The recent presidential election in Colombia highlighted a striking political paradox. New data from the country’s national statistics agency shows that the national poverty rate fell to 28% in 2025, the lowest level ever recorded. Nearly 1.8 million Colombians moved out of poverty in a single year, while extreme poverty and income inequality also declined. The figures represent a significant social achievement and continue a multi-year trend of improving living standards.

Yet, despite this advance, Colombians elected right-wing lawyer and businessman Abelardo De La Espriella, whose nationalist and law-and-order platform marks a sharp contrast with the policies of outgoing President Gustavo Petro. The outcome suggests that even significant social and economic progress does not necessarily translate into electoral support for the government that helped produce it.

Nor is Colombia unique. Across the region, electoral cycles have repeatedly shown that social progress does not necessarily produce lasting political loyalty. Similar patterns can be seen in Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, and elsewhere in South America, where periods of progressive governance have often been followed by the election of more conservative leaders or governments with markedly different priorities.

Former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa offered one explanation for this phenomenon. He argued that when people escape poverty and enter the middle class, many become primarily concerned with preserving their newly acquired status. As a result, they may become less supportive of policies aimed at extending similar benefits to others. Whether or not one accepts this interpretation, it highlights an important political challenge: The very success of progressive social policies may alter the interests, expectations, and priorities of the people they benefit, making long-term political continuity more difficult to sustain.

The very success of progressive social policies may alter the interests, expectations, and priorities of the people they benefit, making long-term political continuity more difficult to sustain.

There is, however, one notable exception: Mexico.

Mexico presents an important counterexample. The presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador was followed by the election of Claudia Sheinbaum, who belongs to the same political movement and has pledged to continue much of the same agenda. Rather than producing a backlash, the governing project maintained broad popular support through a successful leadership transition.

Why Was Mexico different?

Part of the answer may lie not only in policy outcomes but also in political identity. While many progressive governments in South America have defined themselves primarily through ideological labels such as socialism or the left, Mexico’s governing movement increasingly describes itself through the concept of Mexican Humanism. Although its policies share many objectives with progressive governments elsewhere, the language is notably different. Mexican Humanism emphasizes dignity, community, solidarity, and national culture rather than ideological affiliation.

This distinction may matter. Political projects framed primarily in ideological terms can reinforce divisions between supporters and opponents. Projects rooted in shared cultural and ethical values may be better positioned to build identification across traditional political boundaries. From this perspective, Mexico’s continuity may reflect not only the material results achieved by the government, but also the broader narrative through which those results were understood.

The Colombian election therefore raises a broader question for Latin America. If poverty reduction, lower inequality, and improved social indicators are not enough to guarantee political continuity, what is missing? Is the decisive factor economic performance, security, media influence, political organization, or something deeper within a nation’s culture?

Mexico suggests that political durability may depend on more than effective governance alone. It may also require a shared sense of identity and purpose that transcends conventional ideological categories. The most interesting question may not be why some countries move from the left to the right, but why Mexico has not.

This article was first published on Pressenza.

Beginning next week, Australians across a huge swath of the continent will begin getting three free hours of electricity every afternoon—to charge their cars, runs their dishwashers, fill up a storage battery to run the house at night. I’ve written about this before, so I won’t belabor it here, except to say that humans have spent the last 1.79 million years (according to new research last week) working hard for energy: spending time gathering firewood, spending time working to pay the power bill. Now, in one large part of the Earth, for one large part of the day, electricity will be too cheap to meter. You want some abundance? Here you go.

So it seems like a good time to dig in to the larger questions of energy, climate, pollution, and money—an interrelated set of issues, and one where the numbers are shifting quickly and dramatically almost every month. Here’s the bottom line, which I think is beginning to drive public policy almost every place except the US, where we have lots and lots of work to do: As the cost of clean energy keeps plummeting, it gets more and more obvious how much money we waste, and how much financial risk we incur, by staying with fossil fuel.

Let’s start first by talking about the climate crisis, and the ways it’s rapidly becoming an economic crisis. My old colleagues at 350.org have been publishing a series of quite brilliant reports on the subject in recent weeks. One, for instance, is on the insurance crisis, which is growing across the planet. This is from Risalat Khan and Kenny Stancil:

In the United States, homeowner insurance premiums increased by 29% from January 2021 to January 2026, and personal auto insurance rose nearly 25% over the same period. These mounting costs are among the biggest contributors to overall inflation.

