary people have any leverage left in a system that has spent forty years stripping it from them. About whether the country we live in is something we shape or something that happens to us.

Here are the numbers. The top 20% of earners in this country now account for nearly 60% of all consumer spending. Consumer spending is about two-thirds of GDP. So a small slice of households is propping up the entire economy. And the jobs most exposed to AI displacement, finance, law, software, analysis, corporate work, are concentrated in exactly that slice.

The same people whose spending holds the economy up are the ones whose work is about to be automated.

That’s not a labor problem. That’s a structural problem. You can’t retrain your way out of it. You can’t UBI your way out of it at the scale required. The CEOs warning you about 20-30% unemployment are running companies with 40% margins. They’re not wrong about the disruption. They’re wrong about it being something the private sector can absorb.

The market is facing a situation it cannot handle.

The market is the thing that brought us here.

Here’s the part people don’t say out loud. A future of plenty is possible. Not in some abstract, theoretical way. In a very real, material sense.

Health. Wellness. Safety. Time. Travel. Freedom. Education. Meaning. Food. Clothing. Shelter. All high quality and abundant. Enough for everyone.

Most people want that. You can feel it when you talk to them. But they don’t say it plainly because it sounds naive. It sounds like something you’re supposed to grow out of. Like if you take it seriously, you won’t be taken seriously.

Here’s the part people don’t say out loud. A future of plenty is possible. Not in some abstract, theoretical way. In a very real, material sense.

It reminds me a little of The Matrix. The idea that a version of the world that actually worked for people would be rejected because it didn’t match what they believed was real or possible. So instead, we settle into something worse and call it reality.

I grew up in East Tennessee, in the Bible Belt. And one of the things that always stuck with me was how religion was used. Not as a mission to improve people’s lives through effort and sacrifice, but as a way to sort people. To rank them. To separate. To justify who had what and why.

That same instinct shows up here. The idea that wanting a system that delivers for everyone is childish. That building something better is unrealistic. That you’re supposed to accept what exists and work within it, even if it’s clearly failing.

Here’s what gets forgotten. This country has done it before. Not once. Many times.

The New York City subway was built and is owned by the public. The interstate highway system is public. The Hoover Dam, the TVA, every river dam that powers the South and the West, public. The arsenal that won the Second World War was organized and largely paid for by the federal government. Rural electrification was a public project because no private company would run wire to a farmhouse for a price the farmer could pay. The internet started as a public research program. Public universities trained the engineers and doctors and scientists who built the modern American economy. Medicare is a public health insurance program that works better and costs less than what the private market offers people under 65.

Every one of those is a story about power. The public looked at a sector that mattered too much to leave to private capital, and the public took it. Owned it. Ran it. Set the terms. Made it deliver.

This is not foreign. This is not theoretical. This is the history of our country.

What comes next has to be built in public, owned in public, and run in public. The market had its turn at healthcare. The market is having its turn at AI. We’ve seen how this ends.

If we want a different future, we have to build it.

That’s not a metaphor.

We need hospitals, clinics, wellness centers. That means training tens of thousands of doctors, nurses, mental health professionals, dentists, physical trainers. Not hoping the market decides to produce them. Deciding to produce them. Owning them. Running them. Setting the price by knowing the cost.

What comes next has to be built in public, owned in public, and run in public. The market had its turn at healthcare. The market is having its turn at AI. We’ve seen how this ends.

We need millions of homes. New cities. New towns. That means builders, electricians, plumbers, framers, engineers. It means supply chains based in America that can deliver materials at scale. It means breaking the leverage that landlords and developers have spent decades accumulating.

We need to transition energy. Renewable generation. Storage. Transmission. A modern grid that can handle it. High-speed rail. A competitive EV industry that isn’t just a handful of companies protected by scale and capital. Independence from utilities that have spent a century turning a public good into a private toll booth.

Every one of these is a sector where the public used to have power and gave it up. Every one is a sector where the public can take that power back, if it decides to.

There is more to build in this country than we currently have people trained to build it. The bottleneck is not technology. It is not money. It is the decision to organize the effort. Those decisions will never be made by the market.

Solutions are going to take public action and competition. A new way of thinking.

Real work. Coordination. Training. Time. Effort. Change.

It’s a shame but nobody is coming to do this for us.

What are the indicators of a presumed democracy either faltering or fortifying itself against the buffeting or destructive forces of dictatorial autocracy, plutocracy, and oligarchy?

Certainly, the commercial or corporate economy has developed thousands of indicators to ascertain whether the overall economy or its many subeconomies are getting better or worse. Far more than GDP, employment, profits, or inventory levels, these indicators spot trends at astounding microlevels in real time.

Who is developing the indicators for the civic community? Some groups inform us about voter turnout in micro-terms or how much commercial campaign money is flowing to candidates, or the sinking levels of local journalism, etc. But these indicators are far too few and too inadequate.

Let’s try one category of indicators that could be very useful for an introspective civic community and its supporters. The question is: “When conditions worsen, does the resistance get stronger or comparatively weaker?” Democracy in its concrete manifestations for people’s livelihoods, preparedness, and posterity decays or recovers and deepens, depending on the answer.

Space precludes citing more instances of civic resistance getting weaker while the exploiters and greedhounds get bolder, richer, more ravaging, and out of control.

The outlook is not good. With the advent of dictator Donald Trump and his dangerously unstable, violent, egomaniacal personality, the resistance from civic society has not risen to the deadly challenge either quantitatively or qualitatively.

Examples: Are many more new citizen groups (call them startups) forming all over the country to push for the removal of Trump from office via Impeachment? Are there expanding demonstrations of massive revulsions over Trump wrecking, weakening, and endangering America and the world? No. Three demonstrations with the weak moniker of No Kings, without follow-up civic mobilizations in congressional districts, doesn’t cut the mustard.

A detailed report in March by the respected V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden concluded that Trump and his administration are dismantling democracy in the US at a speed that “is unprecedented in modern history.” (See Common Dreams: “Trump Is Dismantling US Democracy at a Speed ‘Unprecedented in Modern History’: Watchdog”.)

The institutional resistance of checks and balances collapsed before January 20, 2025, but has worsened continually since that woeful day—Congress, the Supreme Court, and many state governors and legislators AWOL or actually enabling Trump.

Let’s get into specifics on the ground. Advertising dollars are controlling more content on and access to the media than ever, with fewer public critiques, regulatory action, or resistance from civic watchdog groups.

More programming and promotions are harming children (via smartphones especially) through direct marketing to children bypassing parental control than ever, yet there are few adequately staffed civic groups or parents countering this assault. There are outcries in the media, state legislatures, and congressional hearings, but the intensity of these electronic child molesters (pushing violence, pornography, junk food and drink, and mental anguish) continues without countervailing enforced regulations and substantial powerful civic and educational responses and protections of our vulnerable children.

Our public airwaves and public lands are under more corporate dominance than ever, yet the Federal Communications Commission, the federal forest and land management protectors are either asleep at the wheel or they are supporting corrosive corporatism. The public interest watchdog presence is almost zero on the public’s access to radio and television, and is overwhelmed by the relentless encroachment on the public lands by fossil fuel, mining, timber, and other commercial predators.

A swollen, unaudited Pentagon budget fueling the ever more aggressive American Military Empire has too few civic organizations resisting the annual violation of federal law requiring all federal agencies to provide an annual auditable budget to Congress.

The burgeoning corporate welfare subsidies, handouts, and taxpayer bailouts (government-guaranteed capitalism) are running amok. Large companies and mismanaged corporations go to Washington, not to bankruptcy court, which is the common option for small businesses. The conservative National Taxpayer Union reflects passivity.

More dark money PACs corrupting electoral campaigns has not provoked new civic groups of any size to stop this devastating selling of our elections that twists people’s votes and blocks progressive agendas. Even though 842 local government resolutions calling for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United have been passed since the 2010 Supreme Court Ruling; 22 States and Washington DC have called for a Constitutional Amendment; and 121 Members of Congress are co-sponsoring legislation to overturn Citizens United, much more needs to be done.

Gambling is now accessible everywhere and spreading from college and professional athletics, to youngsters’ smartphones. The greedy “gaming” industry and its recent sleazy cousin—the “predictions market”—are a menace and out of control. Where is the countervailing civic power to oppose this decaying of our culture? Organized religion—long the bulwark—mostly gave up its role in countering the gambling craze years ago.

After 12 students and one teacher were killed in 1999 at the Columbine Colorado High School many American families demanded gun safety controls. The story of this tragedy was all over the media for days. Now there is an average of one mass shooting a day while Congress yawns. According to the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence, “In 2022, 48,204 people died due to gun violence in the US, the second highest total ever recorded. Each day, an average of 132 people died from gun violence—one death every 11 minutes.” Again, no new powerful civic organizations are being started.

There are more tax escapes for big business and the super rich than ever. Major profitable corporations, like Tesla, paid no federal income tax last year. Meanwhile the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) budget shrinks, and demands for rigorous congressional hearings and investigations go nowhere. No start-up civic groups, other than Patriotic Millionaires. Where are the new start-ups to join with existing tax reform groups to stop the attack on the IRS? Candidates for office don’t spend much time talking about these gigantic tax escapees to mobilize focused public opinion to stop tax abuses by corporations and wealthy individuals which expand deficits and starve public budgets.

Space precludes citing more instances of civic resistance getting weaker while the exploiters and greedhounds get bolder, richer, more ravaging, and out of control.

Our Ralph Nader Radio Hour will soon devote a program to the absence of civil society indicators and the collapsing civic resistance to the overthrow of representative government by the corporate state.

Stay tuned and, by your questions and demands, get your politicians to make this deterioration front and center in their campaigning for this November’s election.

The Suez crisis in 1957 was the end of the road for Britain’s 200-year role as a global rule-maker. From then on, it became a rule-taker. The recent political nostalgia for a different England pedalled by Brexiteers, that elegiac world of warm beer, sandwiches and Spitfires, was the world before Suez. The crisis was a monumental cock-up involving Britain, France and Israel, and a botched attack on Egypt to ensure European control over the critical Suez Canal. The fiasco resulted in the Egyptian nationalist leader, Gamal Nasser, having full authority over the canal.

Following a dressing down by new kid on the block the US, Britain and France withdrew with their tails between their imperialist legs. In the story of the global fight against colonialism, Suez was a famed victory for the colonised. It constituted the ultimate asymmetric war story where, like Iran and the Straits of Hormuz today, possession is nine-tenths of the law. Geography was on the Egyptian side.

