President Joe Biden has called America “the world power,” and has referred to his “leadership in the world.” If Biden does indeed see himself as a, or the, world leader, then he has been disappointing in his job and has mismanaged it.

The world today stands on the brink of larger wars, even potentially world wars, on two fronts simultaneously. That is, perhaps, a more precarious position than the world has found itself in in over half a century, since the Cuban Missile Crisis, and perhaps longer. Then, the danger came from a single front: today, there is danger on two or even three.

The Biden administration seemingly subscribes to a foreign policy doctrine of nurturing wars while attempting to manage them so that they remain confined to America’s foreign policy interests and do not spill over into wider wars. But such fine calibrations are not easily done. War is sloppy and unpredictable. Though a nation’s plans may be well understood by its planners, calibration of what might push the enemy too far and cause a wider war depends equally on your enemy’s plans, calibrations, passions and red lines: all of which are harder to profile or understand.

What is more, the contemporary culture of the U.S. foreign policy establishment seems dedicated precisely to excluding the kind of knowledge and empathy that allows one to understand an adversary’s mind, and instead to fostering ill-informed and hate-filled prejudice.

Calibrating how far you can push militarily or politically without tipping the balance of containment and triggering full-scale war is dangerously worse than tricky. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah badly miscalculated how far the calibrated strikes and responses with Israel could go before a controlled conflict became a larger war. The price of miscalculation was his life and a war in Lebanon.

Successive U.S. and European governments, and the NATO Secretariat, calculated that they could, through a series of steps, expand NATO into the former Soviet space without triggering a military response from Russia. The result of this miscalculation has been a war that has been disastrous for Ukraine and severely damaging for Western interests and that risks ending in either Western humiliation or direct war between Russia and the West.

Despite the fragility of such calibrations, they seem to have become the centerpiece of U.S. policy. In both the Middle East and Ukraine, the U.S. nurtured wars by sending weapons and discouraging diplomacy. And in both theaters, the U.S. prioritized containing the wars they were supporting and preventing them from becoming wider wars.

In the Middle East, the focus has been on balancing supporting Israel and its right to defend itself with preventing the war from escalating into a wider regional war. Biden insists that “we’re going to do everything we can to keep a wider war from breaking out.” In Ukraine, the focus has been on providing Ukraine with whatever it needs for as long as it takes to attain the strongest position on the battlefield to win them their freedom, their sovereignty and their territorial integrity while preventing the war from escalating into a wider war with Russia. “We will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine,” Biden has said. “Direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War Three, something we must strive to prevent.”

But Biden’s strategy is on the precipice of disastrous failure on both fronts. On both fronts the calibrations have gone dangerously wrong. The war in Gaza has spread to Lebanon and is on a quivering edge in Iran. After Iran’s missile strikes on Israel on October 1, the world awaits, not only Israel’s response, but Iran’s response to that. The risk is not just an Israel-Iran war. With the U.S. sending, not only a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD, advanced missile defense system to Israel, but about 100 American troops to operate it, there is the risk of the U.S. being drawn into a war with Iran. If that’s not bad enough, that war could then, conceivably, draw in Russia.

In Ukraine, too, the calibration quivers on the edge of a wider war. Zelenskyy daily lobbies the U.S. to erase all red lines and green light strikes deeper into Russian territory with Western supplied long range missile systems, that, as in Israel, would require U.S. involvement.

Russian President Vladimir Putin warns that such a green light would “change the very essence, the very nature of the conflict dramatically” because it would “mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia.” If Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is correct that the U.S. is “seeing evidence” that South Korean and Ukrainian intelligence are right in their assertion that North Korea has sent 3,000 troops to Russia, then there is risk of a still wider war.

The Biden administration’s policy of calibrating how far you can nurture a war before pushing it over the precipice of escalation has gone badly and placed the U.S. on the edge of two wider wars. If Biden is the leader of the world, then he has recklessly and dangerously mismanaged it.

The October 19, 2024 endorsement of the Harris/Walz Democratic ticket for the Presidency and Vice Presidency by over fifty Lebanese Americans (perhaps some reluctantly) reads as if the Biden Bombs for Israel are not daily destroying more of Lebanon and its civilians with an emerging genocidal pattern as seen in Gaza over the past year. Israel’s terrorism against innocent civilians, health facilities, cafes, residential areas, schools, agricultural terrains, transportation routes, and even banks, are receiving so far the full, cruel support of the Biden/Harris Administration. So where is the storied Lebanese tradition of tough negotiation or bargaining?

The statement failed to condition this support on the White House’s making immediate enforceable demands on Israel to stop this mass annihilation, including women, children, the elderly, and hospital patients, immediately. There is no indication of any reciprocity, simply a plea without any display of political power on behalf of the Lebanese American community. After all, there are over a million Lebanese American voters that the Democratic Party should be keeping in mind.

The statement failed to condition this support on the White House’s making immediate enforceable demands on Israel to stop this mass annihilation, including women, children, the elderly, and hospital patients, immediately.

The letter should have given Bibi-Biden a sense of urgency by informing him that over 80,000 Americans reside in Lebanon and that there are two major educational institutions there – the American University of Beirut (AUB) and the Lebanese American University (LAU) with extensions in the Bekaa Valley, along with other American business, cultural and charitable enterprises. Any day now, Netanyahu’s murderous bombing raids against a totally defenseless country will claim the lives of Americans there. (Israel has already bombed the ancestral village of one of the signers of the letter.) The Washington Post reports that Israel has already bombed several Christian villages. What is Joe Biden going to do? The Lebanese American community should let Biden know he and Democratic candidates will pay a political price should he not put a stop to this indiscriminate air and ground attack on its ally and the additional violence against the United Nations peacekeepers in the south.

The letter has long-term proposals for peace and a rebuilding of Lebanon’s economy and governing institutions which are well taken. But as Martin Luther King Jr. once exclaimed: “THE URGENCY OF NOW” is on the table. History reminds us that Hezbollah was created in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, dominating and abusing the unprotected Shiite Lebanese in the south. The Israeli practice of collective punishment and limitless civilian destruction over the years is now underway again in this small country. (The Washington Post reports 1.2 million Lebanese have been displaced in just one week).

The letter does not do justice to this slaughter that is going on right now with full Biden/Harris backing. It should have a follow-up addendum immediately for an emergency demand that Biden pressure Netanyahu to cease attacking an American ally. With consequences if denied. Now!

Don’t you think the bombarded Lebanese people expect at least that much from the signatories?

Postscript: One of the signers is Ralph Nader of New York City. The gentleman is no relation. There should be no confusion of names here.

Israeli officials keep repeating that Israel is fighting on multiple fronts. The truth is that Israel chooses to fight on multiple fronts. The two claims are fundamentally different.

Recently, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went as far as saying that his country is fighting on seven different war fronts, all driven by the objective of "defending ourselves against... barbarism."

These supposedly defensive wars are also carried out in the name of protecting "civilization against those who seek to impose a dark age of fanaticism on all of us," Netanyahu said in a speech in early October.

More wars for Israel also translate into more money.

There will be no need to counter Netanyahu's diatribes. It should be obvious that neither is genocide classified as self-defense, nor does preserving human civilization include burning people alive, as was the case with Sha'ban Al-Dalou, who was horrifically killed alongside his family in the recent Israeli shelling of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah.

But is Israel being forced to fight on seven fronts?

According to Netanyahu, but also other top political and military officials, the fronts are Iran, Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, and groups in Syria, Iraq, and the West Bank.

Though the major fighting is only taking place in Gaza and Lebanon, the official Israeli line is keen on exaggerating the number of war fronts to continue capitalizing on the generous U.S. and Western military and political support. More wars for Israel also translate into more money.

Of course, Israel is fighting actual wars too; a war of extermination and genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, which has killed and wounded more than 150,000 people in the course of one year.

There is also a war in the West Bank, carried out with the precise aim of subduing all forms of resistance, so that Israel may accelerate its settler-colonial project in the occupied territories.

The above is not an inference, but a statement of fact, based on Netanyahu's own declared policies. "Israel must have security control over all the territory west of the Jordan," he said during a news conference last January. To be more precise, "between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty," he said. "Security control" is an Israeli euphemism for territorial expansion.

In an interview with the European public service channel Arte, Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich said Israel would expand "little by little" to eventually encompass the whole of the Palestinian territories, in addition to Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, and other Arab countries.

"It is written that the future of Jerusalem is to expand to Damascus," he said.

Religious prophecies are particularly dangerous when they are embraced by unhinged extremist politicians who wield the political clout and military power to put them into action.

Netanyahu is a leading member of the same group. He has already justified his genocide in Gaza and wars everywhere according to religious texts, where he sees his army as the Israelites fighting the Amalekites.

These religious sentiments are common in Israel's political discourses throughout history. However, they have taken center stage in recent years under a succession of far-right governments, mostly formed by Netanyahu. They see in the Gaza war an opportunity to bring about what Smotrich, then the vice-chairman of the Knesset, called in 2017 "Israel's decisive plan."

Ironically named "One Hope," Smotrich's plan is primarily centered on the annexation of the whole of the West Bank, which he, like Netanyahu and others, refers to as "Judea and Samaria." The plan entails "imposing sovereignty on all of Judea and Samaria," with the "concurrent acts of settlements," as in "the establishing of cities and towns," with the aim of "creating a clear and irreversible reality on the ground."

Smotrich's plan, which is being implemented, now that he is one of the two kingmakers in Netanyahu's government—the other is Itamar Ben-Gvir—was prepared years before the ongoing war on Gaza, and is being implemented, per his own admission, "little by little" ever since.

Israel may claim that it is fighting a war on seven or 70 fronts. It may also assign itself the role of the savior of civilizations. But the truth cannot be hidden, especially when the Israelis themselves are the ones who are disclosing their sinister intentions.

Even the ongoing war on Lebanon, which Israeli leaders, along with their U.S. backers, have dubbed a defensive war, is now being promoted by some Israeli politicians and their right-wing supporters as another expansionist war, or more accurately a quest for "Greater Israel."

There is a difference between a country fighting a defensive war on multiple fronts and another fighting for colonial expansion, for regional hegemony, and for military dominance driven by religious prophecies. Those who have chosen the latter path, as Israel has, cannot claim to be in a state of self-defense.