France raised its mandatory natural catastrophe surcharge on property insurance from 12% to 20%, effective January 2025. In northern Australia, premiums climbed more than 130% in real terms between 2007 and 2022, a 6% growth year on year.

Across most low- and middle-income countries, insurance coverage is usually less than 10%, and sometimes far less, leaving uninsured communities and businesses to bear most of the risks and losses from climate disasters.

Somewhat karmically, a new report from risk analysts First Street finds that… data centers face much of this risk from extreme weather:

Approximately 54% of global data center capacity operates in markets facing elevated chronic heat or drought stress, while 79% is exposed to significant acute hazards such as flood, wind, or wildfire. For many markets, climate risk should now be considered part of the base case rather than a tail-risk scenario.

But most of us only buy insurance once a year, and it’s such a depressing task that we try to forget about it immediately. Groceries are different, and as Nicole Pita points out, the link to climate change is pretty clear.

Droughts in the US Midwest and Canada destroyed harvests in 2022. Floods in India and South Asia pushed up rice prices in 2023 and 2025. The climate crisis is affecting crop production itself, making food harder to grow. The irony is that food systems produce one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions, making them both a victim and a driver of the crisis.

And it will get worse. Here’s a new report from the Autonomy Institute on what the climate crisis is doing to the cost of “Five a day” in the UK:

Heatwaves are projected to add around 11% to the price of the UK’s top 20 fruit and vegetables by 2035 and around 68% by 2050 under a high emissions scenario, on top of normal inflation. Imported tropical fruit such as melons, oranges, bananas, easy peelers, and grapes will rise 12% to 14% by 2035 and 80% to 93% by 2050 on these climate grounds alone.

• Compounded with estimated normal inflation, total average shelf prices of the overall basket of fruit and veg will reach upwards of 170% above today’s level by 2050.

• This means that climate-flation will be contributing 40% of total inflation across the basket of basic goods by 2035 and over 60% of it by 2050. Climate change will have gone from a junior contributor to the dominant driver of shelf-price inflation on fresh produce inside the working lifetime of someone in their 30s today.

(A note to the perplexed: “Easy peelers” turns out to be what Brits call mandarin oranges and clementines. I like it.)

Here’s how Emma Court and Kyle Kim summed it up in a comprehensive Bloomberg account:

Extreme weather also makes growing crops more expensive. For example, Del Monte Corp., which sold more than $4 billion of bananas, pineapples, avocados, and other food products last year, has been investing in measures to shield crops from rising temperatures and sun damage. This includes covering them with shade cloth and spraying them with a reflective layer of so-called plant sunscreen. The company is also paying more for cooling throughout its supply chain, including by requiring upgrades in fruit-processing plants in the Midwest that were originally designed for lower temperatures.

The effects of climate on pricing are difficult to capture, because they build gradually, says Hans Sauter, Del Monte’s chief sustainability officer. But lower yields, increasing disease threats, and higher costs can all contribute to more expensive produce. “This is part of our DNA. We have been dealing with climate events forever,” he says. “But these new circumstances are making it more expensive.”

Regions where temperatures are already warm will likely be the most exposed to climate inflation, in part because additional heat can more readily slash agricultural harvests. Among the worst-off are countries in Africa and South America, which also tend to have lower incomes, with less infrastructure, and fewer resources to guard against climate change.

But the fossil fuel that drives climate change raises costs in other ways too. The most obvious is their effect on public health. It’s hard, of course, to calculate this with precision, but the attempts leave us with staggering numbers: The Natural Resource Defense Council, five years ago, demonstrated that fossil fuel pollution was costing America $820 billion a year. (That’s nearly a Musk). The numbers elsewhere are much higher.

Sometimes, though, it’s easier to see them in reverse. A new study this month, described by Gary Fuller, finds that when London cut down sharply on urban air pollution with its congestion pricing zone, remarkable things followed:

Low emission and clean air zones attract controversy whenever they are proposed, but there is growing evidence that they work in improving air quality. The Bradford zone was followed by a reduction of about 25% in GP visits for heart and breathing problems and survey data shows that the central London zone was followed by a reduction in the likelihood of a person taking sick leave…

The researchers looked at emergency admissions to hospital, excluding cases such as accidents, burns, drug overdose, poisoning, or self-harm. For people living in the central London zone, admissions increased at 3% per year before the schemes started. After their launch this trend was altered, with a 3% reduction in annual trends for emergency admissions, including an 8% reduction for heart problems and a 6% reduction for breathing problems.