Suez changed the global view of Britain for good. From then on, the risk of being associated with or adjacent to Britain in everything from geopolitics to finance increased. For more than 100 years, the UK had been a sure thing: the City of London was the epicentre of global finance; sterling was the world’s reserve currency; and the interest rates on UK gilts—the interest at which the UK government borrowed—was regarded as the global risk-free rate of return.

This meant that whatever else happened in the world, the UK government was seen as always good for its money, and would never default. With sterling pre-eminent, investors could shove their money into UK gilts and go on holiday, safe in the knowledge that it was a risk-free bet. In short, the UK manufactured sterling assets and the rest of world bought them, without question.

In finance, this extraordinary privilege is called credibility. After Suez, UK credibility gradually eroded, politically and financially—not overnight, but slowly and surely.

Could something similar happen to the US following Donald Trump’s war on Iran?

Let’s focus on finance.

Over the past few decades, despite all this talk of trade wars and the US’s inability to manufacture merchandise that the world wants, there is one product, made in the US, which the world wants in huge quantities: the American dollar. The Americans know the rest of the world wants American assets – stocks, bonds, companies and real estate. All of these are priced in dollars, so the Yanks are simply printing dollars and the world is buying those greenbacks. The process works like a resource find.

Other countries find oil that the rest of the world wants. The Americans have dollars, which they print for free and the world buys. Manufacturing these dollars is similar to turning on an oil spigot. Foreign money buys dollars to buy US assets, in the same way as foreign money flows into Saudi Arabia to buy oil. US government debt is above $31 trillion (€26.5 trillion), and foreigners hold about $9.5 trillion of US Treasuries. In order to get their hands on these American assets, foreigners must keep dollars handy, and therefore the US dollar still makes up 56.77 per cent of all official reserves all over the world.

After Suez, UK credibility gradually eroded, politically and financially—not overnight, but slowly and surely. Could something similar happen to the US following Donald Trump’s war on Iran?

Over a few decades, this process has led the dollar to be higher in value than it would otherwise be, plus it means the returns to US financial assets and its adjacent industries rise relative to other American industries. In time, finance elbows out manufacturing at home, while the expensive dollar makes it profitable for corporate America to relocate its industry overseas to cheaper and more tax-friendly locations, such as Ireland. Everyone wins—from the finance bros to the corporate leaders, the shareholders, and the real estate owners in urban America where the finance industry is based. Everyone, that is, but the blue-collar workers made redundant in the hollowed-out rust belt cities. They reacted slowly, but when they did a new political movement was born.

MAGA was birthed by the death of American manufacturing, itself destroyed by the expensive dollar, itself the result of foreigners’ insatiable demand for particular American assets and successive US administrations preferring to bet on things rather than make things. The US swapped manufacturing stuff for manufacturing dollars. The end result is that the US is both strong and weak, robust and fragile, stable and unstable, at the same time. A huge amount of the world’s capital is now over-concentrated in the US, as it used to be in Britain, and it remains there based on the assumption that American credibility will remain unimpeached.

The world has bet big time on the US. But as anyone who knows the form will attest, when you get an overconcentration of bets on one horse, your risk increases exponentially, while your potential return also diminishes significantly.

All this money flowing into the US, and all that buying of American dollars has led to the unsustainable situation whereby the US accounts for about 60 per cent of global listed equities, about half of private capital and 40 per cent of global bond markets. Yet it represents only about 4 per cent of the world’s population, 2 per cent of the global population under the age of 18, about 9 per cent of global growth, 13 per cent of world trade and one-sixth of world GDP. Something must give.

It is not that the finance world will turn on the US, but any risk assessment suggests that not having all your eggs in one basket is a good idea. Even before the Iran war, the supportive reasons for betting big on the US were beginning to wane. For years, the country was supported by falling interest rates, lower taxes, quantitative easing and falling wages relative to profits. All these factors made the US a place to park money. Profits rose and valuations soared, attracting in yet more capital. All this drove the return on US equities above US GDP, seducing foreign investors. In the years since 2008, foreigners have tripled down on US stocks, investing about $20 trillion in US companies. As the dollar rose on foreign exchanges, profits from the US expressed in foreign currencies exploded.

At the same time as foreigners increased their bets on the US in general, the country increased its bets on a particular domestic sector: tech. We have seen a doubling concentration of global risk in a few companies. Since the end of the pandemic, just seven companies account for more than half of total US stock market returns. The top 10 stocks now make up 40 per cent of the index.

One of the central assumptions underlying all this movement of money into the US was that the people who are making the big decisions about where the US is going are sensible, rational and informed. They wouldn’t start an unwinnable war without clear objectives or an extra strategy. They wouldn’t be accused of insider trading, betting personally on the timing of an airstrike that they were about to order. They wouldn’t risk the US’s military reputation by being seen to do another country’s dirty work. When they start a war, surely they’d win it? And if they didn’t, would they blame their staunchest allies, against whom they have already started a trade war?

When such questions are being asked, with so much foreign capital overinvested in America, the US’s credibility begins to erode. Once this starts, as the UK experienced after Suez, it’s almost impossible to recover.

Many of the people who’ve been working for years on climate issues assembled this week in Santa Marta, Colombia for a conference on how to get off fossil fuels. Sponsored by the Colombians and the Dutch, it was an outgrowth of December’s unhappy COP negotiations in Brazil: the 50 or so nations that actually wanted to move decisively past coal, gas, and oil scheduled a meeting of their own. By all accounts it was a kinder, gentler version of the regular climate talks, in part because fossil fuel lobbyists (who have become the largest “country” at the regular negotiations) were not welcome. The wonderful Irish diplomat Mary Robinson put it well: “COPs are more formal, negotiators have their lines and they will not cross them and it’s so different here,” she said, adding that participants “have felt more human together.”

By lucky accident, the gathering took on extra meaning because it coincided with President Donald Trump’s absurd misadventure in Iran. All of a sudden there was a new reason, past the destruction of the planet, for getting off fossil fuel: Gas is too damn expensive, assuming you can get it all. What we’ve done in the Strait of Hormuz is one of those accidents that changes history: As the head of the International Energy Agency, the venerable Fatih Birol, said last week:

The vase is broken, the damage is done—it will be very difficult to put the pieces back together. This will have permanent consequences for the global energy markets for years to come.

The pieces of that broken vase are scattered across the planet, especially in Asia and Africa, where fuel prices are soaring and fertilizer made with fossil fuel is suddenly either unavailable or ruinously expensive. As Reuters reported this week:

Agricultural bodies, including the International Grains Council, are already cutting their forecasts for the next harvests. And the United Nations, which is trying to negotiate shipping access for fertiliser through the Gulf, has sounded ⁠the alarm over food security in developing nations.

In 2022, after the invasion of Ukraine, high fertiliser costs contributed to exacerbated hunger in poor, import-dependent countries, and analysts say regions like East Africa are again vulnerable.

Australia may offer an early indication of the impact on production of global staples.

In the bread-basket state of Western Australia, one industry group now expects the wheat planting area to drop by 14% as growers shift away from the fertiliser-intensive, low-margin grain.

But the good news, of course, is that these countries are rapidly putting together a new and sturdier vase, this time based on energy from the sun and wind that doesn’t need importing. The Santa Marta conference focused on the financing needed to make this switch work—a very real problem, but in the face of the desperation caused by events in the Mideast those who can are going ahead. As Wing Kuang reported, “Chinese EV manufacturers reported an 82.6% rise in month-on-month sales in March.” As the business pages of the India Times reported yesterday:

Increasing penetration of ⁠EVs, especially ⁠two- and three-wheelers, and rapid deployment of Battery Electric Solar Systems across Southeast Asia and South Asia is now viewed as guaranteed by those in the industry.

The optimism was palpable at this week's Asia Battery Raw Materials & Recycling Conference in Hanoi, where much of the discussion among delegates was more how the region was going to source sufficient raw materials to make batteries, rather than how to increase demand from current levels.

That all this counts as irony is the one delicious lining to all the pain and suffering. Donald Trump, purchased underling of the fossil fuel industry, has managed through his own colossal incompetence and ego to nip the hand that feeds his bank account. Yes, at the moment the industry is soaring: BP reported the kind of grotesque returns Thursday that should have any rational government reaching for a windfall profits tax:

Maja Darlington, a climate campaigner for Greenpeace UK, said the war had been “an entirely predictable disaster for everyone except the oil industry. BP’s profits are booming, with Trump’s bombs bringing billions for them and bigger bills for us.”

But those billions are in the here and now; in the slightly longer term the opposite is happening. Big Oil’s only real growth strategy has been exporting liquefied natural gas to Asia. Bloomberg checked in the other day on how that’s going:

The near-closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the serious damage sustained by Qatar’s LNG export plant has sent prices higher and buyers scrambling for alternatives. Gas’ reputation as a reliable and affordable energy source has taken a serious hit, and plans for its speedy adoption in Asia’s developing nations have been derailed, with potentially long-lasting consequences.

“Every day this is extended, prices elevate, the market tightens, and demand destruction happens,” said Masanori Odaka, an analyst at Rystad Energy. “The longer this lasts, the more structural it becomes.”

Bloomberg News spoke to more than two dozen executives, traders, and analysts across Asia, who painted a picture of a region that had been thought of as the future of LNG, but is now rapidly losing faith in the super-chilled fuel. Most requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to media.

Importers in India and Bangladesh are already rethinking whether to keep the fuel as a center piece in future strategies. Countries like Vietnam and the Philippines that were expected to become large growth markets, are looking alternatives. A planned gas power project in Vietnam is looking to switch to wind and solar plus batteries. In Thailand policymakers are pushing for more renewables.

This is an appropriate reaction. Cheap renewable energy had already begun to fuel the remarkable energy transition I’ve been chronicling over the last four years in these pages. Now it’s been supercharged by events, and responsible leaders around the world are drawing the obvious conclusions. As Selwin Hart, the UN’s envoy to the Santa Marta talks, put it in his address to the gathering:

Renewables offer something fossil fuels never did: stability and sovereignty. There are no embargoes, price shocks, or tariffs.

But that’s not been the reaction, of course, in this country, where energy policy just keeps getting stupider. Read, for instance, Elizabeth Kolbert’s masterful takedown of Environmental Protection Agency commissioner Lee Zeldin:

In a little more than a year, Zeldin has transformed the EPA from an agency devoted to protecting human health and the environment into one that, more or less openly, sides with polluters…The EPA has not only abandoned its own efforts to rein in greenhouse-gas emissions; it has stepped in to prevent states from taking action. It has come out officially, if astonishingly, as pro-coal.