"Self-defense in international law refers to the inherent right of a state to use of force in response to an armed attack," the International Red Cross states on its website. This definition does not apply to a state that is itself a military occupier, thus is in an active state of hostility and unlawful use of violence.

Netanyahu and Smotrich, however, are hardly concerned about international or humanitarian laws. They are driven by ominous, expansionist agendas. If they succeed, more deadly wars are sure to follow. The international community must do everything in its power to ensure their failure.

This month, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin authorized the deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system to Israel, along with American personnel to operate it. According to observers, between October 14 and 21, a record 26 U.S. military transport flights landed in Israel, delivering personnel and equipment to set up the THAAD system. Satellite images confirm that the system is now fully operational, with all its components, including radar and missile launch platforms, positioned and ready. By placing U.S. troops and assets in a volatile conflict zone, the Biden administration risks exposing American military personnel to potential attacks, and further destabilizing the Middle East, all without explicit congressional authorization for such combat missions.

In the past year, the attacks between Iran and Israel have increased with escalating tit-for-tat exchanges. What began as smaller retaliations has evolved into direct strikes on critical targets. In April 2024, Iran responded symbolically to an Israeli attack on its consulate in Syria, which killed eight officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, by launching a coordinated missile and drone attack on Israel from its territory.

On October 1 2024, Iran responded to an even more provocative Israeli attack in August 2024, which killed Palestinian leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, deploying maneuverable hypersonic missiles that successfully evaded Israel’s defense systems, showing its capability to strike deep within Israel’s heartland. Since then, the world has waited with bated breath to see how Israel will, in turn, attack Iran. Israel has massively expanded its military assault on Lebanon and Palestine, where it has intensified its genocide in Gaza with an unprecedented ethnic cleansing campaign in its northern parts.

The Biden administration reportedly has urged Israel to ratchet down the conflict with Iran, particularly in the lead up to the election, encouraging it instead to “take the win” in Lebanon. As usual, however, the Biden team’s actions speak louder than words, because by announcing it will deploy THAAD missiles to Israel, it is enabling Israel to pursue a potentially catastrophic offensive against Iran, assured by the backing of U.S. technology and personnel.

By announcing it will deploy THAAD missiles to Israel, it is enabling Israel to pursue a potentially catastrophic offensive against Iran, assured by the backing of U.S. technology and personnel.

Far from being a stabilizing force, the deployment of these missiles raises the stakes for everyone involved, including American military personnel and bases stationed in the region. The U.S. has already crossed the line to become a party to Israel’s war in the region, including by providing Israel with targeting and intelligence support, launching offensive attacks on Yemen to punish them for their support of Palesitnians, and shooting down Iranian missiles from Jordan. By escalating the engagement of U.S. military personnel to assist Israel with this much broader deployment of U.S. missiles to be operated by U.S. personnel, U.S. forces are now legitimate targets of attack themselves.

These combat actions are taking place without the necessary legal permissions under the War Powers Resolution (WPR), which requires the President to notify Congress within 48 hours of deploying forces into hostilities. Without an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) or a declaration of war, U.S. forces cannot engage in hostilities beyond 60 days, with an optional 30-day extension for withdrawal. The Biden administration crossed this threshold in April 2024, spending nearly $1 billion to intercept Iranian missiles and drones during attacks on Israel. These extensive combat operations constitute active hostilities, meaning the 60-day WPR limit has expired without congressional approval, violating constitutional checks on war powers.

According to Brown University's Costs of War Project, the U.S. has spent over $22 billion and counting on Israel's military operations and related U.S operations in the region, including $17.9 billion in approved foreign military financing since October 2023—the most military aid the U.S. has ever sent to Israel since it began providing financial support to the Israeli military. This aid has been used in operations widely condemned for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity and part of the International Criminal Court’s ongoing case, which has resulted in the indictment requests of Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

Instead of sending more weapons and further fueling escalation, the U.S. should push for a ceasefire in Gaza, which remains the key to defusing the broader regional conflict.

Continuing to send weapons to a country involved in such actions undermines U.S. credibility and also violates the Foreign Assistance Act, which prohibits military aid to foreign forces engaged in gross violations of human rights or obstructing humanitarian assistance. Israel continues to block humanitarian aid to Gaza while intensifying its war crimes on a daily basis, and the U.S. continues to transfer weapons—implicating itself in these violations too.

The United States should resist this reckless course of action. It is not in America’s interests to get entangled in another Middle Eastern war, especially one undertaken without public debate, congressional approval, or a clear exit strategy. Instead of sending more weapons and further fueling escalation, the U.S. should push for a ceasefire in Gaza, which remains the key to defusing the broader regional conflict. A ceasefire would halt the immediate bloodshed and prevent the cycle of retaliation from dragging the entire region into war.

Has there ever before been a wannabe tyrant as open about his intentions as Donald Trump? This transparency—absent in everything else in his politics and his life—is nothing short of astonishing. This is a man who lies every time he opens his mouth. Yet, as to this one, immeasurably important, subject he’s been remarkably frank, openly embracing one characteristic of an authoritarian after another. He even expressly announced his desire to be a dictator, if only for one day.

One cannot help but wonder if this openness is because the drive to be an autocrat is one of the few things to which he has ever been deeply committed.

He makes no effort to hide his distaste for the rule of law, bragging publicly about plans to turn the Justice Department into his personal avenger, prosecuting and jailing his political opponents. These will be prosecutions not intended to prevent or punish crime, but as a means of attacking those with the nerve to oppose him.

The same is true of his lust for political violence, another classic authoritarian trait. He has repeatedly, and again openly, encouraged his followers to engage in political violence—famously telling the crowd at one of his rallies in 2016 to “knock the crap” out of a heckler. And, of course, there is the granddaddy of all political violence—sending a fired-up crowd to the capital on January 6, 2021, with orders to “fight like hell.”

He is a man who regularly celebrates dictators. The only foreign leaders he seems to be comfortable with are totalitarians, people like Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin, and, of course, his favorite squeeze (“We fell in love”) Kim Jong Un.

Yet despite all this, some progressives still intend to either stay home or cast a protest vote for a minor-party candidate. And in a close election like this, if enough people in the wrong states do stay at home or vote for a third-party candidate, Trump could win because of it. And if that’s the choice you make, which is certainly your right, all I can say is enjoy casting your protest vote, savor the experience, because if Trump wins it is likely to be the last act of protest you will ever participate in where you won’t be putting your life on the line or risking a long prison sentence.

The ugly truth is that if Trump becomes president, especially if he has a Republican Congress to work with, he will have all the power he needs to rig the game such that he, or his chosen successor, will be all but guaranteed to win future elections. That is precisely how Orban ended meaningful democracy in Hungary.

Trump has been up front on this subject as well. If people protest his actions, he intends to call out the national guard, or even the military, to shut them up. To shut you up. Although it is hard to see why he would bother with the military. Trump already has no shortage of thugs, his own personal Brownshirts, who would be more than happy to beat the life out of a few liberals. After all, if they get arrested he can just pardon them in the same way he is promising to pardon the January 6 rioters.

Trump has studied at the feet of authoritarian masters—often taking his lead from the likes of Orban, Putin, and Kim Jong Un. At the same time, hundreds of Americans in right-wing think tanks and other far-right institutions are working hard, preparing to move quickly when Trump takes office. Don’t underestimate their goals. They are fighting for nothing less than revolutionary change, including election fixes that will guarantee that once in power they will remain in power indefinitely.

In most elections there are several weighty issues at the center of the campaign. But this time there is really only one issue—will the United States remain a liberal democracy. In saying this, I am in no way suggesting that other issues, such as a woman’s right to control her own body, are not critically important. They are. What I am suggesting, however, is that in this election all of those other issues of concern to progressives are wrapped up inside this one issue. If Trump wins, he will saturate executive departments, including the Justice Department, the FBI, the military leadership, the CIA, and many regulatory agencies with far-right fanatics—not to mention continuing what he started in his first term in packing the courts with even more far-right fanatics.

What chance will abortion rights, and other progressive causes, have in the United States then?

I understand that for some people casting a vote for someone they regard as “the lesser of two evils” will be personally offensive. I don’t feel that way in this election, but if you are one of those people, I understand where you are coming from. But do me a favor and make a list of all the things you love in this country that depend on federal action.

Please think twice before assuming that people are exaggerating the danger, or that we can get by and then vote the far right out of power in later elections.

If you try, you will have no problem coming up with a long list. Perhaps your list will include preservation of national parks and wilderness areas. Or maybe the protection of endangered species. Public education? Union rights? Fighting climate change? Fighting other forms of pollution? Protecting consumers from fraud and dangerous products? Then once you’ve made your list, take a moment to think about what will become of those things in a Donald Trump America.

Take that list with you when you go to vote and look at it one last time before voting, then hold your nose and mark your ballot for Kamala Harris.

One last point: Please think twice before assuming that people are exaggerating the danger, or that we can get by and then vote the far right out of power in later elections. The ugly truth is that if Trump becomes president, especially if he has a Republican Congress to work with, he will have all the power he needs to rig the game such that he, or his chosen successor, will be all but guaranteed to win future elections. That is precisely how Orban ended meaningful democracy in Hungary: after gaining power through elections, he used that power to change election rules, weaken the courts, and damage his opponents in other ways. Trump supporters have already started paving the way for such an assault in the 2025 Plan.

What this means is that if we lose our democracy in this election, we are unlikely to get it back, or at least to get it back anytime soon. As described in Anne Applebaum’s book, Autocracy, Inc, once an authoritarian gains power though elective office, it becomes remarkably easy for that autocrat to extend that power.

In other words, we only have one chance to get this right.

Kamala Harris has a plan to expand Medicare to include home care. If Harris is elected president and signs her plan into law, it will be life-changing for millions of seniors and people with disabilities. Importantly, it builds upon President Franklin Roosevelt’s vision for a New Deal for the American people.

Vice President Harris should get enormous praise for her groundbreaking proposal. Long-term care is a looming challenge that’s barely getting discussed. Harris recognizes this challenge and is offering an important solution: Medicare At Home.

Harris’s Medicare At Home plan would expand economic security by creating a new universal benefit, in the grand tradition of President Franklin Roosevelt and his visionary Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins.