That adds up to real money. Not only that, but people can breathe, always a plus!

If you try to add all this up, you get some interesting numbers. As Kate Yoder reports:

“What’s striking is that already, households are bearing serious costs,” said Kimberly Clausing, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. She co-authored a paper from earlier this year finding that families were paying between $400 and $900 more each year because of the effects of climate change, with the costs above $1,300 in the 10% hardest-hit counties, many of them found in Florida, Louisiana, Nebraska, Colorado, and California.

What’s more, people are figuring all this out:

Two-thirds of US voters agree that global warming is affecting the cost of living to some degree, according to new survey data from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, including most Democrats and moderate Republicans. Of those two-thirds, a majority of them said that climate change was driving up what they pay for groceries, utility bills, and home insurance.

And then there’s the sheer cost of energy itself—of the need to keep paying for coal and gas and oil while the far-cheaper sun and wind goes to waste. We’re stuck in a political moment when feckless Democratic politicians (paging Kathy Hochul) are making “affordability” their excuse for going along with Big Oil. But in fact one example after another is making it clear that, as Ray Wills writes, “what is making us poorer is not the move to clean energy—it is doing the transition slowly and badly. His examples are back in Australia:

The Australian Energy Market Commission’s latest Residential Electricity Price Trends work is blunt: Accelerating renewable generation, transmission, and battery storage is "essential" to keep electricity prices affordable over the next decade.

In scenarios where new wind, solar, and transmission arrive on schedule, household bills fall compared to today. When those projects are delayed, prices remain higher for longer because the system leans more heavily on expensive gas and unreliable old coal.

Independent modelling tells a similar story. Analysis for the Clean Energy Council shows that if Australia stalls the rollout of renewables, household bills in 2030 could be around 30% higher than on a timely transition path—roughly $449 a year extra for a typical household, and even more for small businesses.

Nexa Advisory’s work finds that transition delays that lock in more gas-fired generation could add about $115.7 billion to wholesale costs between now and 2050.

Individuals can and do figure out some of the ways to lower their own costs. Not surprisingly, the spike in gas prices for Americans during our farcical Iranian excursion convinced some to change their habits or their technology. Lydia DePillis looked at the numbers:

Americans are powerfully attached to their cars, and their spending at gasoline stations jumped 21% from February to May. But that ability to spend has limits. According to Dow Jones Energy, consumption was 6.1% lower in May from a year earlier. Some of that is a long-running trend owing to the increasing efficiency of passenger vehicles, said Denton Cinquegrana, the company’s chief oil analyst, and about half is probably a consumer response to higher prices.

But much of the real work needs to be done by governments: Nothing people can do by themselves will have much affect on the cost of food, healthcare, or energy. And when governments do their job well, the results can be amazing. I began with Australia and its free afternoon electricity; let’s close with Europe. As Jan Rosenow points out, the continent’s commitment to energy efficiency is paying off: It’s spending 29% less on energy than it would have if consumption had kept growing this century:

Importantly that is energy nobody had to generate, import, or pay for. It built up slowly, over 25 years, across 27 countries, in warmer buildings, more efficient factories, better appliances, the switch to LED lighting, and steadily more efficient transport. At any given price Europe now pays around a third less than it would have without those gains.

This shield holds whichever direction the next shock arrives from. If anything, the figure undersells the benefit, because it counts only the energy saved and not the power stations, pipelines, and grid connections nobody had to build. It is one of the most effective protection measures against future energy crisis: The energy not consumed cannot be withheld, weaponised, or made more expensive by a supplier you do not control.

As he points out, there’s vast room for expansion:

A heat pump in a well-insulated home on clean electricity cuts the energy the building needs, replaces the gas boiler, and runs on a grid that keeps getting cleaner. That single device also pulls the household out of the gas import chain for good, and as a side effect keeps it cooler through the sort of summer Europe now gets most years.

In the Netherlands, for instance, you can sign up for free clothes-washing, drying, and dishwashing between noon and 5:00 pm, part of a scheme from a company called CoolBlue.