But here’s what’s astonishing. The person that Zeldin very nearly beat for governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, has been embarked on an environmental demolition project of her own. At the precise moment that gas prices are soaring, and as a new and supercharged El Niño brings climate concerns back to the center of public consciousness, Hochul is doing her very best to sink New York’s landmark climate law and stick the Empire State with more expensive gas. She’s not showing the policymaking chops of her peers in far poorer places like Pakistan or Bangladesh.

Donald Trump, purchased underling of the fossil fuel industry, has managed through his own colossal incompetence and ego to nip the hand that feeds his bank account.

The background here is long, and like all things in New York politics, opaque. Suffice it to say that New Yorkers passed a reasonably ambitious climate law, and that the governor has not done much to enact it. If you want some background, the redoubtable David Roberts interviewed the equally redoubtable Pete Sikora, who explains:

The governor just took everything that the Climate Action Council came up with—her own appointees—and ignored it. That’s the capsule summary. They didn’t do the policies, they didn’t do the regulations, they didn’t do the things that would have implemented the law. They did a few things here and there, but by and large, nothing that would have implemented the law correctly was done. Little bits and pieces. For example, the state passed ending oil and gas in all new construction. That’s fantastic. That’s really good.

As you pointed out, distributed solar is a real bright spot. The numbers are moving there. It’s good. The CHPE project is about to connect. That’s a big transmission project from Canadian hydropower to New York City. Very cool too. There’s good things happening. But by and large, the long list of things in the climate plan was not done—90% of it not done. The centerpiece was Cap and Invest. The governor pulled that back at the last second the same way she did on congestion pricing. It’s in this weird limbo where it’s paused now.

If you want a comprehensive list of the opportunities she’s missed, try here. Most political pros I’ve talked to—and I talked to some more this week because I was in New York this week to lobby on the state’s solar laws—seem baffled by what Hochul’s up to. She’s not in a tough election fight—after Trump pushed Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) out of the GOP primary she faces only a Zeldin-lite Long Island pol, and in a year when an onion bialy could win in blue New York. My guess is that she’s about a year behind on her talking points; in the wake of Kamala Harris’ loss, a certain kind of moderate Dem decided that “affordability” was the new watchword and brought the idea that talking about climate was a mistake. (Not everyone went along—Gov. JB Pritzker in Illinois, for instance, has kept up the state’s clean energy momentum).

In New York’s case this may have been magnified by the sudden rise of Zohran Mamdani, who talked about affordability—but with a particular set of policies attached to it that made it more than rhetorical. For Hochul, an all-out push for wind and solar and batteries would have been wise since they are in fact affordable, but it was easier to go with the fracked gas lobby. So she’s fast-tracking new pipelines—in essence building the very infrastructure that New Yorkers rejected when they shut down fracking in the state. It’s all a tragic muddle, benefiting only Big Oil. Indeed, as Colin Kinniburgh reported last month:

A national industry group, led by some of the country’s largest pipeline builders and a slew of other gas interests, has recently entered the fray, tapping former state politicians to help advance Gov. Kathy Hochul’s “all of the above” energy strategy. Top of their agenda: pressing pause on the state’s climate targets.

New Yorkers can do a couple of things. One is press their state legislators to resist Hochul’s gutting of the climate law. The other is to lobby those same legislators to pass the ASAP and SUNNY laws, which would at least speed up solar permitting and allow balcony solar in the state.

And all of us can do a better job of demanding real action from our blue state leaders. Because this drift is not confined to New York—in Hawaii, for instance, Democratic Gov. Josh Green has called for a huge new liquefied natural gas project to supply the state’s electricity, ignoring the fact that the Aloha State is bathed in sunlight and washed by the steady trade winds that make it so delightful. Again, this is exactly the opposite tack that leaders across the rest of the world are taking, and in both states it will saddle residents with gas projects for decades to come.

I wrote about “climate-hushing” last week, and decisions like this are the inevitable result—on purely political grounds alone they surrender the high ground on what will be the most important issue of our century. And they surrender the gift that cheap renewables provide to both planet and consumer. They are exactly the opposite of what scientists told the Santa Marta conference was required—an end to new fossil fuel expansion. The next time a climate disaster strikes these states their governors will mouth the usual pieties, but they won’t mean much.

On three major occasions in President Trump’s second term, his opponents, including many elected officials, have taken to the streets under the banner of “No Kings.” And yet just this week, King Charles III spoke before our joint houses of Congress, where his comments about governmental checks and balances drew a standing ovation from everyone there.

A contradiction lies here, between our history and our perception of it. The truth is, the law that made kings untouchable—that “the king can do no wrong”—has never gone away in the United States. Instead, it multiplied. Today we call it “sovereign immunity.”

The Declaration of Independence blamed the King for its grievances, claiming his actions showed an “absolute Despotism” and “absolute Tyranny over these States.” But the taxes it complained about came from Parliament, which in 1688 had subordinated the King’s political role to itself and its Prime Minister. True, the monarch retained a total legislative veto (among other powers), but it last invoked that power in 1708. Colonial complaints about the King not recognizing colonial legislatures suggest the opposite of the grievance—a monarchical commitment against tyranny, by declining to override and usurp Parliament’s powers via royal whim.

Describing the 1789 Constitution, Alexander Hamilton wrote that, except for a few important “particulars, the power of the President will resemble equally that of the king of Great Britain.” Some changes shed the aristocracy; others infused more checks and balances, like making the veto power conditional. As for the right of kings, Hamilton argued that the impeachment power of Congress addressed it, because an impeached president would be subject to prosecution “in the ordinary course of law.” Unfortunately for us, history did not walk that line.

The 1789 Constitution also split sovereign power between federal and state governments. These twin powers then pulled a trick: they successfully argued that the special right of kings had transferred to them. Courts applied this special right to political subdivisions, like counties and municipalities, and to those who act on their behalf, like legislators, judges, clerks, bureaucrats, and police. Tocqueville thought these subdivisions “mitigat[ed] tyranny,” viewing “townships, municipal bodies, and counties” as “concealed break-waters, which check or part the tide of popular excitement.” But by permitting them sovereign immunity, the opposite happened: our myriad government bodies (sometimes four or five to a person) now each hold the right of kings. Instead of ridding ourselves of kingly power, we multiplied it.

Courts continue to expand these special powers. In 2024, the right-wing majority of the US Supreme Court confirmed that presidential immunity insulates the officeholder from criminal responsibility, so long as the alleged acts happened while carrying out official duties. Last March, the Court expanded the immunity available to law enforcement. Now, police officers have immunity from suit for any constitutional violation not explicitly addressed by an appellate or high court. And a federal appeals court recently held that governments have no general duty to compensate a bystander when law enforcement destroys their property in the course of their duties. If police break down your door, in error or not, you must pay for the fix.

We don't need courts to tell us these things. We see government officials acting above the law every day, even in incidents as small as police ignoring parking rules or blaring through stoplights into oncoming traffic, just to then turn their lights off. Rules for thee, but not for me. While we still have the right of kings, we don't have to keep it.

If we’re serious about addressing protections for misconduct and abuses of power, ending these special rights—originally justified as a divine right—should be our top priority. We have the tools to do it. Governments may waive and disclaim their special rights through legislation, and many have done that in limited doses. We should move forward to end the special right altogether, which we can accomplish through legislation at local, state, and federal levels. For a sound first step, Congress could reintroduce and pass the Ending Qualified Immunity Act, which would strip these special rights from law enforcement in civil-rights cases.

And most fundamentally, we should recognize that we have not ended the rule of kings just yet. Abuses of power and protection against accountability under the rule of law aren’t of a bygone era, and the monarchy didn't take its special rights with it when it left. Sadly, the powers of kings and queens were left behind, written into our laws under a different name.

Uptown wakes up before the rest of New York even opens its eyes. Walk Broadway from 125th to 168th, up through Dyckman, as I have, and you'll see it: The bodega coffee grabbed on the run, the crosstown bus packed before dawn, people clocking into work while downtown is still asleep. These are the people who built our city. Not the CEOs, real estate developers, or the politicians who show up every two to four years with fliers and false promises. The movement fighting for their dignity has always lived here—on these buses and these street corners.

Every May 1, we honor them. May Day, or International Workers' Day, was created from needless state violence. In 1884, American workers went on strike to win an eight-hour workday. As the deadline approached, a protest in Chicago turned deadly, with police firing into the crowd and arresting seven workers who, after a sham trial, were executed. The bosses thought that would be the end of it. They were wrong. Workers fought for and won the right to an eight-hour workday.

Here in Harlem, Washington Heights, and Kingsbridge, May Day isn’t an abstract history lesson, it’s a mirror. This is a day to honor the transit workers, nurses, teachers, laborers, and caregivers who have always refused to accept less than they deserve and risked everything to fight for a better future for the next generation. They show us what's possible when working people come together, across generations, race, gender, and culture, and demand a dignified life.

May Day reminds us of something simple and profound: Uptown is a union town. It always has been.

I want to build power for the people on that crosstown bus before dawn who never get thanked for keeping our city running and are told to be grateful for what little they have.

New York, and Uptown especially, has become a stronghold of union power. It was in Harlem, during the Harlem Renaissance, that A. Philip Randolph founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters—the first Black-led labor union in American history. It was in Washington Heights and Spanish Harlem where Dominican and Puerto Rican immigrant women transformed the garment industry, becoming so essential to the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union that by the 1950s, the union published its paper, Justicia, entirely in Spanish. And it was in the Bronx that Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke exposed the Bronx Slave Market, where domestic workers, most of them Black women, were paid as little as 15 cents an hour and subjected to workplace harassment and abuse. Their conditions were so appalling that it sparked city-wide organizing to protect domestic workers. This is my community’s inheritance.

That tradition is still alive in our streets today. In January 2026, 70 years after 1199 Service Employees International Union's historic 46-day strike at Uptown hospitals, hundreds of unionized NY State Nurses Association (NYSNA) nurses walked off the job at NewYork-Presbyterian on 168th Street and at hospitals across our community. They stood on their picket lines from dawn to dusk, through a brutally cold January, fighting starvation wages and conditions so unsafe that patients were being put at risk. After 41 days of striking and organizing, they won. That's the Uptown way.

From the factory floor to the hospital room to the living room, Uptown is still at the center of the labor movement. I think about this legacy when people ask me why I'm running for Congress. The honest answer is: I'm not sure I had a choice.