In 1934, President Roosevelt considered adopting a comprehensive cradle-to-grave program of economic security. Ultimately, he decided to start more slowly and incrementally with what became the Social Security Act of 1935, which, among many other achievements, created Social Security and unemployment insurance. He recognized that Social Security was too important to risk failure by beginning too ambitiously.

A decade later, in 1944, having just been elected for the fourth time, FDR built on this legacy by calling for an economic bill of rights in his State of the Union address. This so-called Second Bill of Rights would give every American the right to comprehensive economic security, including a first–rate education; guaranteed employment at a living wage – “enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation”; a decent home; “adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health”; as well as “adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment.”

He understood, as Vice President Harris does, that people want the right, the ability, and the assistance necessary to age in place, with dignity and independence. In a capitalist system like ours, where working families are dependent on wages, economic security requires insurance against the loss of those wages, which Social Security and Unemployment Insurance provide. That is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Economic security and a decent and dignified life also require getting the care you need, including home care.

Medicare provides health care to Americans over age 65 and people with disabilities, but it has a huge gap: Long-term care. Most people think that Medicare covers long-term care, only to face a devastating shock when they (or a loved one) are in need of care.

Long-term care costs around $100,000 per year, so almost no one can afford it. Currently, the only program that covers long-term care is Medicaid. But unlike Medicare, which is universal, Medicaid is means-tested. As a result, seniors and people with disabilities are forced to “spend down” all of their assets, including property, before they can qualify for long-term care through Medicaid.

Sometimes, people must even divorce their loving spouses in order to qualify for long-term care coverage. And even then, after breaking up families and depleting their nest eggs, they may wind up in a dehumanizing corporate nursing home that exists to exploit patients for profit, because that’s still all they can afford.

In one heartbreaking instance, physicist Leon Lederman was forced to sell his Nobel Prize medal for $765,000 to pay for his care — and he still ultimately wound up in a nursing home.

Medicaid was not enacted as a long-term care program, but that is what it has become by default. And because it was not structured to be a long-term care program, it forces middle class seniors to bankrupt themselves so that they can receive care. It forces seniors and people with disabilities into nursing homes when they are healthy enough to remain at home.

This is a system that is fundamentally broken in this country. But Kamala Harris’s new plan for a universal Medicare At Home benefit would finally begin to change all that.

Those who have responsibilities for aging parents are also often caring for young children. Many other Americans are caring for a spouse while also dealing with their own health challenges. Kamala Harris’s Medicare At Home plan would benefit the entire family. It would empower seniors and people with disabilities who are healthy enough to age in place but can’t afford the care they need to remain at home.

Before the creation of Social Security, it was routine for parents to live with their adult children. Those who did not have children, or whose children were unable or unwilling to care for them, were forced into poorhouses.

FDR and Frances Perkins saved millions of seniors from the poorhouse. Now, Kamala Harris has a plan to save them from another form of institutionalized care, the nursing home.

Her plan is completely affordable because the Biden-Harris administration finally stopped letting Big Pharma rip Americans off. Kamala Harris would pay for this new Medicare At Home benefit, along with adding vision and hearing coverage to Medicare, with the savings from Medicare negotiating lower prescription drug prices. Big Pharma will continue to profit, just not at unconscionably exorbitant rates.

Seniors get to pay lower prescription drug prices, and also receive new hearing, vision, and home care benefits. And the so-called sandwich generation will have more time and resources. Moreover, states will benefit because the proposal will reduce their hard-pressed budgets, which are heavily burdened today by the long-term care costs funded by Medicaid. Harris’s proposal is a win-win for everyone (except for Big Pharma CEOs).

Kamala Harris’s Medicare at Home plan is a big step toward fulfilling Medicare’s promise of a simple, universal benefit. When she signs it into law, it will bring us far closer to the grand vision of full economic security first imagined by President Roosevelt and Secretary Perkins.

The 2024 U.S. presidential election is a referendum on whether or not America will be a partner or a roadblock to global climate action. Just a week after the U.S. election, the next global climate conference will work out the technical details and new global climate finance goal at Baku’s COP29. The U.S. election will set the tone and tenor of this important meeting. Whoever wins in November will determine if the United States will be a global partner to the diverse issues connected to climate, energy transition, and development finance—or a nation withdrawn at best and a hostile actor at worst.

Globally, climate-fueled events are costing us all $16 million per hour through wildfires, storms, and drought—amplifying livelihood insecurities and potentially putting the global sustainable development goals out of reach. The majority of Americans polled want to see climate policies that can address the climate shocks being felt today. But only the Democratic ticket of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz has a plan to address these challenges.

The climate crisis does not exist in a political vacuum. That’s why the Biden-Harris administration has centered climate in various arenas: international aid, foreign policy, conservation, energy, and so much more. On President Biden’s first day in office, the administration rejoined the Paris Agreement and reversed many of the environmental rollbacks President Trump enacted. As Vice President, Kamala Harris worked tirelessly to pass the monumental Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The IRA is among the world's largest single investment in climate to date, including incentives for renewables and expanding on programs for communities coping with climate and environmental injustices. A Harris-Walz administration would continue and expand off the IRA to address the climate and environmental challenges Americans are facing at home while maintaining emissions reduction targets that meet global climate goals.

A future President Harris would see America continuing its leadership role in global climate forums. She would address the myriad of climate challenges as economic opportunities that can be interwoven throughout domestic and global endeavors. A future President Harris would continue policies normalized around the world—like participating in the World Bank and in global climate forums in partnership. This is a future where the United States continues to wield influence and shape agendas on climate, security, and international development. This is in sharp contrast to what the other side is offering.

As president, Trump took the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, expanded oil development on previously protected lands, and slashed environmental protections that protect Americans from unsafe air and water. Environmentally, we can expect the same and much worse from a second Trump administration.

The Republican Platform this year was limited on details, but outlined core goals that align with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook. In the past, republican presidents have aligned and adopted the Heritage Foundation’s agendas. For instance, President Reagan adopted roughly 60% of their Mandate for Leadership.

If Project 2025 is implemented it would represent an America in retreat. It would harm global cooperation on climate and potentially break multilateral forums. A Trump-Vance ticket is offering an America unmoored from geopolitical and economic reality; a future where the U.S. removes itself from the International Monetary Fund, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the World Bank. Without U.S contributions to these institutions, though all must do more and reforms remain necessary, global climate action would be strained for most emerging and developing countries. Today, the U.S. is the largest contributor to the World Bank, which provides the lion’s share of global climate finance, amounting to $38.6 billion in 2023.

A Trump-Vance administration would—once more—remove the U.S. from the Paris Agreement and depart from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Detaching the United States from global climate frameworks would mean global climate goals are unlikely to be met. Coal-reliant nations like China, Australia, and India would have a free pass to continue to exploit coal despite the costs and risks, both nationally and globally. An unsustainable path towards 2.0°C or 3.0°C would become more likely.

America and the world cannot afford to ignore climate, especially when it’s cheaper, more beneficial economically, and avoids the worst climate consequences to face our climate reality head on. The world cannot afford a prospective U.S. presidential ticket hellbent on fostering global and domestic instability across the board. A ticket that considers science as fiction cannot act in the best interest of the American people at home nor abroad.

Elections are about the future, juxtaposed against the challenges of the present. Climate is today’s challenge and opportunity. A Trump-Vance ticket would be a scorched earth reality for our climate, inevitable energy transition, and the financing developing nations need. It is no competition—the world needs a future President Harris.

Note: The opinions expressed are solely that of the author and do not represent an endorsement from any of her current or past affiliated organizations.

This year marks the 107th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. In the evening of October 25, 1917, the Winter Palace in Petrograd (today’s St. Petersburg) was stormed. This event marked the beginning of the Great October Revolution, one of the most significant political events of the twentieth century that shaped the course of history for decades ahead.

Leading up to the events of October 25 was another revolution in late February 1917, which brought to power a group of leaders from bourgeois political parties that formed a provisional government headed initially by Georgy Lvov, a liberal reformer, and then by Aleksander Kerensky, a social democrat who as Prime Minister from July to October 1917 continued Russia's involvement in World War I despite that being very unpopular among the soldiers and with the masses in general. In early March of that year Tsar Nicholas II, who had ruled imperial Russia since 1894 but had managed to make autocracy the most unpopular it had ever been, abdicated. Five months later, Russia was pronounced a republic.

Although the provisional government did introduce some reforms on the political front, prompting even Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin to declare Russia in April 1917 “the freest country in the world”, it was the Red October Revolution that turned the old order completely upside down by inaugurating a socialist regime and making Soviet-style communism a global ideological and political force that lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991.

Still, more than one hundred years later, the rise of the Bolsheviks to power continues to divide scholars, the chattering classes and even the educated public. There are several issues that are particularly divisive, such as whether the October Revolution was a popular insurgency or essentially a coup, and whether Stalinism evolved naturally from the basic principles and political strategies of Lenin or was an unexpected development.

Likewise, there is still a great deal of ambiguity, disagreement and confusion over the nature of the regime that flourished in the Soviet Union after Lenin’s death in 1924. For example, did the Soviet Union represent an “actual socialist society”, a “degenerated workers’ state”, or simply a “totalitarian state economy” in which the communist ideology functioned as a mere instrument of political legitimization and imperial rule?

When it happened, the Great October Revolution produced global hysteria, untamed enthusiasm and hope about the possibility of the creation of heaven on earth (a new utopia) in equal measures. For the bourgeois classes everywhere, the inauguration of the Soviet regime was anathema to core values of the “western civilization”, while for radicals and communists it signified a natural culmination of the inevitable march of history towards human freedom and a social order devoid of exploitation.

However, an objective evaluation on socialism and the legacy of Soviet communism gives no room for mourning or celebration. It was essentially the epic story of an impossible dream that turned in due time into a political and historical nightmare because of the interplay of a vast array of factors that included “backward” socioeconomic conditions, outside intervention, an absence of democratic traditions, and misconceived notions about socialism and democracy. Hence, while one can easily romanticize about the October Revolution, the cold reality of history smacks you in the face.

For starters, the Great October Revolution was unlike the February Revolution which erupted as a result of spontaneous action by hundreds of thousands of hungry and angry men and women workers and militant troops. What happened in October 1917 was the outcome of a well-designed strategy on the part of the leader (Lenin) of a minority party (the Bolsheviks) to wrest control from the provisional government because of a strong ideological aversion to “bourgeois democracy” and desire for power. Unsurprisingly Lenin’s call for “all power to the Soviets” ended up being something entirely different: all power went to the party and its politburo.