People are quickly figuring all this out across much of the world. It remains for a savvy American politician to really lay out the case. But when she does the rewards will be high. “Free” would be a popular thing.

The US Supreme Court on Thursday sided with pesticide manufacturer Bayer in Monsanto Company v. Durnell, ruling that federal law preempts lawsuits brought by cancer patients who allege its Roundup product was to blame for their disease.

With the Trump administration siding with Bayer in the litigation, the devastating ruling by the court extends this legal shield to all pesticide corporations, leaving patients harmed by these toxic agricultural chemicals without the recourse of litigation that has cost Bayer billions of dollars.

Once again, the Supreme Court has sided with big business over people and the environment. This ruling is a disaster for public health—and it has Trump’s name written all over it. If one needed any further proof that the president’s feigned mission to "Make America Healthy Again" was a farce, today’s decision is all the evidence needed. Trump has been all too willing to endorse Bayer’s crusade to pollute with impunity, while the administration doubles down on a failed pesticide regulatory scheme.

Industrial agriculture is poisoning America. The fight against toxic pesticides does not end here. Congress must pass the Pesticide Injury Accountability Act to safeguard access to justice for all harmed by these toxic chemicals, and a Farm Bill that finally puts public health first. Until then, the Supreme Court has shut the courthouse doors to tens of thousands of sick and suffering Americans."

Today’s ruling comes despite a litany of evidence suggesting that glyphosate, the key ingredient in Bayer’s ubiquitous Roundup pesticide, is carcinogenic, and that the Environmental Protection Agency’s pesticide registration process is fatally flawed. The World Health Organization has defined glyphosate as a probable carcinogen since 2015. Roundup is the most widely used pesticide in the United States.

The decision completes Bayer’s years-long, well-financed quest to stifle cancer lawsuits cutting into its bottom line. Since purchasing Monsanto in 2018, Bayer has spent over $11 billion settling over 100,000 cancer lawsuits related to Roundup. Bayer has been pushing widely-opposed Cancer Gag Act bills nationwide, seeking to shield pesticide corporations from health-related lawsuits in multiple states and Congress. So far this year, the immunity legislation has failed in 11 states and was stripped from the House Farm Bill and left out of the Senate version.

There is a better way, including the Pesticide Injury Accountability Act, introduced by Sen. Corey Booker (D-NJ), which would restore the right to sue over pesticide harms. It's a right all Americans deserve.

The Democratic Party is trying to get born again.

For forty years it didn’t want to be. Since Reagan, the Democrats stopped fighting the world he built and started managing it. Bill Clinton signed NAFTA and sent the factories south. He signed the crime bill Joe Biden wrote and helped fill the prisons. He ended welfare and called it reform. He tore down the wall between the banks and your money, and a few years later the banks lost your money and got bailed out for it. Obama bailed them out, let the houses go, deported people by the millions, and kept the drone war and the surveillance state running without missing a step. On the things that decide who holds power, money and war and the police and the spying, our party and theirs were one party. That was never where they fought.

What they fought over was the rest of it, and even there they did the least they could get away with, because anything real would have cost their donors. They told us things were getting better and better. They told us they were on our side. They put out a statement for women and Black people and immigrants and Latinos every time one was due, and then they went back to managing the decline. And every couple of years they came back and told us this was the most important election of our lifetimes, so hold your nose and vote, and we did, and the rent went up anyway.

The left is connecting now because it tells the same truth and points it the right way. America is falling apart, and it didn’t fall by accident, and the people who broke it are not the busboy or the kid at the border.

Then Trump stood up and said the whole thing was a fraud and the country was a wreck. Media talking heads were appalled. They laughed at him. But he connected, because it rang true. We’d been told for thirty years that we’d never had it so good while the ground gave out under us, and here was a man saying out loud that it was a lie. The trouble was where he pointed. Trump took the truth of our condition and aimed it straight down, at the immigrant and the poor and the weak and the despised, the people with the least power in the whole arrangement. He found the real anger and fed it to the worst part of us.