When you grow up as the daughter of Dominican immigrants and watch your parents work multiple jobs and come home exhausted, see your neighbors get pushed out, watch politicians blame the vulnerable instead of the corporations robbing them blind, all while sending their tax dollars to drop bombs on babies, you organize and fight back. And eventually, the question stops being why run and starts being how could I not?

Congress was not built for us. It was built to manage us. It was built to keep our labor, our rent checks, and our votes flowing to people who have never had to choose between rent and groceries, all while allowing the people who are the foundation of our city to fall through the cracks. But here's what the establishment never understood about Uptown and The Bronx: We don't wait for permission.

That's the legacy I am fighting to protect in Congress. I am a proud card-carrying United Auto Workers member. I've picketed alongside NYSNA nurses on 168th Street and Mount Sinai Morningside. I've fought with Student Workers of Columbia to protect their peers from harassment by the university and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In Congress, I will fight to pass the PRO Act so every worker can organize without fear. I will push to fund public housing, cancel medical debt, and end the forever wars that drain our communities to pad the pockets of defense contractors. I want to build power for the people on that crosstown bus before dawn who never get thanked for keeping our city running and are told to be grateful for what little they have. They built New York and deserve everything it has to offer.

May Day is a call to action. The workers of Uptown and The Bronx have been making the demand for a better life for over a century but Washington has ignored their demands for too long. I'm running to make sure it finally has an answer.

On April 29, the Supreme Court voted 6-3 along ideological lines to weaken Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate based on race, color, or membership in a “language minority group.” Under this provision, states were allowed to consider race in drawing district maps for the purposes of protecting the voting power of people of color. That is, until now.

In Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana congressional map that created a second majority-Black district as “an unconstitutional gerrymander.” The map was created after the Fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals found that an earlier redistricting attempt with only one such district violated Section 2. The circuit court argued that the state unjustly divided Black communities in a way that “deprive[d] them of the opportunity to form effective voting blocs.” In response, Louisiana created a second majority-minority district, which Rep. Cleo Fields (D-La.) won in 2024.

This new map was later challenged by a group of self-described “non-African Americans” who contended that it violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause. The Supreme Court concurred. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito remarked, the new map “would violate the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights.”

Notably, the Supreme Court did not rule that Section 2 itself was unconstitutional. Rather, they determined that the framework used to determine whether a map violates the provision must be updated “so it aligns with the statutory text and reflects important developments” in the decades following the passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). These “great strides” include abolishing voting tests, erasing disparities in voter registration and turnout due to race, as well as greater shares of people of color elected to political office. For the Supreme Court, these developments warrant a higher bar for Section 2 violations.

The Supreme Court misunderstands the present. It pretends that we live in a nation largely free of the very kinds of racial prejudices and issues that gerrymandered maps like Louisiana’s allow Congress to overlook.

This is a reckless conclusion. While recent decades have seen sizable progress in addressing racial discrimination, the court ignores two key points: Fiirst, progress does not mean that the problem is gone. Anti-voter bills designed to undermine the political power of people of color continue to be introduced and passed across the country. This is especially true in red states. As the Brennan Center of Justice notes, “Racially diverse states controlled by Republicans are far more likely to introduce and pass restrictive provisions than very white states with Republican control; in other words, it’s states like Texas and Arizona, not Wyoming or Utah, that are passing the most restrictive legislation.” In fact, on April 27, the Supreme Court issued a shadow docket ruling that allows Texas to implement a gerrymandered map that a Trump-appointed judge had previously found to be “racially discriminatory.”

Second, and as this very ruling indicates, progress can always be undone. Prior to this ruling, the Supreme Court had already undermined core aspects of the VRA. This includes eliminating “preclearance” requirements which mandated that states with histories of racist voting practices must have new election laws or procedures reviewed by a federal court or the Department of Justice. Since then, multiple states previously covered by those requirements, including Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana, have seen their congressional maps challenged in federal court over concerns of racial discrimination.

Becoming complacent, as the Supreme Court would have us, puts the hard-fought victories that people of color have achieved at risk. Their emphasis on racial progress overlooks that even seemingly colorblind policies can set us back decades. Consider for instance the nominally race neutral SAVE America Act. It requires proof of citizenship, such as a US passport or birth certificate, to vote. This is effectively a poll tax that will disproportionately harm poor people and people of color. According to a 2023 YouGov poll, only about a third of Black Americans have a current passport. Moreover, some Black people may face more novel challenges. The Center on Budget and Policies Priorities reports that elderly Black people who were born under Jim Crow may never have been issued a birth certificate at all. As Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) put it, the SAVE America Act is “Jim Crow 2.0. […] What they're trying to do here is the same thing that was done in the South for decades to prevent people of color from voting.” In short, the past is not simply history; if we are not vigilant, it can become our future.

The multigenerational, centuries-long issues of race will require more than 60 years to solve. While the Supreme Court is right to acknowledge that the situation today is different from past decades, it errs drastically in concluding that the proper path forward is to gut one of the key pieces of legislation that made that progress possible. More fundamentally, the Supreme Court misunderstands the present. It pretends that we live in a nation largely free of the very kinds of racial prejudices and issues that gerrymandered maps like Louisiana’s allow Congress to overlook. Importantly, by diluting the voting power of people of color and by extension their congressional representation, it undermines their efforts to combat racism, colorism, and xenophobia.

Nevertheless, under this court’s decision, future plaintiffs will have to show that “the State intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race.” Simply demonstrating that a congressional map dilutes a minority group’s voting power will not be sufficient. As Justice Elena Kagan writes in her dissenting opinion, requiring “vote-dilution plaintiffs” to prove a “race-based motive” will “make success in their suits nearly impossible.”

Intentionality is an incredibly difficult legal standard to meet. Proving intent is among the core reasons why hate crimes are so difficult to convict in court. As such, it is no surprise that Kagan believes this ruling effectively renders Section 2 “all but a dead letter.”

Justice Clarence Thomas, in his concurring majority opinion, wrote that the Supreme Court should never have interpreted Section 2 “to effectively give racial groups ‘an entitlement to roughly proportional representation.’” In his view, Section 2 “does not regulate districting at all.” Thomas’ opinion is not only inconsistent with the legislative and judicial history of the VRA, but it is inherently contrary to the ideals of a democracy. Proportional representation is not a mere “entitlement”—it is a constitutionally mandated guarantee that ensures that communities have their unique concerns addressed and their interests protected.

The Supreme Court’s decision, in conjunction with the Trump administration’s unrelenting assault on the Constitution, have set American democracy back decades. Yet, this is no time to despair. Now more than ever, we must organize, build broad multi-state coalitions, protest, and demand that our rights be recognized.

Unlike the rest of the world's democracies, the United States doesn't use the metric system, doesn't require employers to provide workers with paid vacations, hasn't abolished the death penalty, and doesn't celebrate May Day as an official national holiday.

Outside the US, May 1 is international workers' day, observed with speeches, rallies and demonstrations. This year, millions of workers in Europe, Asia and Latin America will take to the streets to demand higher wages, better benefits and improved working conditions.

Ironically, this celebration of working-class solidarity was started by the US labor movement and soon spread around the world, but it never earned official recognition in this country.

This year, on the heels of the three massive nationwide “No Kings” marches and rallies, millions of Americans will join forces, in thousands of cities and towns, in May Day Strong events.

The May Day Strong organizers hoping to bring Americans together to challenge the billionaires, big corporations, and the Trump administration, who have manipulated the rules to lower living standards, attack immigrants, undermine democracy, and direct tax dollars for wars rather than meeting human needs. It will be a day of rallies, marches, teach-ins, labor actions, and a refusal to participate in business as usual—because, as the organizers say, “when those at the top rig the system, collective action is how we set it right.”

Organizers expect over several thousand nonviolent actions across the country. The broad coalition behind the protests include major unions, civil rights, reproductive justice, environmental, immigrant rights, and faith groups, and tenant and community organizations, as well as Indivisible and Democratic Socialists of America.

The protest is inspired by the large day of action on January 23 that shut down much of Minneapolis by asking people not to work, shop, or attend school that day to challenge ICE’s occupation and its illegal actions (including murder) against immigrants and activists.

But the May Day Strong leaders are not calling for a general strike to shut down the economy. That tactic—allowing unions to strike in solidarity with other unions’ strikes—was banned in 1946 when Congress passed the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act over President Harry Truman’s veto. Even so, organizers view this year’s May Day events as a dress rehearsal something close to a general strike in 2028, in anticipation of the presidential and mid-term elections, but that would require the participation of many large unions who may not believe they and their members are prepared for such a militant action or the possible political backlash by the Trump administration and by voters if employers threaten to fire workers for engaging in an illegal strike. In addition, as Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch noted, “How many people would need to stop shopping to make a noticeable dent in the nearly $3 billion per day Americans spend?””

But another massive national day of protest this May Day could help inspire voters to oust more Trump Republicans in November, give Democrats a majority of seats in both the House and Senate, and lay the groundwork for a more progressive policy agenda if the Democrats take back the White House in two years.

In doing so, they will be honoring the original May Day, which was born of the movement for an eight-hour workday. After the Civil War, unregulated capitalism ran rampant in America. It was the Gilded Age, a time of merger mania, increasing concentration of wealth and growing political influence by corporate power brokers known as Robber Barons. New technologies made possible new industries, which generated great riches for the fortunate few, but at the expense of workers, many of them immigrants, who worked long hours, under dangerous conditions, for little pay.

As the gap between the rich and other Americans widened dramatically, workers began to resist in a variety of ways. The first major wave of labor unions pushed employers to limit the workday to ten hours and then later down to eight hours. The 1877 strike by tens of thousands of railroad, factory and mine workers—which shut down the nation's major industries and was brutally suppressed by the corporations and their friends in government—was the first of many mass actions to demand living wages and humane working conditions. By 1884, the campaign had gained enough momentum that the predecessor to the American Federation of Labor adopted a resolution at its annual meeting, "that eight hours shall constitute legal day's labor from and after May 1, 1886."

On the appointed date, unions and radical groups orchestrated strikes and large-scale demonstrations in cities across the country. More than 500,000 workers went on strike or marched in solidarity and many more people protested in the streets. In Chicago, a labor stronghold, at least 30,000 workers struck. Rallies and parades across the city more than doubled that number, and the May 1 demonstrations continued for several days. The protests were mostly nonviolent, but they included skirmishes with strikebreakers, company-hired thugs and police.