The October Revolution was not a coup in itself, but neither was it a popular uprising that enjoyed the kind of mass support that the February Revolution had. In fact, it was not until the autumn of 1917 that Lenin’s “land, peace, bread” slogan had been embraced by some workers in St Petersburg and Moscow.

Yet, even this does not mean that the Bolshevik program and Lenin’s ideas of rule were accepted by the majority of the Russian people: In the November 1917 elections, the first truly free election in Russian history, Lenin’s party received only one quarter of the vote, while the Social Revolutionaries managed to receive over 60 percent.

Lenin had stomach neither for parliamentary democracy nor for sharing power with any other political organization. His unwavering intent to establish socialism in Russia, regardless of the ripeness of the social and economic conditions, and his firm conviction that only the Bolsheviks represented the true interests of the workers, would compel him to adopt strategies and policies that would soon deprive the Revolution of whatever potential it had originally had for the establishment of a new social order based on workers’ control of the means of production and democracy (which Lenin, sadly enough, associated with the “dictatorship of the proletariat”).

Indeed, not long after the November elections, Lenin would ban several opposition newspapers and unleash a campaign of “Red Terror” against all class enemies (with the Social Revolutionaries being the first victims following their uprising in Moscow in early July 1918). The orchestration of the “Red Terror,” which lasted until the end of the Russian civil war, was assigned to Cheka (a Bolshevik police organization that reported to Lenin himself on all anti-communist activities), thereby laying the foundations for the emergence of a full-fledged police state under Stalinism.

The clearest illustration of how far to the “right” the Bolsheviks had moved following the outbreak of the October Revolution is the brutal repression of the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921 by Red Army troops. Disheartened by the Bolsheviks’ dictatorial tendencies, a garrison of the key fortress of Kronstadt revolted in March 1921 against the communist government and the ideas of “war communism” – even though the Kronstadt sailors had been, back in 1917, among the strongest supporters of the October Revolution and the idea of “Soviet power”. To be sure, they were, until then, in Lev Trotsky’s own words, “the pride and joy of the revolution”.

With the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion, it became clear that Lenin’s concept of the “vanguard party” and his understanding of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” did not permit dissent of any kind and that a socialist political order was to be based on one-party rule.

As for the policy of “war communism”, it ended a complete disaster. Lenin himself admitted as much in a speech on October 17, 1921, when he said, “we made the mistake of deciding to go over directly to communist production and distribution”.

But this did not mean that all Bolsheviks shared Lenin’s views on “war communism” or that they embraced the policy that was followed in the 1920s by a partial return to the market system of production and distribution. The soon-to-be “new Tzar” Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, regarded the New Economic Policy as the betrayal of the October Revolution. His “revolution from above”, launched in 1928 with the policy of collectivization and dekulakization (a campaign of political repressions, including arrests, deportations, and executions of millions of the more “well-to-do” peasants) reopened the gates of hell and converted Soviet socialism once and for all into a barbarous and murderous regime.

Stalinism did not merely formalize the worst aspects of Leninism but became, in reality, an actual stumbling block for the transition into socialism both inside the Soviet Union and throughout the rest of the world where the ideas of social justice and equality continued to move the minds and hearts of millions of decent people.

Hence, the end of Stalinism and the collapse of Soviet communism (which in the course of its 74 years did manage to turn a “backward” country into an industrialized nation that was able to defeat Nazism and make undeniable advances on several economic, cultural, and social fronts) mark simply the end of a dream turned into a nightmare.

In this context, the legacy of the Russian Revolution obliges, 107 years later, neither celebration nor mourning. Dreams are surely renewable, and a new world is waiting to be born as neoliberalism, militarism, and the climate crisis are wreaking havoc on the planet, but the possibilities available to create an egalitarian, socially just, ecologically friendly, and decent society lie today outside the ideas, practices and policies of the October Revolution.

Climate is at number nine among the top issues that voters care about in this election. So it was no surprise that the candidates hardly mentioned climate change as two ferocious hurricanes—both fueled by elevated sea surface temperatures—pummeled parts of the Southeast in the closing months before the election. In the Western states, we are getting to the end of another big fire season after losing 8 million acres to wildfires this year alone. Climate-driven disasters like these are clearly not enough to make climate a top election issue in the current political environment.

The challenge for political leaders who want to address the climate crisis is to campaign as if it was not an existential threat and then somehow mobilize action across government and the private sector once they are elected to office. This is the needle that Joe Biden has tried to thread, with remarkable success. With the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the U.S. is now on a legitimate path to net zero emissions by 2050, which is a prerequisite for staying within the critical 2 degrees Celsius temperature increase.

Donald Trump has made it exceedingly clear that he does not believe climate change is even a problem.

But the IRA loses steam after 2030 and additional climate policies will need to be incorporated into the net zero plan on a regular basis to keep us on track for the net zero target. The Biden administration has already lined up several key regulations that should help, including new fuel economy standards and limits on tailpipe emissions starting in 2027, a cap on power plant emissions by 2039, and faster federal permits for major transmission lines to get renewable power into the grid with more ease.

The next president will either accelerate this progress or bring it to a screeching halt.

Given Kamala Harris’s support for climate action, the clean tech industry, and climate activists have given her plenty of space to campaign on other issues while staying largely silent on climate. If elected, it is reasonable to expect that Harris will build on the Biden administration’s work and keep the U.S. on the net zero path. A clean energy economy—built on electrification and emissions-free energy—should be a relatively easy sell as a job creator, cost reducer (yes, electrification saves consumers money in the long run), and a competitive advantage against countries like China.

We are going to be voting for the world’s climate future even if we are reluctant to admit it.

Donald Trump has made it exceedingly clear that he does not believe climate change is even a problem. Between Project 2025 pushing for a “whole-of-government unwinding” of U.S. climate policy and the fossil fuel industry drafting detailed plans to dismantle the Biden administration’s climate rules, it is a safe bet that we will no longer be on a trajectory to net zero emissions if Trump is back in the White House. If the official climate policy of the world’s second largest greenhouse gas emitter is no policy at all, then it is anyone’s guess what it will take to get the world on track to prevent the worst impacts of a rapidly warming planet.

But the danger does not end there. Given the previous Trump administration’s record of sidelining climate scientists and deleting mentions of climate change in scientific reports, we should also be concerned about not having access to timely and accurate climate-related data and analysis from key government agencies and national labs in a second Trump administration. Without reliable data from entities such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Energy Information Administration (EIA), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), effective climate research and action will be that much harder even outside the government.

The enormity of the danger hiding behind the climate silence in this election can not be overstated. We are going to be voting for the world’s climate future even if we are reluctant to admit it.

Contributing fundamentally to the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the struggles of British workers in the Industrial Revolution, Thomas Paine was the greatest radical of a truly radical age. Yet this son of an English artisan did not become a radical until his arrival in America in late 1774 at the age of thirty-seven. Even then he had never expected such things to happen.

However, struck by America’s startling contradictions and magnificent possibilities, and moved by the spirit and determination of its people to resist British authority, he dedicated himself to the American cause and through his pamphlets of 1776—Common Sense and the ensuing American Crisis Papers—he emboldened Americans to transform their colonial rebellion into a revolutionary war, defined the new nation in a democratically expansive and progressive fashion, and articulated an American identity charged with exceptional purpose and promise.

As Paine saw it: Americans could show the world that humanity had no need for kings and overlords, indeed, that common people, working people, could govern themselves!

Is it any wonder then that we have reached back and recruited Paine to the cause of rescuing America’s revolutionary promise from royal wannabee Donald Trump and his MAGA and GOP (Tory) subjects who seem set upon destroying it?

Vote Democratic top to bottom on November 5th… so we can start acting anew on Citizen Paine’s radical-democratic challenge: “We have it in our power to begin the world again.”Words That Turned a Rebellion Into Revolution
Poisoning the Blood of Our Country?
We Must Vote...

In 30 years, on some fall morning like today, we wake up and turn on the news. No one is talking about banning abortion or “legalizing abortion” because we don’t talk about wombs like they exist to be legislated around anymore. Instead they are announcing the closing of U.S. military bases in the Pacific, and returning the land to its stewards. Once places of pollution, sexual violence, and war buildup, these bases are something else now. And all over the South of the United States, communities have been given billions of billions of dollars to replace their infrastructure to better protect against natural disasters.

For a couple decades, the world has been working together to slow climate emissions; the only competition is who can save the world the fastest. Something that seemed unfathomable 30 years ago, when Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton destroyed Florida and North Carolina and when the government sent money to Israel for genocide instead of sending money to hurricane relief. Palestinians rebuilt Gaza, and people born in Gaza are free to visit their families in Jerusalem, Tulkarem, or Beitunia. The apartheid walls finally came down.

Any devastating moment can be the one that makes us change course in this timeline—natural disasters or coming to the brink of a world war could have been it. From the bottom up, the people demanded better priorities. Feminists thought holistically about what women ought to demand. If war and imperialism are killing women and children directly through bombs and indirectly through climate destruction, then feminists ought to demand an end to war. So they did. The money that was so tied up in the war industry every year, over $1 trillion, flowed into communities to meet beyond their most basic needs.

If we can see little glimpses of the world we want to live in by just being with each other, then we are tangibly moving in the right direction.

The world and its people have a sense of stability. We are all less filled with anxiety and trauma. That’s an example of the feminist future we can imagine.

If utopia is a world where uteruses can’t be legislated or Palestinians can move freely throughout their land, then we are guilty of being utopians. Having a social imagination is useful because we can’t start walking somewhere if we have no idea where we are going, or else we risk walking in the complete opposite direction. The “feminism” of Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, or any other woman of the ruling class has no vision for the future because their feminism very plainly endorses the status quo of endless war and capitalism. This brand of feminism might make it so women have the right to an abortion, but with no way to afford one if they need it, for example. We argue that the co-opted war mongering feminism of this era is leading us down a path that puts all women who aren’t in the ruling class in the line of fire. And we also argue that we can practice our feminist values to create a crawl space to reach a feminist future.