The left is connecting now because it tells the same truth and points it the right way. America is falling apart, and it didn’t fall by accident, and the people who broke it are not the busboy or the kid at the border. We’ve been unjust. We’ve been immoral, paying for a genocide in Gaza with our own tax money while we couldn’t house our own people. We are failing, and we need to be redeemed. Trump never offers that last part, because his whole act runs on it being someone else’s fault. The left says it plain. We did this, and we can undo it, and we can make this country great, the real kind, not the red hat version.

So this is a fight about which future we get. One is the future the war party keeps selling, a trillion-dollar arsenal standing guard over a pile of money while the killing goes on. The other one has to be built, and it starts by telling the truth about where we’re standing. The whole question is which one we choose.

On Tuesday we got our first real look in a while at people choosing the hard one. Zohran Mamdani is the mayor of New York, and he spent his own standing to back primary challengers against sitting Democrats. Three of the House candidates he backed won, two of them democratic socialists. They ran against the party that signed the checks for Gaza, and they won anyway. Krystal Ball put it as plain as anybody, that the real radicals are the politicians who back the killing of children. Jaime Harrison, who used to run the party machine, told people like Mamdani that if they hate the Democratic Party they should stop using its name and go build their own. We’re not going anywhere. The party was never Harrison’s to hand out, and the people who actually built it just voted for the truth.

It’ll be loud and it’ll be ugly, and men like Jaime Harrison will keep telling us to leave. We’re staying, because the country is worth saving and we’re the ones who’ll do it.

We’ve been here before, and the last time we got it right. Between the 1930s and the 1960s, Democrats and socialists fought over the future and then they built one. They passed Social Security and the right to a union into law. They strung electric lines out to farms that had never seen a light bulb. They sent a generation to college on the GI Bill and gave the old and the poor a doctor with Medicare and Medicaid. They put us on the road to the moon. They built the biggest middle class the world had ever seen and pulled millions out of poverty doing it. They argued the whole way, and the country came out stronger for the fight.

But we forgot the other half of the job, which was the building. A roof you can afford. A doctor you can see. A job that holds a family together. We handed all of it to the market, and the market handed us back rent we can’t pay and care we can’t afford and kids who don’t believe they’ll ever own a home. The rights we won, for Black people and women and immigrants and gay and trans people, were real and worth every fight, but they don’t pay the rent, and the party that told us to clap never wanted to talk about the rent.

The Democratic Party needs a rebirth not a rebrand.

We’ve done it before, so we know it’s not a dream. We need a politics and an economy and a democracy and a country that works for all of us, and not for the shrinking few who bought up the last one. We can build that. And the thing they have left to stop us with is fear.

Jesse Watters went on television and said the New York socialists aren’t even socialists, they’re communists, and you can’t reason with them, you have to crush them. That’s the same move Trump makes, the powerful turning your fear on someone weaker than you. Be scared of your neighbor, and keep trusting the people who paid for a genocide and couldn’t fix a thing here at home. We’re done taking that.

So the party is trying to get born again. It’ll be loud and it’ll be ugly, and men like Jaime Harrison will keep telling us to leave. We’re staying, because the country is worth saving and we’re the ones who’ll do it. We tell the truth about how far we’ve fallen, and then we build our way back up. We make it great for real, or we don’t get it.

The saying “that’s history” is usually meant to be dismissive, but in politics the past casts a long shadow over the future. Now, two years after President Biden’s disastrous debate with Donald Trump, the patterns that dominate the Democratic Party are damaging its prospects for the elections to come.

When Biden left CNN’s debate studio after an often-incoherent performance on the night of June 27, 2024, his re-election goose was cooked. With voting for president set to begin within three months, time was of the essence to replace Biden as the party’s presidential candidate. But excessive loyalty and outright denial kicked in immediately among top Democrats.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom was on MSNBC telling viewers that they didn’t see and hear what they’d just seen and heard. “I was very very proud that he was able to articulate the work that he has done,” Newsom said. He voiced transactional gratitude: “We have the opportunity to universally have the back of this president, who’s had our back. You don’t turn your back, you go home with the one that brought you to the dance.”

Such tap dancing was common among party operatives who stayed publicly stoic. “Joe Biden has always had our back,” Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison said, “and we’re gonna have his.” Congressman James Clyburn of South Carolina intoned, “Let’s just stay the course.”