On May 3, at a rally outside the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company factory, police fired on the crowd, killing at least two workers. The next day, at a rally at Haymarket Square to protest the shootings, police moved in to clear the crowd. Someone threw a bomb at the police, killing at least one officer. Another seven policemen were killed during the ensuing riot, and police gunfire killed at least four protesters and injured many others.

After a controversial investigation, seven anarchists were sentenced to death for murder, while another was sentenced to 15 years in prison. The anarchists won global notoriety, being seen as martyrs by many radicals and reformers, who viewed the trial and executions as politically motivated.

Within a few years, unions and radical groups around the world had established May Day as an international holiday to commemorate the Haymarket martyrs and continue the struggle for the eight-hour day, workers' rights, and social justice.

In the United States, however, the burgeoning Knights of Labor, uneasy with May Day's connection to anarchists and other radicals, adopted another day to celebrate workers' rights. In 1887, Oregon was the first state to make Labor Day an official holiday, celebrated in September. Other states soon followed. Unions sponsored parades to celebrate Labor Day, but such one-day festivities didn't make corporations any more willing to grant workers decent conditions. To make their voices heard, workers had to resort to massive strikes, typically put down with brutal violence by government troops.

In 1894, the American Railway Union, led by Eugene Debs, went on strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company to demand lower rents (Pullman was a company town that owned its employees' homes) and higher pay following huge layoffs and wage cuts. In solidarity with the Pullman workers, railroad workers across the country boycotted the trains with Pullman cars, paralyzing the nation's economy as well as its mail service. President Grover Cleveland declared the strike a federal crime and called out 12,000 soldiers to break the strike. They crushed the walkout and killed at least two protesters. Six days later, Cleveland—facing worker protests for his repression of the Pullman strikers—signed a bill creating Labor Day as an official national holiday in September. He hoped that giving the working class a day off to celebrate one Monday a year might pacify them.

For most of the 20th century, Labor Day was reserved for festive parades, picnics and speeches sponsored by unions in major cities. But contrary to what President Cleveland had hoped, American workers, their families and allies, found other occasions to mobilize for better working conditions and a more humane society. America witnessed massive strike waves throughout the century, including militant general strikes and occupations. These included a general strike in Seattle in 1919, the 1934 San Francisco general strike, led by the longshoremen's union; a strike of about 400,000 textile workers that same year; militant sit-down strikes in 1937 by autoworkers in Flint, Michigan, women workers at Woolworth's department stores in New York, aviation workers in Los Angeles, and others, and the largest strike wave in US history in 1946, triggered by pent-up demands following World War Two.

May 1 faded away as a day of protest. From the 1920s through the 1950s, radical groups sought to keep the tradition alive with parades and other events, but the mainstream labor movement and most liberal organizations kept their distance, making May Day an increasingly marginal affair. In 1958, in the midst of the cold war, President Dwight Eisenhower proclaimed May 1 as Loyalty Day. Each subsequent president has issued a similar proclamation, although few Americans know about or celebrate the day.

Since 2001, American unions and immigrant rights activists have resurrected May 1 as a day of protest around both workers’ rights and immigrant rights. That year, millions of people in over 100 cities—including more than a million in Los Angeles, 200,000 in New York and 300,000 in Chicago—participated in May Day demonstrations.

The huge turnout was catalyzed by a bill, sponsored by Representative James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) and passed by the House the previous December, that would have classified as a felon anyone who helped undocumented immigrants enter or remain in the United States. Since then, immigrant workers and their allies have adopted May Day as an occasion for protest.

In 2006, organized launched a protest they called “A Day Without Immigrants,” which was also termed the “Great American Boycott.” In many cities, workers refused to go to work, high school students walked out of their classrooms and into the street, while consumers shut down businesses that depended on immigrant workers.

In 2017, activists organized another “Day Without Immigrants” protest to dramatize the importance of immigrants to the American economy and protest Trump’s plans to build a border wall and deport millions of undocumented immigrants. The organizers called for immigrants and allies not to go to work, to avoid spending money, and keep children home from school.

"It was mostly immigrants who led the first May Day movement for the eight-hour day. Now a new generation of immigrant workers have revitalized and brought May Day back to life," observed California State Senator María Elena Durazo, the former head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor.

Although the labor movement fell on hard times starting in the 1950s, it nevertheless helped guarantee that more Americans would share in the nation’s post-war prosperity and join the middle class. Moreover, the civil rights, feminist, environmental and gay rights movements, and the more recent immigrant rights movement, drew important lessons from labor movement tactics and built coalitions with organized labor to advance their goals.

America is now in the midst of a new Gilded Age with a new group of corporate Robber Barons, many of them operating on a global scale. The top of the income scale has the biggest concentration of income and wealth since 1928. Several decades of corporate-backed assaults on unions have left only six percent of private sector employees with union cards, down from about one-third of all workers in the 1950s. More than half of America's 15 million union members now work for government (representing 33 percent of all government employees), so business groups and conservative politicians, including Trump, have targeted public sector unions for destruction.

Despite this, we’ve seen a recent resurgence of activism among rank-and-file workers at fast-food chains, Starbucks, Amazon, Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, Volkswagen, Boeing, Trader Joe’s, Apple, Barnes and Noble, Chipotle, Disneyland, Kaiser Permanente, UPS, Uber and LYFT, REI, film companies and TV studios, meatpacking companies, major hospitals and universities, school districts, and other employers. They have waged strikes, walkouts and union recognition campaigns to win better pay and working conditions.

Public opinion in solidly behind these demands. The decline of union membership is not due to Americans’ opposition to unions. A recent Gallup poll found that 68% of Americans support unions. Support is particularly high among Americans between 18 and 34 years old, 72% of whom embrace unions as a vehicle to address economic inequality and workplace problems. About two-thirds (64%) of Americans think the federal minimum wage—which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009—should be increased to $17.

The biggest obstacle to a union resurgence is federal labor law. American workers understand that employers resort to a variety of antiunion tactics—including firing employees illegally—to thwart unionization efforts. And there’s the rub. Americans have far fewer rights at work than employees in other democratic societies. Current federal laws are an impediment to union organizing rather than a protector of workers’ rights. The rules are stacked against workers, making it extremely difficult for even the most talented organizers to win union elections. Under current law, and with Trump stacking the National Labor Relations Board with anti-union members, any employer with a clever attorney can stall union elections, giving management time to scare the living daylights out of potential recruits.

This year's May Day rallies go beyond workers’ rights. They will focus on issues like stopping the billionaire takeover and rampant corruption of the Trump administration, protecting Medicaid, Social Security, and other programs working people rely on, fully funding public schools, healthcare, and housing for all, and stopping the attacks on communities, including policies that target immigrants and people of color. It will also build momentum for a large-scale voter mobilization effort to elect liberals and progressives in the November mid-terms.

“It isn't just about immigrant rights. It isn't just about workers’ rights on the job or even about raising the standard of living for all workers,” said Durazo. “It's about what kind of country we want to be.”

Today, for May Day, millions of students, educators, and workers are striking for our education, lives, and futures. This isn’t just a rally or march: Whether it’s shutting down corporate offices or leaving classrooms empty, we’re disrupting business as usual. And, young people are taking the lead.

Today isn’t a one-day strike. It’s day one of a mass youth uprising. Throughout history, we've seen students and workers on the front lines of anti-authoritarian movements, catalyzing mass societal action.

In the days leading up to May Day, we’ve seen that we’re already having an impact. In Durham, North Carolina, the Durham Public Schools announced last week that school was cancelled on May 1 because over 1,000 students and staff were projected to walk out of school that day. In Madison, Wisconsin, schools shut down after 70% of staff committed to this national day of action. A dozen more school districts have followed suit.

So when pundits ask, “Where are the young people?” The answer is, May Day. Across the country, people are growing increasingly frustrated with political and institutional leadership that are serving billionaires, not us. While the Trump administration commits war crimes in the Middle East, millions are stripped of their healthcare. While billionaires get handouts to build data centers, they claim we can’t solve our housing crisis. While college football coaches are paid million-dollar salaries, tuition to attend school continues to rise.

This May 1, we will strike in hundreds of thousands. In every corner of this country, you will see students walking out of class and workers striking from their jobs.

It’s extremely clear to young people like me: This system is not made for everyday working people, and the only way we can change things is if we start disrupting the status quo. If we’ve learned anything over the past few months, it’s that when people come together in masses, we are more powerful than the people in power, and we win. Specifically, when people practice mass noncooperation in their schools and cities, they win.

Mass noncooperation is the act of not giving in to their "business as usual." We hold the power because we make the system run, and we have the power to make it crumble. It means recognizing that the system only functions because of us, and choosing to withdraw that labor, that time, that participation is power we hold. It is not enough to protest on our days off, or repost a social media post. We need workers to stop going to work so billionaires lose money. We need students and educators to stop attending classes to show the power of those empty seats. We need to stop working for a system that is failing us, to show them that we can turn it all around if they keep ignoring our needs.

We’ve seen mass noncooperation work in the past. Earlier this year, after tens of thousands of people went on strike in Minneapolis following the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) commander in the city was removed from his role, and he himself said that the level of noncooperation from Minnesotans was stopping ICE from carrying out its goals. Now, we’re taking that action nationwide.

This May 1, we will strike in hundreds of thousands. In every corner of this country, you will see students walking out of class and workers striking from their jobs. You’ll hear chants and cheers for one another; you’ll feel hope and resilience. And when we do, we’ll show President Donald Trump and his billionaire friends that if they keep going with their agenda, we will stop their regime from operating. If they keep abducting our neighbors, if they keep choosing Wall Street over working people, if they keep starting wars instead of giving us healthcare—the kind of disruption they are seeing today will be a drop in the bucket.

We’re also sending a message to people across this country: We, working people, have the power. We run the economy, we fill the classrooms. If we stop cooperating, the billionaires can’t profit, and the oligarchs can’t rule. We have the power to win what we deserve: a world where we earn a livable wage, breathe clean air, and can afford necessities like education.

Today, on May 1, we say: No work. No school. No spending.

This speech was delivered to the 11th Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons on May 1, 2026.

Honorable President, Distinguished Delegates, Colleagues, and Friends,

We are living in a decisive moment. Humanity faces a choice, whether consciously or not, to continue down a path of conflict that leads toward ultimate destruction or to renounce its old ways and center peace at the heart of all its efforts.