Any dehumanization is antithetical to feminist values. “Feminists” who haven’t said a word about the genocide in Gaza are leaving out Palestinian women—thus dehumanizing an entire population of oppressed people and giving discursive cover for a genocide. If you look at any atrocity at any moment in time, there were people, even “feminists,” justifying those atrocities and injustices. Even if they don’t mention Palestine at all and only discuss abortion rights, omitting it from their demands demonstrates dehumanization all by itself. They are saying aloud who is important to them and who is not.

With each exclusion, the war machine and patriarchy (they are the same thing) will just go to the next oppressed group of people that feminists are willing to leave behind. The first weekend of November, a Women’s March, hoping to stir the women into the streets like it did in 2017, is planned. It declares it is a feminist movement: “By 2050, we will be a feminist-led movement that ensures anyone and everyone has the freedom to lead empowered lives in safety and security in their bodies, in their communities, and throughout the country.” We wonder if our feminist vision should demand a little bit more, and if it’s really useful to have a vision that only includes “the country.” In a globalized world where our “country” has over 700 military bases and supplies weapons for every major conflict, don’t feminists within the U.S. owe a vision that transcends borders? If our oppression flows to every inch of the Earth, so should our solidarity.

Patriarchy is a stomach that is never satiated and is constantly looking for people to swallow up, so it encourages us and pressures us to leave people behind. At this present moment, we are being encouraged by Western feminists to put women in the U.S. ahead of women in Gaza, even when we see videos of pregnant Palestinian women being shot in the street. Western feminists are insisting we try to race to the top, leaving our sisters in Gaza ailing and starving in our dust. Unless part of the ruling class, Western feminists gain nothing by excluding Palestinian women from their politics and future aspirations. Without the practice and value of true solidarity, they will leave everyone living under the boot of capitalism and imperialism in the dirt.

Having a social imagination is key to our feminist world view. To quote Bill Ayers’ new book, When Freedom is the Question, Abolition is the Answer, social imagination is “the collectively creative, inventive, resourceful forces that embrace all of humanity and are explicitly pro-emancipation and pro-liberation for the many, for all.” Any feminist framework that doesn’t include the masses lacks what is necessary for social imagination.

Here’s what Western feminists are presented with: women in the Senate, women in the House of Representatives, and women in “power” vaguely. Let’s zoom in at the women in Congress who CODEPINK has been educating on the plight of women in Gaza for years now. When confronted with the reality of the human suffering they knowingly support and materially make possible, people like Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) shake their fists at us and insist they are focusing on the issues facing women here in the U.S. Not only is Western feminism exclusionary, it also thinks you’re stupid. Congress, and women like Pelosi, have had multiple opportunities to codify abortion rights in the United States. During this time, and in the last year, these same women have promised ironclad support for the genocidal state of Israel as it destroys families and sexually abuses Palestinian women and men.

So, what have these “feminists” in power delivered for the people? They give us an image of a woman sitting in the seat of power and “breaking the glass ceiling.” Is having a woman who sat where a man once sat to vote in favor of the same austerity or war spending that the man voted for “breaking the glass ceiling”? Sure. But, what about that is meaningful if the walls that hold up the ceiling keep the masses in poverty, trauma, and war? Feminists seek to tear the walls down altogether.

A plea for the status quo (that includes institutional violence against women) is not liberatory nor is it an example of social imagination. Liberatory values like feminism are all-encompassing, they are aspirational and inspiring. Above all, they are rooted in love.

We want a different future. So, what’s the alternative to exclusionary, Western feminism that doesn’t mind Palestinian women being murdered en masse as long as maybe, one day, they can codify the right to an abortion in one, singular country?

It’s feminism—feminism in practice, feminism that truly believes every person deserves dignity in this life. Feminism that can actually imagine and cultivate a future worth living to.

To begin to break out of the racial capitalist patriarchy is to begin practicing feminist values in our everyday lives. At CODEPINK, we call this moving from the war economy to the peace economy. Here are five simple steps you can start taking today:

1. Talk to and meet a new stranger every day. On the bus, at a cafe, on the street. Anywhere. Get outside
2. Practice curiosity. When you hear information relayed to you about another person or issue, ask why that might be the case, or even if that’s the case at all. Curiosity can help us sift through mass media and interpersonal drama with a more critical lens.
3. Practice patience. Remind yourself to not be condescending to people who know less than you about politics or anything at all!
4. Practice generosity. When we live from a place of abundance, we are actively rejecting the scarcity the war economy instills in us.
5. Practice all-encompassing care. You care about the people directly around you. But you also care about the people around them, and then the people around them. You can’t possibly have a feminism that is exclusionary if your empathy reaches everywhere.
6. Read about more practices and our support of you at codepink.org/peaceeconomy

Yes, the atrocities the U.S. government carries out in our name aren’t necessarily our fault. Our politicians are bought off and don’t represent the people, we know that. But practicing our values as we build our movements is critical. If we can see little glimpses of the world we want to live in by just being with each other, then we are tangibly moving in the right direction.

This constant practice of our feminist values makes sure no one gets left behind and prevents our movement from being sucked into co-option. In the U.S., our struggle is with our own government’s priorities. They thrive on getting rich from war and the power they draw from it. They never had and never will be concerned with life, ours or the planets. When our government’s oppression spans the entire world, the people’s struggle is always one.

So, when we imagine a world where our priorities shift to the people, and we look past the horizon and over the Mediterranean, there is also a liberated Palestine.

As global leaders converge in Colombia for the COP16 global biodiversity summit this week, they face a stark reality: Despite over a decade of pledges to protect biodiversity, not a single global target has been fully achieved.

Forests continue to burn, habitats are vanishing, and biodiversity is spiraling toward collapse. Without addressing the systemic drivers of environmental destruction—especially in the Global South—this failure will persist.

The last biodiversity summit (COP15) saw the adoption of decisions on instruments to reduce inequalities, ensure a gender-responsive approach to biodiversity action, take a human rights-based approach, and guarantee access to justice and participation in decision-making by communities. These points are found in the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity’s Gender Plan of Action and the Global Biodiversity Framework’s Targets 22 and 23 and Section C on implementation.

The economic model that Global South countries are forced to pursue by the international financial institutions, based on natural resource extraction with highly unequal distribution of benefits and impacts, is driving extinction and global biodiversity loss.

In Cali, countries will take stock of the targets and commitments adopted so far. This meeting is a crucial opportunity to assess how well the 196 signatories of the convention—sadly, the United States is not one of them—have tackled biodiversity loss so far. And because the crisis we face is so urgent, it’s also a moment in which we must look toward the leadership of women, who play key roles in local agricultural production, family and local economies, and stewardship of biodiversity in key areas like the Amazon.

Picture women like Lucy Mulenkei, a Masai woman who has championed the interests of marginalized pastoralist and hunter-gatherer communities throughout Africa. Or Patricia Gualinga, who has led her Kichwa community in the Amazon in keeping oil drilling off their land and proposing a “living forest” model for rights-based conservation. And Xananine Calvillo, a young woman from Mexico who recently called on the World Bank to stop loaning money to factory farming companies that destroy forests and rivers in sensitive ecosystems.

Our governments and institutions have failed in the past, but they have a chance to listen to women leaders this week. It’s urgent that they do this, and start putting their money where their mouth is, ending subsidies for harmful industries that are behind biodiversity loss.

Why Past Plans on Biodiversity Failed

The strategy agreed in 2010 to guide global action during the U.N. Decade on Biodiversity (2011-2020) recognized the need to address the underlying drivers of biodiversity loss. The failure to tackle these root causes is one of the reasons cited in the third edition of the Global Biodiversity Outlook as to why we didn’t meet the first global biodiversity target in 2010.

Building on this analysis, the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020 structured the 20 Aichi Biodiversity Targets around five Strategic Goals, setting benchmarks for progress through relevant policies and enabling conditions.

However, at the global level, none of the 20 Aichi Targets were fully achieved.

Target 4 on sustainable production and consumption was deemed not achieved with “high confidence,” which means that actions to reduce the ecological footprint failed after a decade of commitment. Between 2011 and 2016, the ecological footprint remained at approximately 1.7 times the level of biocapacity—in other words, requiring “1.7 Earths” to regenerate the biological resources used by our societies.

The rate of loss of all natural habitats including forests, which is considered in Aichi Target 5, is not lower than that of previous decades, with South America surpassing a record for forest fires this year, with 433,000 fire hotspots and over 14.4 million hectares of forest cover burned or affected in different biomes of Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Peru. Brazil and Bolivia alone have seen their forest devastated by 7 million hectares each, while the Amazon river basin is reporting the lowest levels on record amid a severe drought driven by climate change.

What’s Behind Biodiversity Loss

Governments continue to provide billions of dollars in tax breaks, subsidies, and other perverse incentives to support deforestation, water pollution, and fossil fuel consumption which directly work against the goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement and the Global Biodiversity Framework.

By some measures, countries spend at least $2.6 trillion a year on propping up polluting industries, which is equal to 2.5% of global GDP. And the wealthiest nations claim there isn’t enough money to help Global South countries respond to the crises of climate change and biodiversity loss.

The failure to tackle the underlying causes of biodiversity loss, including fossil fuel extraction, mining, industrial agriculture, intensive livestock farming, large-scale infrastructure projects, and monoculture tree plantations— estimated to drive up to 90% of biodiversity loss—are partly linked to the contradictions within the Global Biodiversity Framework. Biodiversity offsets and other market-based schemes considered in Target 19(d) undermine Goal C of the framework, which is to protect the integrity, connectivity, and resilience of all ecosystems.

Forest fires continue to rage in the Amazon, and there’s no time to let companies swoop in with false solutions to the problem.

Letting the market have its way with biodiversity policy is not the way to achieve biodiversity protection, either. So-called biodiversity investment projects have increasingly been exposed for human rights violations, social and gender impacts, conceptual flaws like inattention to ecosystem integrity, and problems with compliance and effectiveness.

The economic model that Global South countries are forced to pursue by the international financial institutions, based on natural resource extraction with highly unequal distribution of benefits and impacts, is driving extinction and global biodiversity loss. That’s why, if we really want to enable urgent and transformative action, government support for export-oriented economic sectors, subsidies, preferential tax subsidies, and diluting environmental regulations must end immediately.

Here’s What Should Happen at COP16

The biodiversity summit this week in Colombia presents us with an opportunity to reaffirm our collective commitment to forest and biodiversity conservation.