International law, built painstakingly over decades and even centuries to prevent such an unfathomable catastrophe, is under brazen and relentless attack today. At the heart of this divergence lies a fundamental question: whether states may claim a right to wage war without restraint, and whether use and even possession of weapons with potential to end human civilization can ever be justified. These are precisely the issues at the core of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT)—whose future we have gathered to discuss at this Review Conference.

Nuclear disarmament and nuclear non-proliferation are not separate tracks toward a safer world—they are intertwined and inseparable paths.

Our world is a time-ticking bomb. There are more than 12,000 nuclear warheads in existence—each capable of killing hundreds of thousands, some even millions of people, and any one of which could trigger a chain reaction leading to full-scale nuclear war in less time than this session will last.

More than 40 years ago, Presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev reminded us that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” And yet today, we hear renewed calls to use nuclear weapons in the name of “saving lives,” alongside threats that contemplate the destruction of entire societies.

The five nuclear-weapon states recognized under the NPT, the United States, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, France, and China, possess over 95% of the world’s nuclear arsenal. With that power comes not only a moral responsibility, but a clear legal obligation under Article VI of this Treaty: to pursue negotiations in good faith to achieve not only nuclear disarmament, but also total and complete general disarmament.

Nuclear disarmament and nuclear non-proliferation are not separate tracks toward a safer world—they are intertwined and inseparable paths. As Joseph Rotblat warned in his 1995 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech: “If the militarily most powerful and least threatened states need nuclear weapons for their security, how can one deny such security to countries that are truly insecure? The present nuclear policy is a recipe for proliferation. It is a policy for disaster.”

We join the voices of hibakusha and countless others who have come before us in urging all NPT States Parties to take immediate and meaningful action:

1. Condemn and cease all military combat, including wars that risk escalation toward nuclear conflict, and reaffirm the primacy of international law and peaceful resolution of disputes.

2. Unequivocally renounce the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons under any circumstances, and reject policies such as “launch on warning” and “first-use” that heighten, rather than reduce, the risk of nuclear war.

3. Commit to a concrete, time-bound path toward a world free of nuclear weapons, including by joining the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The first step in this journey must be clear to all: The United States and the Russian Federation, which together possess more than 85% of the world’s nuclear arsenals, must urgently restart bilateral negotiations to reduce and ultimately eliminate their stockpiles. The remaining nuclear-armed states must pause all modernization and arsenal increase programs, and commit to a transparent, verifiable, and irreversible process of disarmament.

4. Recognize and assist all victims of the nuclear age, including survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, those impacted by more than 2,000 nuclear explosions during the so-called nuclear testing period, and uranium mining workers and others harmed by the the development of nuclear weapons, ensuring justice, support, and environmental remediation.

This call is not just an abstract moral appeal; it is a prerequisite for human survival. The credibility of the NPT and the future of humanity depend on the actions we take over the next three weeks.

In the words of Joseph Rotblat: “The quest for a war-free world has a basic purpose: survival. But if in the process we learn how to achieve it by love rather than by fear, by kindness rather than by compulsion; if in the process we learn to combine the essential with the enjoyable, the expedient with the benevolent, the practical with the beautiful, that will be an extra incentive to embark on this great task.”

Thank you, Honorable President.

For decades, American politics rested on one big, mostly unquestioned idea: Real change happens through the system. You vote, you lobby, you go to court, you work the parties. Even the biggest protest movements eventually tried to plug themselves back into those official channels. But lately—especially since Donald Trump burst onto the scene—that old assumption has been crumbling fast.

What we're seeing now, in things like the “May Day Strong” actions, isn't just more people protesting. It's a deeper change in how politics actually works. Action isn't only about pressuring institutions anymore. It's increasingly about jamming the system, slowing it down, or breaking its rhythm. In plain terms, we've shifted from representative politics toward something more like direct pressure.

The key driver here is the collapse of trust in institutions. One of the most striking things about Trumpism isn't any single policy—it's the relentless way it attacked the legitimacy of the middlemen: the media as “the enemy of the people,” judges as biased, elections as rigged. These weren't just throwaway lines. Over time, they sank in and reshaped how a lot of people view the system's ability to actually deliver.

When folks stop believing the formal channels can handle their grievances, they start looking for other levers. That's when direct action, civil disobedience, and economic disruption stop looking fringe and start feeling logical.

“May Day Strong” feels like a live experiment. It's testing how well networked groups can mobilize and whether hitting the economy where it hurts can deliver lasting political leverage. The answers will matter a lot for where democracy goes next.

“May Day Strong” sits right at that crossroads. The call for “No Work, No Shopping” isn't subtle. It says: If real power flows through the economy, then choking those flows becomes a form of politics. On the surface it seems straightforward, but it quietly rewrites the textbook definition of power.

In the old model, power lived in government buildings and political offices. You tried to influence them. In the emerging one, power is scattered across economic networks and social connections. So the game moves from representation to targeted disruption—from institutional politics to what you might call infrastructural politics.

This isn't purely ideological. It also grows out of how people actually experience daily life now: gig work, shaky jobs, disappearing benefits, and costs that keep climbing. When the ground under your feet feels unstable, waiting for institutions to fix things starts to feel naive.

So where does Trumpism fit? It didn't invent this distrust, but it poured gasoline on it. By hammering institutional norms, torching media credibility, and sharpening polarization, it helped create an environment where formal mechanisms look increasingly broken. In that kind of atmosphere, taking it to the streets—or to the supply chains—doesn't feel radical. It feels like common sense.

Still, there's real tension. Disrupting people's everyday lives is a double-edged sword. If folks see it as standing up for justice, it can build wide support. If it just looks like chaos that hurts regular people trying to get by, it can spark a strong backlash.

That tension defines politics in this post-trust era. Legitimacy no longer comes neatly from institutions. It gets fought over in public opinion—and more and more, the street has become the arena where that fight happens.

In that light, “May Day Strong” feels like a live experiment. It's testing how well networked groups can mobilize and whether hitting the economy where it hurts can deliver lasting political leverage. The answers will matter a lot for where democracy goes next.

If direct disruption keeps replacing traditional institutional routes, the line between protest and actual governance starts to blur. Suddenly, the power to halt things becomes its own kind of authority. That opens doors for groups that felt shut out—but it also raises the odds of deeper instability.

At the end of the day, this isn't simply politics getting more extreme. It's politics changing its fundamental shape. It's no longer just a contest to control the institutions. It's becoming a struggle to control the flows—of information, money, goods, and attention.

Trumpism didn't create this shift, but it accelerated it. By eroding trust and heating up divisions, it helped make direct action feel less like an outlier and more like a normal part of how politics gets done.

The big question now isn't how institutions can manage protest. It's whether institutions can hold onto their central role at all.

In the evening of Wednesday, April 29, 2026, Israeli naval forces attacked the Global Sumud Flotilla to Gaza. An unknown number of Israeli military ships went over 700 miles to attack a 54 ship flotilla that was headed for Gaza to attempt to break the illegal Israeli naval blockade of Gaza and bring worldwide attention to the continuing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, Israeli ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, the destruction and occupation of southern Lebanon and the attacks on Iran.

Twenty-one boats were attacked by Israeli naval forces about 80 nautical miles west of the Greek island of Crete in international waters; 179 participants from 33 countries were taken against their will from boats that were damaged by Israeli naval forces and put onto a commercial cargo ship that may arrive at the Israeli port of Ashdod around Saturday, May 2.

We anticipate that they will be processed at a dock facility in Ashdod, then transported to an Israeli prison and in three to five days deported from the country with a 10-100 year ban on returning to Israel, which means that one cannot get to the West Bank for actions in solidarity with Palestinians who are under attack by Zionist Israeli settlers who steal Palestinian land and animals and burn Palestinian houses and cars.

Fifteen US citizens were among the 179 that were kidnapped by Israeli forces.

As a US citizen in opposition to the US government complicity, no matter which political party is in power, in Israeli attacks on Gaza, I have been a part of the flotilla movement since 2010.

Thirty-two flotilla boats remain afloat, although many were damaged by Israeli naval forces and may be forced into ports on the large Greek island of Crete for repairs. No doubt the Israeli naval forces will be lurking like sharks in the waters off Crete waiting for the small boats to come out.

4 More Boats Are in Siracusa, Sicily, Italy

I am in Siracusa, Sicily, Italy with the Gaza Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) and its four boats, two of which came from the Thousand Madleens organization.

The FFC has been sailing boats to break the illegal Israeli naval blockade of Gaza since 2010 with over 35 boats sailed in the years from 2008-2025.

2025 Was a Remarkable Year for International Citizen Solidarity with Palestine

2025 was a remarkable year for international citizen solidarity with Palestine. In July the Madleen sailboat sailed to break the Siege of Gaza; followed by the 3,000+ person Global Sumud Land Convoy through Egypt, Libya, and Tunisa; followed by the FFC ship Handala sailing to break the blockade; followed by the large 42 boat Global Sumud Flotilla; followed by the FFC Conscience ship that sailed with eight boats of the “Thousand Madleens.”

Actions Against US Complicity in the Israeli Genocide of Gaza

As a US citizen in opposition to the US government complicity, no matter which political party is in power, in Israeli attacks on Gaza, I have been a part of the flotilla movement since 2010 as a participant on the flotilla that included the large ship Mavi Marmara on which Israeli soldiers killed 10 and wounded 50. All six ships in that flotilla were attacked by Israeli naval forces and participants assaulted, taken to Israel, imprisoned in Israel, and ultimately deported.

We will continue to sail boats until the genocide of Gaza ends and we break the illegal Israeli blockade of Gaza.

More than four months after Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin announced that he was breaking his promise to release its autopsy report on the 2024 election, the decision remains highly controversial. Arguments swirl around whether it’s wise to proceed without public scrutiny of what went wrong during the last presidential campaign. But scant attention has focused on how hiding the autopsy provides an assist to Kamala Harris, who currently leads in polling of Democrats for the party’s 2028 nomination.

As Harris eyes another run, she has a major stake in the DNC continuing to keep the autopsy under wraps—and has a lot to lose if it reaches the light of day. She must feel gratified when Martin defends keeping the autopsy secret, saying that the party should not “relitigate” the 2024 election and claiming that release of the 200-page document would result in “navel-gazing.”

Release of the entire autopsy would likely be a blow to Harris’s chances of becoming president in January 2029. Partly based on interviews with more than 300 prominent Democrats and others in all 50 states, it reportedly concludes that Harris’s unwavering support for US weapons shipments to Israel was a significant factor in her loss to Donald Trump.

While she pursued an unsuccessful strategy of wooing scarce “moderate” Republican voters, many in the Democratic base were repelled by the full backing that Harris gave to President Biden’s massive arming of Israel as civilian deaths mounted in Gaza. She adhered to Biden’s admonition that there be “no daylight” between the two of them as she campaigned for president after he withdrew from the race.

The DNC’s scrapping of the autopsy is a political gift that keeps on giving to Harris as she appears to be gearing up for the 2028 campaign.

At the time, polls showed that Harris was harming her election prospects by refusing to distance herself from Biden’s policy toward Israel. She evades that reality in her post-election book 107 Days, which dismisses antiwar protesters at her rallies as mere “hecklers.”

Harris’s protracted book tour has been beset by disruptions as well as her inability to provide cogent responses. At one appearance last fall, protesters yelled “Your legacy is genocide! Your legacy will always be genocide!” Her rejoinder was, “You know what, I am not president of the United States. You want to go to the White House and talk to him, then go on and do that.” Weeks later, speaking in Chicago, when a protester accused her of complicity in the Gaza horrors, she fired back: “Are you the same person that was telling people not to vote?”

Renewed attention to the Harris 2024 finances would also be unwelcome. Thirteen months after the election, the New York Times reported, “some Democratic donors have demanded a more thorough accounting of how exactly the party and Ms. Harris spent $1.5 billion in 15 weeks en route to losing every battleground state in 2024.” In mid-April, NBC News noted that “to date, a full accounting has not been made of who was paid what from the $1.5 billion, though the DNC later disclosed it carried more than $20 million in debt from Harris’s loss.”

A few weeks ago, Harris told an audience of influential black leaders that she’s “thinking about” running for president again and said that “I know what the job is and I know what it requires.” Politico described those comments as “the most explicit sign yet she’ll run for president in 2028.”

Release of the entire autopsy would likely be a blow to Harris’s chances of becoming president in January 2029.

Just about the last thing Harris would need is enormous publicity about an authoritative audit from the DNC—the governing body of the Democratic party—about what was wrong with her 2024 campaign. Such an autopsy would stoke fires of negativity and apprehension about making her the party’s standard-bearer again.

The DNC’s scrapping of the autopsy is a political gift that keeps on giving to Harris as she appears to be gearing up for the 2028 campaign. A straw in the wind: The DNC national coalitions director, Gabriel Uy, recently emailed colleagues that he will leave that job in early May to “be working for VP Harris again, so let’s keep in touch.” Uy was the Nevada political director for Harris’s presidential campaign in 2019 and then deputy director of public engagement and intergovernmental affairs for Harris when she was vice president. Other high-level DNC employees will probably also be migrating to the Harris staff.

Under ongoing pressure from a variety of Democrats, Martin has begun to indicate that he will supply “top lines” summarizing the autopsy. Such a move would do little to placate critics, raising pointed questions about what was omitted and why the DNC was only willing to engage in cherry-picking instead of fully informing the party faithful.

During an MS NOW television interview in late April, while he used head-spinning illogic to defend concealing the autopsy, Martin went out of his way to say “I’m not here to protect anyone.” The interviewer had not asked if he was protecting anyone. It seemed to be an instance of “the chairman doth protest too much.”

Martin has properly emphasized that the Democratic National Committee should maintain strict neutrality in relation to presidential primaries, unlike what happened in 2016 when the DNC secretly assisted Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders. A year ago, in a well-publicized dustup with David Hogg, then in a brief stint as DNC vice chair, Martin insisted that Hogg could not run a funding operation for candidates in party primaries and remain a DNC officer.

“I am determined to make sure we don’t repeat the same errors of the past,” Martin wrote in Time magazine. He explained that “I've spent the past decade making sure our party cannot ever again be perceived as having a thumb on the scale for one candidate.”

But now, in effect, Martin’s concealment of the autopsy report puts a thumb on the scale for one candidate: Kamala Harris.

The re-election of Donald Trump reignited a simmering feud between the progressive and centrist wings of the Democratic Party. While centrists have cautioned against alienating “moderate” voters, progressives have urged the party to rally around universal healthcare, raising wages, and other populist measures.

If recent elections are any indication, moderate voters seem plenty receptive to progressive appeals.

Newly minted Rep. Analilia Mejia recently won a special election for New Jersey’s 11th district in the House of Representatives. Mejia replaces moderate Democrat Mikie Sherill, who vacated her seat in the affluent, suburban district after winning the state’s gubernatorial election.

Mejia gave a fiery inaugural address on April 20 calling on her colleagues to “Stand up, defend, and restore not only our democracy, but also a just economy that actually works for working people.”

Centrism means preserving the status quo—and the status quo is a failure for most Americans.

Mejia has built a political career championing economic populism. Not only did she serve as Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) 2020 campaign political director, but was also co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy and director of the New Jersey Working Families Alliance.

Poll after poll shows majorities of the public back taxing corporations and the very rich, prefer a Medicare for All healthcare system to our patchwork private insurance system, and are deeply concerned about climate change. Mejia says that makes those issues good politics as well as policy.

I talked to Mejia in the run-up to the 2022 midterms. “The policies that really motivate people, that work for working families,” she told me then, “are also popular ideas.”

She’s right. This year, Mejia won her suburban district handily, beating out Republicans and more centrist or conservative Democrats. Her populist, morally unambiguous platform included a demand to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and a denunciation of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

In November 2026, Mejia will run for the same congressional seat, facing Republican candidate Joe Hathaway, a man who labeled her a “radical socialist.”

But there’s nothing radical about popular programs that address affordability.

Pundits have claimed for years that tacking to the center is a surefire way to win political power. When Vice President Kamala Harris ran for president on a centrist campaign in 2024, many explained her loss to Donald Trump as the result of her identity rather than her politics.

But centrism means preserving the status quo—and the status quo is a failure for most Americans. Sharp analysts such as Tressie McMillan Cottom identified the real reason Harris lost, saying her “promise was that nothing much would change about the country but the race and gender of the one in charge.”

At a time when some members of Harris’ party are giving in to a white supremacist resurgence by backing away from people of color in positions of power, Mejia leans into her racial and ethnic identity to connect with voters of all backgrounds. “I am the daughter of a Dominican factory worker and a Colombian seamstress who knew struggle,” she said during her inaugural speech.

Indeed, candidates like Mejia—and progressive populist politicians such as Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.), and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani—have proven that demographic diversity is not a liability for candidates who embrace justice-driven platforms and take principled stands on issues.

“The ideas that we support are popular ideas, are transformative ideas, and if we get together and raise our voices, we can and must win,” Mejia told me in 2022. “Everything depends on it.”

She added, “Democracy is not a spectator sport. You have to jump in and participate.” And that’s precisely what she did.

America’s Department of Homeland Security has been receiving lots of scrutiny right now from journalists and ordinary citizens like me—and for good reason! Detaining people en route to their kids’ schools, in hospitals, or at work shouldn’t be the first thing that comes to mind these days when I think of “freedom,” “civil rights,” or “America.” Nor should spending tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to rebuild warehouses so that the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, can hold people without charges in subhuman conditions. What do you think?

In all of this mayhem, it’s easy to overlook new human rights violations because there are so many each day. Violations of the rule of law have become the air Americans breathe.

In a matter of months, ICE has leaped far from its mandate as the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) civilian investigative arm—not its muscle. Note its agents’ forced-entry tactics, its recent 40% shorter training protocols that stress the use of force over knowledge of our Constitution, and a dramatic rise in use-of-force incidents and deaths in custody. And it has more than doubled in size!

Instead of a workaday force that makes sure the rules are followed, it’s become an internal police force that bears increasing resemblance to what the United States military has been doing in dozens of other countries around the world as part of the never-ending Global War on Terror (GWOT) that this country has been waging for almost a quarter-century now in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks. America’s wars are indeed coming home.

Our Wars, Ourselves

The War on Terror has been notable for its heavy reliance on special forces operations like nighttime raids on civilian homes and incursions into mosques, schools, and marketplaces to search for enemy combatants or information. In particular, the US scaled back large troop deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan after its failed wars in those countries, and yet, by 2016, about 70% of the world’s nations had US special operations forces deployed in them. At the height of the Afghanistan war in 2010-2011, US special operations forces were conducting thousands of nighttime raids into Afghan homes in search of suspected terrorists.

The violence our troops have used in our names should not be easy to stomach, even from afar.

Since those special forces operate outside of conventional battlefield settings, often with little planning and without embedded journalists, the public has had few chances to scrutinize their activities. Not surprisingly, then, we haven’t paid much attention to the civilian deaths that resulted. Roughly 40%—or close to half a million—of those killed directly in our wars have been civilians, an unnerving number of them children. Our military’s reliance on special operations, urban warfare, and proximity-based ways of identifying suspected terrorists (more on that later) means that many people with no connection whatsoever to the warring parties have been shot down or bombed out in their homes, markets, or schools, among other places.

And that’s because the US military has come to rely on a form of targeting called “pattern-of-life surveillance,” whereby they look for suspected opposition leaders by using what they know of their daily routines to aid with target identification. This approach holds some serious implications for the safety of civilians and has arguably led to extra anger and so the ability of armed opposition groups to recruit new members more easily.

The intimacy of death in our wars, combined with an increasingly unaccountable Pentagon that has isolated itself from journalists, while using its own secretive “justice” system, means that knowledge of civilian deaths often emerges only months or even years after the original events (if and when journalists find eyewitnesses willing to provide their accounts). As a result, the collective lack of awareness of most Americans has been striking and, in recent years, has been increased by the misconception that drone warfare—an ever more prominent part of our wars—is more “precise” at targeting enemy combatants than boots-on-the-ground combat.

21st Century Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

One thing is certain: US military servicemembers who have fought in those wars do know what they entail (and many carry that intimate knowledge with them in particularly haunting ways). As a clinician, I specialize in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which you’ve likely heard of by now. It’s a condition characterized by flashbacks; a desire to avoid anything that reminds you of what happened; and a deep sense of anger or ongoing edginess, anxiety, depression, and mistrust.

For people who have fought in such foreign wars and manage to make it back, everyday life in America can be riddled with imagery that triggers painful memories. For this generation of veterans, among whom are those who were charged with kicking down family doors on night raids, a child’s playful scream on a playground might trigger memories of the boy who screamed in horror when you rammed down the door of his home in Kabul, Afghanistan. The sight of a discarded doll on the ground at that same playground might trigger a flashback to the market in Iraq where a little girl dropped everything as she fled the explosion of an improvised explosive device (IED) with her mother. A cornfield in the town where you grew up could transport you back to the rural Afghan village where you shot a farmer you thought was a terrorist.