Women in all their diversity, Indigenous peoples and local communities, Afro-descendants, peasants, youth, and grassroots movements must be central in shaping the policies that will guide our future. Governments must prioritize people and the planet over corporate profit in a way that is just and equitable, gender-responsive, rights-based, and rooted in a non-market-based approach led by real, community-led solutions.

Transformative change necessarily demands challenging the international financial and monetary systems that force Global South governments to maintain and expand extractive activities and perpetuate the destruction of nature, as well as gender and social inequalities.

As global leaders gather in Cali to review the state of implementation of the Global Biodiversity Framework and show the alignment of their National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans with the Framework, it is crucial that we critically examine the level of biodiversity commitments and address the structural drivers of biodiversity loss.

If we ignore those structural drivers, the harmful activities that are the same ones countries have been propping up with subsidies and favorable terms, there’s no way to halt the biodiversity crisis. Forest fires continue to rage in the Amazon, and there’s no time to let companies swoop in with false solutions to the problem. Transformative change is what is needed, and women like Xananine, Lucy, and Patricia will be there at COP16 with real solutions in their hands.

When Lyndon B. Johnson became president in 1963, he wanted the United States to become a “Great Society” with voting rights for all and an end to discrimination and poverty.

“With your courage and with your compassion and desire, we will build a Great Society,” Johnson told Ohio University students when he kicked off the effort. “A society where no child will go unfed, and no youngster will go unschooled.”

Central to Johnson’s vision for a Great Society was healthcare. The two health programs he started, Medicare and Medicaid, do not offer the universal coverage many nations provide, but they did advance healthcare as a right and not just a privilege for the wealthy.

Trump spent his four years as president trying to take health coverage away from 45 million people by destroying the Affordable Care Act. His only plan for healthcare in a second term is to privatize.

Medicare and Medicaid now offer peace of mind to 150 million older, lower-income, and disabled Americans. Together, they provide healthcare to the largest single pool of people in the United States.

Yet private insurance companies have been chipping away at public healthcare for years to boost their profits. If Donald Trump becomes president, they’ll take it all away. When they do, every one of us will lose, while massive corporations and their executives win, at our expense.

Medicare was run by the federal government for decades. Yet in 1997, Republicans in Congress invited private insurers to manage these plans. Private companies now run more than half of all Medicare policies. Under Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for Trump’s next administration, private insurance will become the default option for new enrollments, ultimately leading to complete privatization.

These private plans, now called “Medicare Advantage,” offer patients less while charging taxpayers more. Private companies like UnitedHealth, the largest provider of Medicare Advantage, love to get guaranteed income from our tax dollars, while they delay and deny claims to boost their profits. If Trump’s plan takes effect, the number of Medicare Advantage policies UnitedHealth controls is expected to reach 15.6 million.

One out of every three Medicare Advantage policyholders is denied care by private insurers like United every year. Under Trump’s plan, UnitedHealth alone would deny care to as many as 5.2 million people. This ability to deny care is what makes Medicare Advantage plans far more profitable to private insurers than any other plans they offer.

Privatized Medicare sounds more like a “Disadvantage” to me. It’s a raw deal for everyone who, like me, believes the United States can do better. I believe that as a nation, we have the courage, compassion, desire, and resources to offer healthcare for all, not just the wealthy few. We can start by electing a president who, unlike Trump, will not destroy Medicare, but will defend and improve it.

Vice President Kamala Harris just announced her plan to expand Medicare coverage to help cover the costs of home healthcare for seniors. This will help the 1 in every 4 Americans who cares for an older member of their household.

Harris will pay for her plan by expanding Medicare’s ability to negotiate with drug manufacturers to lower costs. Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act passed by President Joe Biden, the federal government now has the power to demand lower drug prices and get them.

The Biden and Harris administration has already successfully lowered the prices of drugs for diabetes and heart disease by as much as 79%, and capped the price of insulin at $35. These changes will save taxpayers $6 billion a year, and you and I will save $1.5 billion every year in our out-of-pocket costs. As president, Harris will negotiate even more cost savings, which will translate into more care for families like ours.

To me, this is the President Harris Advantage. Trump spent his four years as president trying to take health coverage away from 45 million people by destroying the Affordable Care Act. His only plan for healthcare in a second term is to privatize.

Vice President Harris, in contrast, has an actual track record of working to improve our health, and has pledged to do even more if she is elected. This is why she has my vote.

Presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have put forward a wide range of different tax proposals during this year’s campaign. We have now fully analyzed the distributional impacts of the major proposals of both Vice President Harris and former President Trump in separate analyses (see here for Harris and here for Trump).

In all, the tax proposals announced by Harris would, on average, lead to a tax cut for all income groups except the richest 1 percent of Americans, while the proposals announced by Trump would, on average, lead to a tax increase for all income groups except the richest 5 percent of Americans.

If the Harris proposals were in effect in 2026, the richest 1 percent – with incomes of $914,900 and above – would receive an average tax increase equal to 4.1 percent of their income. All other income groups would receive tax cuts, including an average tax cut equal to 2.7 percent of income for the middle fifth of Americans – with incomes between $55,100 and $94,100 – and an average tax cut equal to 7 percent of income for the poorest fifth of Americans (those with incomes less than $28,600).

Under the Trump proposals, in 2026 the richest 1 percent would receive an average tax cut equal to 1.2 percent of their income. The next richest 4 percent – with incomes between $360,000 and $914,900 – would receive an average tax cut equal to 1.3 percent of their income. All other income groups would receive tax increases, including an average tax increase equal to 2.1 percent of income for the middle fifth of Americans and an average tax hike equal to 4.8 percent of income for the poorest fifth of Americans.

Average tax changes vary widely between the two candidates’ plans. For example:

• The middle fifth of Americans would receive an average tax cut of $1,980 under Harris’ plan and an average tax increase of $1,530 under Trump’s plan.

• The bottom fifth of Americans would receive an average tax cut of $1,130 under Harris’ plan and an average tax increase of $790 under Trump’s plan.

• The top 1 percent of Americans would receive an average tax increase of $121,460 under Harris’ plan and an average tax cut of $36,320 under Trump’s plan.

Harris tax plan

This analysis examines major tax proposals Harris has explicitly announced and others that are major pieces of President Biden’s tax agenda, which Harris has said she would pursue and which are consistent with her campaign pledges:

• Extending the temporary provisions in the 2017 Trump tax law that will otherwise expire at the end of 2025 fully for those with incomes of less than $400,000 but with strict limits on benefits for those with incomes above $400,000

• Proposals for workers and families related to raising children and obtaining health coverage, assisting service workers and making housing more affordable

• Reforming the taxes that fund Medicare, which would raise taxes on those with incomes of more than $400,000

• Scaling back existing tax breaks on capital gains and dividends for those with incomes of more than $1 million (and in some cases far more)

• Reforming the corporate tax code to scale back recently enacted breaks and long-standing loopholes that have been shown to increase income inequality and racial inequality

Trump tax plan

This analysis also includes all of Trump’s major tax proposals, including:

• Extending the temporary provisions in Trump’s 2017 tax law that will otherwise expire at the end of 2025 (except for the $10,000 cap on State and Local Tax (SALT) deductions, which he recently stated he would not extend)

• Exempting certain types of income from taxes (overtime pay, tips and Social Security benefits)

• Reducing the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 20 percent and then further reducing it to 15 percent for “companies that make their product in America”

• Repealing tax credits enacted as part of President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act that provide incentives for the production and use of green energy

• Imposing a new 20 percent tariff on imported goods, with a higher rate of 60 percent for goods from China

For more details on the impact of either of the candidates’ tax proposals, you can read more here:

• A Distributional Analysis of Kamala Harris’ Tax Plan

• A Distributional Analysis of Donald Trump’s Tax Plan

With the election up for grabs and perhaps even slipping towards Trump, Kamala Harris needs an October surprise. What major last-minute events might tip the election her way?

Here are a few that could make news.

Cease-fire in Gaza? That certainly would help among young people and in Michigan, where voters of Arab descent are angry at the Biden administration. But there’s no way Bibi Netanyahu is going to help the Democrats. He wants Trump, who he can more easily manipulate.

Cease-fire in Ukraine? That certainly would help with the substantial number of voters who believe that endless war is a drain on American resources. But there’s no way Putin is going to help the Democrats. He wants Trump, who he can more easily manipulate.

What major last-minute events might tip the election her way?

Another Salacious Trump Revelation? Even if a video emerges with Arnold Palmer in Trump’s shower, it’s doubtful it would make a difference. When it comes to sex scandals or pining for loyal generals like Hitler’s, or even felony charges, there’re more than enough out there already, and they haven’t made much of a difference.

Or how about this...

A Sovereign Wealth Fund for Workers? Imagine that Kamala Harris appeared at a John Deere facility in the Midwest to highlight the company’s plan to move 1,000 jobs to Mexico, while at the same time awarding its shareholders with $12.2 billion in stock buybacks.

Standing In front of the plant gate Harris should say:

To create a meaningful opportunity economy, we must halt the needless layoffs of working people, the goal of which only is to enrich the rich.

On my first day in office, I will institute a new clause in every government contract: No taxpayer money shall be awarded to companies that layoff taxpayers.

If Deere wants to continue to serve as a government contractor, it will refrain from moving jobs out of the country.

Even in a booming economy, more than four million workers will be laid off this year. Many of those layoffs will be used to raise money for stock buybacks, jobs sacrificed to reward the largest shareholders and company executives. (Stock buybacks are a blatant form of stock manipulation – using the company’s money to buy back its own shares and thereby artificially raising the stock’s price. More layoffs, more money for stock buybacks.)

Therefore, also on my first day in office, I will call on Congress to establish a Sovereign Wealth Fund for Workers, which will provide wage insurance for laid off workers. The insurance will pay workers the difference between what they earned on the jobs they were laid off from and the new jobs they find.

The Fund will be financed by requiring that 10 percent of all stock buybacks go into the Sovereign Wealth Fund for Workers. In 2025 this would amount to $100 billion of stock shares.

On my watch, no longer will working people experience downward mobility while the richest of the rich become even richer.

Wall Street, to be sure, will mercilessly attack her. How dare she prevent the wealthy from getting wealthier? How dare she protect the wages of the working class? Don’t the Democrats know who’s buttering their bread?