There’s a reason why events like the infamous rampage of American troops through the village of My Lai in 1968 during the Vietnam War and the massacre that followed (when they killed hundreds of unarmed civilians) still remain etched in the memories of many Americans of a certain age, whereas I’d bet that most of us would be hard pressed these days to name particular instances when US troops murdered civilians in our contemporary wars. Perhaps there are simply too many such murders, or maybe killing has been in the collective air for so long—in our video games, in Hollywood films, in our militarized police force—that we don’t care as much anymore.

The Fog of War

Were we, however, to pay more attention and look more closely, the violence our troops have used in our names should not be easy to stomach, even from afar. Take the story of the 2005 shooting of 24 civilians in the small city of Haditha, Iraq. Once a peaceful, shade-dappled middle-class residential area, Haditha was occupied by American troops who conducted nighttime raids on civilian homes in search of “enemy combatants.”

Being in the wrong place at the wrong time took on urgent meaning for Haditha’s residents, even as being seen around the US military base nearby could mean risking decapitation by enemy troops, since members of al-Qaeda were also watching. One day, an IED blew up a Marine Humvee (an all-terrain military vehicle), killing one American soldier and injuring two more. In the hours that followed, Marines entered three homes and shot almost everyone inside, nearly wiping out three families and 24 civilians, including at least 10 young children. The head of that Marine unit claimed that the victims were somehow responsible for that IED explosion (because they had not stopped it), though the only link was that they happened to live in the neighborhood where it took place. In its award-winning coverage of the incident 19 years later, The New Yorker offered this quote from the letter of the lawyer for the Marines: “I trust you have no sense of… the stress of combat or the fog of war that precedes from that.”

If the administration can violate constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure when it comes to people in their homes, then it’s your guess or mine who will next end up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Though that grim incident stands out in my mind because of the vivid coverage it finally received, what came to be known as the Haditha massacre was anything but the only one in which civilians became direct targets of American forces in this country’s War on Terror. Take the multiple incidents in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in 2010 and the years that followed, when US and Afghan forces killed farmers and day laborers they misidentified as enemy Taliban fighters. Or consider the 2010 nighttime raid by US special operations forces in Paktia Province, Afghanistan, when troops attacked the home of a family gathering to celebrate a child’s birth, killing two pregnant women, a teenage girl, and two male relatives (though the US-NATO forces involved initially claimed that the women had been killed prior to their assault).

There are far too many incidents to name here, but I think you get the picture of a war in which scenes that you and I might otherwise normally relate to became enmired with violence for no obvious reason.

The Ripple Effects at Home

There are many parallels that can be drawn between the US War on Terror and the Department of Homeland Security’s current immigration crackdown here in the US, and you’ve probably noticed some of them. Take the reliance of DHS and ICE on patterns of movement among targeted populations to sweep up large numbers of “illegal aliens,” a tendency to detain (or even shoot) first and ask questions later (if at all), and something we haven’t even talked about yet—the deportation of detainees to countries where they are likely to be mistreated or even tortured in prisons with far laxer human rights standards than we have (much like the Central Intelligence Agency’s grim global “black sites” in the Global War on Terror). This points to the sort of operational flexibility that military commanders and many Americans troublingly accept as part of our present national security operations.

Most troubling to me is that in May 2025, DHS issued an internal memo authorizing its agents to enter people’s homes without a warrant signed by a judge. Instead, those agents only need an administrative warrant signed by another immigration official (based on a suspicion that they have reason to remove someone living in the home). A handful of high-profile incidents since then show that ICE agents are indeed entering homes forcibly.

According to a New York advocacy group, in November 2025, ICE agents knocked down a family’s door in the borough of Queens in New York City and pointed a gun at a mother and four children before forcibly removing her from her bed. They did not produce a warrant and alleged that they were looking for someone who turned out not even to live at that address. Similarly, in September of that year, hundreds of armed federal agents descended on a Chicago apartment building at night in search of members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, some landing in Black Hawk helicopters on the roof. They detained dozens of residents, including children whom they took from their beds, zip-tied, and held for hours, some separated from their parents or guardians.

If the administration can violate constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure when it comes to people in their homes, then it’s your guess or mine who will next end up in the wrong place at the wrong time, their fates shaped by President Donald Trump’s choice of an enemy of the day or the urges of stressed-out ICE agents.

Trauma and the Everyday

Counterinsurgency wars are often the bloodiest types because troops attempt to root out the enemy in the general population. Our 21st-century War on Terror has shown that this country remains more than capable of fighting like that today.

One of my favorite anthropologists, Begoña Aretxaga, drove home the horror of such combat. She documented political violence against Basque nationalists in late 20th-century Spain. State officials raided homes and communities, planted car bombs, and kidnapped activists. As she pointed out, such trauma is “horror cropping up in the routines of ordinary life.” In the cities where she did research, people watched their neighbors and relatives being “disappeared” or getting killed, while fear permeated everyday events like taking a walk through their neighborhood.

We can look at our military’s actions as well as ICE’s in detail and refuse to accept “terror” among us (however the government conceptualizes that elusive term!) as a reason to mistreat others.

Today, none of us should be surprised that the Trump administration is conducting its own homegrown version of counterinsurgency warfare right here in the United States of America. Tactics once used abroad are increasingly our new normal. I don’t think it helps that each new development shocks so many of us more than the last, making it hard (for me at least) to look at what DHS and ICE are doing with fresh surprise each time such actions prove to be distinctly so far beyond the pale of what the founders laid out in our Constitution.

Yet understanding the costs of war also offers us an opportunity. We can look at our military’s actions as well as ICE’s in detail and refuse to accept “terror” among us (however the government conceptualizes that elusive term!) as a reason to mistreat others. We can denounce atrocities ranging from that Chicago raid to possible future versions of the Haditha massacre.

We can also think more clearly about the root causes of why our war on terror has indeed been coming home—literally. (It should be no surprise that about a third of ICE officers reportedly have had some kind of experience in the US military.) While we’re protesting what the Trump administration is doing, we should also think about the way it’s been slashing the mental health staff at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Veterans need our help, too, rather than being left in isolation and shame.

After all, even those who break and enter American homes aren’t aberrations. They are not just among us, they are us: For years, they have acted in our names, including abroad, when all too many of us were barely paying attention. And when we ignore what they did over there, we allow the same things to happen here.

This May Day, I’ll be one of the millions who will peacefully take to the streets to denounce the cruelty and corruption of this administration and the oligarchs it serves. I will march because I believe our lives are worth more than dollars and cents. Every one of us deserves the right to live in dignity with hope for the future. I invite you to join me.

May Day began in the 19th century, when industrial workers came together to demand something we now take for granted: an eight-hour workday. At that time, even children worked 12 or more hours straight in factories, every day. We too easily forget how far we have come, and that victories like these were won by organized people.

In 1884, there was an extreme concentration of wealth in the United States, so labor organizers called for a general strike every year on May 1 until all workers achieved “eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will.” It took many strikes and marches, advances and setbacks, but the eight-hour workday ultimately became the law of the land in 1940.

This year, the organizers of May Day Strong are calling for everyone to participate in a new version of a general strike—with no work, no school, and no shopping—wherever you are. There will be large, peaceful marches you can easily join in cities and towns in every state.

This year, I find inspiration in everyone who has marched before me, and in all those across the country who are finding their voices as we step into the streets in this dark moment. Because it truly is up to us.

May Day Strong’s rallying cry is #WorkersOverBillionaires, at a time when the difference between rich and poor is even worse in this country than it was in the 19th century. The top 1% in this country controls more wealth than the bottom 93%, while one man—Elon Musk—controls more than 52% of American families.

Every four seconds, Musk and billionaires like him rake in more than the average person makes in a year. Extreme wealth is concentrating even more, fueled by the more than $1 trillion in tax cuts granted by the Trump administration to the ultra rich and corporations last year. But there’s more at stake than income inequality. We all know that a basic right in a healthy democracy is to have free and fair elections: While this ideal has never really been true for many of us, it’s a hard-fought right that guarantees us having a voice in how the country, and our daily lives, are run. That is precisely why it is under attack at this very moment.

That’s why the organization I lead, People’s Action, has joined May Day Strong and more than 400 partner groups across the country to host democracy bootcamps and solidarity schools, so every community can be prepared to defend democracy. You can join a solidarity school where you live, or organize your own. The materials we have developed for these trainings are freely available to anyone who wishes to use them, in English and Spanish, at organizingfordemoracy.org.

May Day has long served as an inspiration for the immigrant rights movement. For two decades, it has called for May 1 to be a “Day Without Immigrants,” as a way to show solidarity and make the work and contributions of immigrants visible to everyone.

This year’s organizers also found inspiration in Minneapolis, where faith and union leaders called for schools and businesses to close for a “Day of Truth and Freedom” on January 23, to protest the violent treatment of immigrants and peaceful protesters by federal agents.

More than 75,000 people poured into the streets of Minneapolis to express their outrage, and thousands more did in other cities. It worked: In the face of this solidarity, clear evidence the people of Minneapolis would stand together and protect each other, federal agents left the city.

Who answered the call in Minnesota? Workers of all sorts, small business owners, neighbors, mothers with children, pastors with their faithful, doctors, nurses, and teachers. That is, everyone who believes violence is never the answer, and that we all deserve better.

I am also inspired by the people of Hungary, who just ended the authoritarian rule of Viktor Orbán with their most effective tool: their votes. Despite all of Orbán’s efforts over 16 years to restrict, silence, and intimidate civil society, Hungarians united around a simple truth: They want to live in a future free from fear. Together, they won. And if they can do it, we can, too.

This year, I find inspiration in everyone who has marched before me, and in all those across the country who are finding their voices as we step into the streets in this dark moment. Because it truly is up to us. No one is coming to save us: We must rely on each other.

So I invite you to march with me this May Day, then let’s organize to win elections and protect our right to vote this November. Together, we can prove the power of organized people. I’ll be marching in Florida this year, and if you are nearby, you are welcome to join us. But wherever you are, I encourage you to do something. You will make new friends when you do.

It does not matter why, how, or when you decide it is time for a change. It could be today. What matters right now is that we show up for one another, and we learn how to organize with new neighbors to create a democracy where every one of us has a voice, a vote, and the right to live with dignity. You can choose to do this now.