Wall Street, to be sure, will mercilessly attack her. How dare she prevent the wealthy from getting wealthier? How dare she protect the wages of the working class? Don’t the Democrats know who’s buttering their bread?

In response, Harris needs to prove she has the guts to take on the powerful and truly protect working-class jobs and incomes.

How about going on national television (or FOX News) and quote from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1936 Madison Square Garden speech:

[Wall Street] had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.

Now there’s an October surprise.

This is “Climate week” in New York City, and my inbox has been awash recently in the latest press releases about start-ups and noble initiatives and venal greenwashing. Much of it’s important, and I’ll get to some of it later, but there’s a big new study that came out last week in Science that sets our crucial moment in true perspective. Let’s step back for a moment.

This new study—a decade in the making and involving, in the words of veteran climate scientist Gavin Schmidt “biological proxies from extinct species, plate tectonic movement, disappearance in subduction zones of vast amounts of ocean sediment, and interpolating sparse data in space and time”—offers at its end the most detailed timeline yet of the earth’s climate history over the last half-billion years. That’s the period scientists call the Phanerozoic—the latest of the earth’s four geological eons (we’re still in it), and the one marked by the true profusion of plant and animal life. It’s a lovely piece of science, and it’s lovely too because it reminds us of all we’re heir to in this tiny brief moment that marks the human time on earth. So staggeringly much—strange and extreme and fecund—has come before us.

But it’s also scary as can be, for two big reasons.

The first is that it shows the earth has gotten very very warm in the past. As the Washington Post explained in an excellent analysis yesterday, “the study suggests that at its hottest the Earth’s average temperature reached 96.8 degrees Fahrenheit (36 degrees Celsius).” Our current average temperature—already elevated by global warming to the highest value ever recorded—is about 60 degrees Fahrenheit, or 15 degrees Celsius. For most of the 500 million years the study covers, the earth has been in a hothouse state, with an average temperature of 71.6 Fahrenheit, or 22 Celsius, much higher than now. Only about an eighth of the time has the earth been in its current “coldhouse” state—but of course that includes all the time that humans have been around. It is the world we know and we’re adapted to.

In every era, it’s increases in carbon dioxide that drive the increases and decreases in temperature. “Carbon dioxide is really that master dial,” Jess Tierney, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona and co-author of the study, said. And so the study makes clear that the mercury could go very high indeed as humans pour carbon into the sky. We won’t burn enough coal and oil and gas to reach the very highest temperatures seen in the geological record—that required periods of incredible volcanism—but we may well double the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and this study implies that the fast and slow feedbacks from that could eventually drive temperatures as much as eight degrees Celsius higher, which is more than most current estimates. Over shorter time frames the numbers are just as dramatic

Without rapid action to curb greenhouse gas emissions, scientists say, global temperatures could reach nearly 62.6 F (17 C) by the end of the century — a level not seen in the timeline since the Miocene epoch, more than 5 million years ago.

Now, you could look at those numbers and say: well, the earth has been hotter before, so life won’t be wiped out. And that’s true—there’s probably no way to wipe out life, though on a planet with huge numbers of nuclear weapons who knows. But these temperatures are much higher than anything humans have experienced, and they guarantee a world with radically different regimes of drought and deluge, radically different ocean levels and fire seasons. They imply a world fundamentally strange to us, with entirely different seasons and moods—and if that doesn’t challenge bare survival, it certainly challenges the survival of our civilizations. Unlike all the species that came before us, we have built a physical shell for that civilization, a geography of cities and ports and farms that we can’t easily move as the temperature rises. And of course the poorest people, who have done the least to cause the trouble, will suffer out of all proportion as that shift starts to happen.

But that’s not the really scary part. The really scary part is how fast it’s moving.

In fact, nowhere in that long record have the scientists been able to find a time when it’s warming as fast as it is right now. “We’re changing Earth’s temperature at a rate that exceeds anything we know about,” Tierney said.

Much much much faster than, say, during the worst extinction event we know about, at the end of the Permian about 250 million years ago, when the endless eruption of the so-called Siberian traps drove the temperature 10 Celsius higher and killed off 95 percent of the species on the planet. But that catastrophe took fifty thousand years—our three degree Celsius increase—driven by the collective volcano of our powerplants, factories, furnaces and Fords—will be measured in decades.

Our only hope of avoiding utter ruin—our only hope that our western world, in the blink of an eye, won’t produce catastrophe on this geologic scale—is to turn off those volcanoes immediately. And that, of course, requires replacing coal and gas and oil with something else. The only something else on offer right now, scalable in the few years we still have to work with, is the rays of the sun, and the wind that sun produces, and the batteries that can store its power for use at night.

Another new analysis this week, this one from the energy thinktank Ember, shows that 2024 is seeing another year of surging solar installations—when the year ends there will be 30% more solar power on this planet than when it began. Numbers like that, if we can keep that acceleration going for a few more years, give us a fighting chance.

That’s what all those seminars and cocktail parties and protests in New York over this week will ultimately be about—the desperate attempt to keep this rift in our geological history from getting any bigger than it must. As this new study once more makes clear, raising the temperature is by far the biggest thing humans have ever done; our effort to limit that rise must be just as large.

We need to stand in awe for a moment before the scope of earth’s long history. And then we need to get the hell to work.

In September, North American professional sports leagues had the opportunity to demonstrate their commitment to protecting the planet during a joint panel at Climate Week NYC, the annual affair cosponsored by the United Nations featuring hundreds of events feting local, national and international efforts to address climate change.

They dropped the ball.

Just three months earlier, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres castigated coal, oil and gas companies—which he dubbed the “godfathers of climate chaos”—for spreading disinformation and called for a worldwide ban on fossil fuel advertising. Until that happens, Guterres urged ad agencies to refuse fossil fuel clients and companies to stop taking their ads.

The leagues apparently didn’t get the memo. During their panel discussion, titled Major League Greening, representatives from pro baseball (MLB), basketball (NBA) and hockey mainly talked about their long-term goals to shrink their carbon footprint and, to be sure, they have come a long way since I wrote about their initial efforts to reduce their energy, water and paper use back in 2012. They also talked about their budding alliances with climate solution experts. But there was no talk of cutting their commercial ties with the very companies that are largely responsible for the climate crisis.

A recent survey of pro baseball, basketball, football, hockey and soccer leagues by UCLA’s Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment found that they collectively have more than 60 sponsorship deals with three dozen oil companies and utilities that burn fossil fuels or distribute fossil gas. Depending on the deal, the companies get prominently placed billboards in team facilities, logos on team uniforms, partnerships with team community programs, or—if they spend some serious money—stadium naming rights.

Eight of the oil and utility companies identified by the UCLA survey—Chevron, Entergy, ExxonMobil, Marathon Petroleum, NextEra Energy, NRG Energy, Phillips 66 and Xcel Energy—are among the top 25 U.S. carbon polluters. Four of those companies—Chevron, ExxonMobil, Marathon Petroleum and Phillips 66—along with four other companies with sports sponsorships—ConocoPhillips, Hess, Occidental Petroleum and Shell—have been sued by state and local governments across the United States for climate change-related damage and their decades of deception, which has served to delay the necessary transition to clean energy. ExxonMobil is a defendant in all 39 lawsuits, Chevron has been cited in 28, and Phillips 66 has been named in 21.

Banks that are still investing tens of billions of dollars annually in fossil fuel projects also have sponsorship deals with pro sports teams. Besides routine billboard deals, six of the 12 largest fossil fuel investors since the Paris climate agreement was signed in 2016—Bank of America, Barclays, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Scotiabank and Wells Fargo—are all spending a small fortune on facility naming rights.

Corporations sponsor sports for two main reasons: to build public trust and increase exposure. According to a 2021 Nielsen “Trust in Advertising” study, 81 percent of consumers completely or somewhat trust brands that sponsor sport teams, second only to the trust they have for friends and family. By sponsoring a team, corporations increase the chance that fans will form the same emotional connection they have with the team with their brand, especially when fans see it repeatedly during a game and over a season. Jersey patches, which the NBA approved in 2017 and MLB approved last year, especially attract attention. Nielsen estimates that the average value of the live broadcast exposure a baseball patch sponsor would receive over a full regular season would exceed $12.4 million.

Another rationale for banks and oil and utility companies for sponsoring pro sports is to protect what social scientists call their “social license” by assuring fans that they are public-spirited, good corporate citizens. Critics call it “sportswashing”—using sports to burnish a reputation tarnished by wrongdoing, in this case, endangering public health and the environment.

Fans of the two baseball teams that battled it out in this year’s National League Championship Series are crying foul, but thus far have been ignored.

In March 2023, environmental activists joined New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams to urge the Mets to change the name of Citi Field because Citibank’s parent company Citigroup has invested $396 billion in fossil fuel projects since 2016, second only to JPMorgan Chase’s $430 billion. “Citi doesn’t represent the values of Mets fans or NYC,” Williams wrote in a tweet. “If they refuse to end their toxic relationship with fossil fuels, the Mets should end their partnership with Citi.”

More recently, more than 80 public interest groups, scientists and environmental advocates signed an open letter calling on the Dodgers to cut its ties to Phillips 66, owner of the Union 76 gas station chain. “Using tactics such as associating a beloved, trusted brand like the Dodgers with enterprises like [Union] 76,” the letter states, “the fossil fuel industry has reinforced deceitful messages that ‘oil is our friend,’ and that ‘climate change isn’t so bad.’” Since August, nearly 22,800 people have signed the letter, which urges the team to end its sponsorship deal with the oil company “immediately.”

Unlike the North American pro sports leagues, advertising and public relations agencies worldwide are heeding U.N. Secretary-General Guterres’s call. More than a thousand have pledged to refuse working for fossil fuel companies, their trade associations, and their front groups. If the leagues were serious about sustainability, they likewise would sever their relationships with the godfathers of climate chaos and the banks that enable them.

The housing affordability crisis – and how to solve it – has become a major focus during election season, for good reason. Millions of American families struggle to afford and keep a roof over their heads, find themselves unsheltered, or have become frustrated in the hope of owning their own home.

The over-focus on expanding housing supply through for-profit development misses a key contributor to the housing crisis: the concentration of wealth and power. The challenges of the U.S. housing crisis go beyond supply or fixing local land use regulations. The billionaire class and billionaire-backed private equity investors have become a driving force in the U.S. housing crisis.

A new report, Billionaire Blowback on Housing: How concentrated wealth disrupts housing markets and worsens the housing affordability crisis, coauthored by the Institute for Policy Studies and Popular Democracy, examines the myriad ways that billionaire investors are harming local housing markets and diminishing the supply of affordable housing.

With roughly 800 billionaires in the U.S. with combined wealth of $6.2 trillion (and 2,781 billionaires globally with over $14.2 trillion), ultra-wealthy investors tend to diversify their holdings across multiple kinds of assets. A huge amount of this billionaire wealth is invested in property, land, and housing. Billions and possibly trillions of dollars are sucked into predatory investment practices and luxury housing schemes — where global billionaire investors park vast quantities of wealth in U.S markets.

This is not your grandparent’s gentrification, but rather a hyper-gentrification fueled by concentrated wealth driving up land and housing costs, expanding short-term rentals, and treating housing like a commodity to speculate on or a place to park wealth. The billionaires are displacing the millionaires, and the millionaires are disrupting the housing market for everyone else.

Estimates of hidden wealth are as high as $36 trillion globally, with billions parked in U.S. land and housing markets.

Our report found that billionaire-backed private equity firms have wormed their way into different segments of the housing market to extract ever-increasing rents and value from multi-family rental, single-family homes, and mobile home park communities. For instance, Blackstone has become the largest corporate landlord in the world, with a vast and diversified real estate portfolio. It owns more than 300,000 residential units across the U.S., has $1 trillion in global assets, and nearly doubled its profits in 2021.

Global billionaires have purchased billions in U.S. real estate to diversify their asset holdings, driving the creation of luxury housing that functions as “safety deposit boxes in the sky.” Estimates of hidden wealth are as high as $36 trillion globally, with billions parked in U.S. land and housing markets.

Wealthy investors are acquiring property and holding units vacant, so that in many communities the number of vacant units greatly exceeds the number of unhoused people. Nationwide there are 16 million vacant homes: that is, 28 vacant homes for every unhoused person. These investors are also buying up a large segment of the short-term rental market, preventing local residents from living in these homes, in order to cash in on tourism. These are not small owners with one unit, but corporate owners with multiple properties.

The focus on expanding housing supply by giving incentives to for-profit development has failed to add to the stock of permanently affordable housing. For five decades, U.S. taxpayers have subsidized private for-profit investors and developers to build tens of thousands of temporarily affordable units of housing. Federal programs give for-profit investors wasteful tax breaks, but only require the units to remain affordable for 30 years or less, so many have been converted to market-rate housing.

Policy makers should expand the social housing sector of community-controlled or publicly owned housing that is outside the speculative market, such as quality public housing and other forms of nonprofit-owned housing like community land trusts or resident cooperatives. New investment in social housing should come from taxing billionaires, levying mansion taxes, and regulating harmful practices.

Instead of waiting for action from the federal government, local communities can protect residents in existing affordable housing and generate revenue for affordable housing.

Policymakers should require ownership transparency, so community members know who is buying up neighborhoods. They should institute limitations on corporate ownership of housing and pass ordinances giving tenants the right to “first option to buy” apartments and mobile home parks when they come up for sale; and public funding as well as support structures to make these buy-outs possible.

Levying taxes on luxury real estate transactions (known as “mansion taxes”), on speculation, on vacancy, and on the rich, can generate funds that should be dedicated to expanding the supply of nonprofit and social housing.

At least one tactic in this year’s election subversion playbook is clear. Step one: before Election Day, file a slew of lawsuits making baseless allegations of bloated voter rolls, unlawful voting, and problematic election procedures. Step two: if right-wing activists are unhappy with election results, point to those previously filed cases to justify demands to halt certification or change outcomes. This plan is neither secret nor new. It’s a repeat of 2020, now with more advanced planning. And just like in 2020, the plan should fail.

Conservative activists, operatives, and election denial groups have filed dozens of cases. With a particular intensity in swing states, they are suing to give local election board members the right to refuse to certify election results, exclude mail ballots that arrive after Election Day from the count, limit voting by overseas and military voters, restrict the availability of ballot drop boxes, force states and counties to aggressively purge their voter rolls, and limit when absentee ballots can be requested, submitted, and counted. While the legal claims and unsubstantiated allegations differ somewhat from case to case, they share a common goal: cast enough doubt on American elections to excuse subsequent efforts (whether in court or otherwise) to supersede the will of voters.

For Americans primed to believe that voter fraud is rampant and the 2020 election was stolen, partisans who are unhappy with the 2024 results will use the ongoing legal processes in their effort to undermine public confidence and confirm a sense that our democracy is “rigged.”

These cases are — to use a technical, legal term — bogus. We know this for several reasons. First, plaintiffs’ factual allegations are based on conspiracy theories, misinformation, unsubstantiated data, and claims of widespread voter fraud that have repeatedly been disproven. For example, over a dozen cases are premised at least in part on unsubstantiated fears of noncitizen voting. Yet the evidence could not be clearer: with vanishingly rare exceptions, only eligible citizens vote, and states have multiple systems in place to ensure that remains the case. Dressing up misinformation and conspiracy theories in legal jargon and laundering them through court filings doesn’t make the allegations true.

Second, plaintiffs don’t even seem to be trying to win in court. In many of these right-wing activist cases, plaintiffs have not even bothered to file motions to ask the courts to fix the so-called problems before Election Day. If plaintiffs genuinely believed there were issues with our voting systems and had any evidence to back up such beliefs, they would have requested that courts remedy those problems immediately (by seeking a preliminary injunction, for example). A representative from United Sovereign Americans, a right-wing group that has filed at least nine cases challenging various election procedures, conceded that its goal is to “pre-position standing” for the post–Election Day period. Of course, preemptively filing a lawsuit does not confer standing, which requires actual harm, among other things.

Other cases are mere copycats of losing efforts from years past. For example, one Michigan case seeking more aggressive voter purging effectively replicates three similar cases filed in Michigan in the last five years, all of which plaintiffs voluntarily settled or lost. A federal court dismissed the case today.

Third, even if the legal theories that plaintiffs offer were supported by facts (which they aren’t), they would not warrant the extreme remedies that plaintiffs ultimately seek or that they may request after Election Day: stopping the certification of and overturning election results. In more than 20 cases, for example, plaintiffs allege that states have not done enough to remove ineligible voters from their rolls. The remedy for such a claim is for the state to conduct reasonable voter list maintenance at least 90 days before an election, not to throw away the votes of millions of eligible voters afterward. What’s more, certification is not discretionary — state law has long established that officials have a mandatory duty to certify elections. It’s no surprise, then, that courts have already tossed several of these cases, including in Arizona, Georgia, Maryland, Nevada, and Pennsylvania.

We anticipate that courts will largely reject the unsubstantiated claims in these pre-election cases, just as they did overwhelmingly in 2020.

But winning in court isn’t necessarily the point. We expect that activists will point to the mere existence of ongoing litigation as a basis for slowing, stopping, or altering election processes. Their audience is not just the court of law but the court of public opinion. For Americans primed to believe that voter fraud is rampant and the 2020 election was stolen, partisans who are unhappy with the 2024 results will use the ongoing legal processes in their effort to undermine public confidence and confirm a sense that our democracy is “rigged.”

We’ve been here before, and now we know what to expect. The American public, the press, and courts should not be duped into believing that where there’s smoke, there’s fire — because these cases are nothing but smoke and mirrors.

As we head into fall, now is the perfect time for families to plan their next escape from the stresses of school, work, and everyday life—and there’s no better place to go than the outdoors. From Acadia to Everglades to Yosemite, our national parks provide opportunities for relaxation, camping, day hikes, and science education.

We are two people who understand—and love—the outdoors. I, Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.), am a single mom of three kids and an avid national park visitor, and serve on the House Natural Resources Committee, which oversees federal land and our environment. And I, Tigran Nahabedian, am a student and youth adviser at Outdoors Alliance for Kids. We’re both passionate about exploring our national treasures and making it easier for all Americans to experience our country’s beautiful parks and lands.

Some families might be daunted at the idea of visiting our national parks. For some, the cost of entry and other assorted expenses can feel prohibitive. Fortunately, the Every Kid Outdoors program helps remove one of those barriers by granting fourth graders and their families an annual pass that allows them free entry to all federal public lands, waters, and shores. Dedicated park staff, both in person and online, can help families plan a fun, safe trip, appropriate for every level of outdoor experience, fitness, and budget.

If you love visiting our national treasures and agree that everyone should have the ability to enjoy the outdoors, make your voice heard.

Every year, over 200,000 kids and their families get a pass, helping connect them with nature and history. These affordable vacation and recreation opportunities help kids learn about conservation and wildlife, and teach important lessons about our nation’s history, geology, biology, and more. The Every Kid Outdoors program sparks passions that can shape future careers in science or recreation and creates lifelong memories.

But, if Congress doesn’t act to extend and fund the program, it will expire in 2026, leaving families to pay the full cost of admission to our public lands. Respectively, in our roles as parent and congressmember, and as a student and an outdoor advocate, we have seen the benefits of this program firsthand, which is why we are working to build bipartisan support for the Every Kid Outdoors Act. This bill would make permanent the free admission for fourth graders and their families, and expand the program to fifth graders.

Getting families on our federal lands goes beyond the direct benefits of helping kids learn and grow. Our national parks, forests, and marine sanctuaries are cornerstones of our economy, infrastructure, and communities. That diner serving bananas foster pancakes half an hour from the campsite or that roadside shop stocking magnets and bug spray rely on thriving national parks that attract millions of visitors each year. A National Park Service report in 2023 found that over 325 million visitors spent $26.4 billion in communities within 60 miles of a national park. Outdoor recreation alone accounted for $560 billion of the United States’ 2022 GDP.

So, if you love visiting our national treasures and agree that everyone should have the ability to enjoy the outdoors, make your voice heard. Be loud and be proud about your support for the Every Kids Outdoors program and the Every Kid Outdoors Act so that generations of families can continue to make memories in our national parks. Talk about the program with your friends, family, and neighbors—and if you know a fourth grader, tell them to get an Every Kid Outdoors pass. It’s the perfect time to visit a park.