Biden loyalist Heather Cox Richardson tried to reassure her several million readers via Substack, writing: “Biden needed to demonstrate that his mental capacity is strong in order to push back on the Republicans’ insistence that he is incapable of being president. That, he did, thoroughly. Biden began with a weak start but hit his stride as the evening wore on. Indeed, he covered his bases too thoroughly, listing the many accomplishments of his administration in such a hurry that he was sometimes hard to understand.”

Not all of the usual Biden boosters were disingenuous after the debate. Quite a few high-profile commentators were quick to say that Biden should drop out of the race. Among them, within hours, was the New York Times editorial board.

But five days passed before the first Democrat in Congress called for Biden to step aside. Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas was alone among his colleagues when he said that Biden should “make the painful and difficult decision to withdraw.”

Meanwhile, the New York Times belatedly reported: “In the weeks and months before President Biden’s politically devastating performance on the debate stage in Atlanta, several current and former officials and others who encountered him behind closed doors noticed that he increasingly appeared confused or listless, or would lose the thread of conversations.”

Thirteen days passed after the debate before a single Democratic senator urged Biden to step aside. At that point, only 4 percent of congressional Democrats had publicly said that Biden should exit the ticket.

By July 19, a full three weeks after the debate, only 10 percent of the Democrats in Congress had called for Biden to withdraw. Three days later, at last, Biden announced that he would not run.

The Democrats who did openly urge Biden to leave the race were a mix across the party’s ideological spectrum. Two renowned progressives were among the most outspoken advocates of the president soldiering on: Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Sanders encouraged the illusion that Biden had the capacity to be an effective candidate. Reporting that Sanders “does not want Biden to step aside,” the Associated Press quoted the senator as saying: “A presidential election is not a Grammy Award contest for the best singer or entertainer. It’s about who has the best policies that impact our lives.”

While that statement was true as a generality, it notably failed to meet the moment.

Sanders, who enjoyed a warm friendship with Biden, had his ear at that pivotal time. Ten days after the debate, Sanders said on the CBS program Face the Nation that Biden “has spoken to me in recent days.”

Eleven days after the debate, Ocasio-Cortez told reporters: “I have spoken to the president over the weekend. I have spoken with him extensively. He made clear then and he has made clear since that he is in this race. The matter is closed.”

More than a week after the debate, a prominent progressive writer oddly blamed “the pundit class” for “suggesting Biden is unfit” and wanting him “to get lost.” Such undue allegiance to Biden was similar to what had enabled and bolstered his disastrous choice to run for re-election in the first place.

Consciously or not, too many self-described liberals and progressives took their cues from Democratic leaders who were routinely deceptive on behalf of the president. In a typical episode of dissembling, the party’s Senate leader Chuck Schumer said from a podium on Capitol Hill in mid-February 2024: “I talk to President Biden regularly, sometimes several times in a week, or usually several times in a week. His mental acuity is great, it’s fine, it’s as good as it’s been over the years…. He’s fine. All this right-wing propaganda that his mental acuity has declined is wrong.”

We should remember that the Biden who insisted on running for re-election – despite the repeatedly polled wishes of most registered Democrats – was the same Biden who insisted on shipping billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Israel while it proceeded with genocide in Gaza, despite the repeatedly polled wishes of most registered Democrats.

Looking ahead, a great need will be to overcome the ongoing culture of conformity that so badly damaged the Democratic Party in 2024 and helped Trump get back into the White House.

The necessary leadership will not come from the governing body of the party, the Democratic National Committee; its 450 members have remained overwhelmingly deferential to the hidebound dictates of the DNC chair. Nor will the needed leadership come from Democrats in Congress, who couldn’t bring themselves to call for Biden to stop running for re-election during the crucial first weeks after his debate disaster.

The vital leadership must come from grassroots activists.

For millions of workers, the conversation about artificial intelligence and the future of work is no longer theoretical. It is already showing up in layoffs, hiring freezes, shrinking departments, and growing anxiety about whether the paycheck families rely on today will still exist tomorrow.

But the most important question is not simply which jobs AI will eliminate. It is whether workers will have any real support when those jobs disappear.

While policymakers, executives, and economists debate which industries will thrive and which occupations will disappear in the age of AI, working Americans are focused on more immediate concerns: paying rent, affording groceries, covering childcare, and figuring out how they would support their families if their income suddenly vanished.

Workers are right to worry, because the system meant to help them through job loss is already failing to meet this moment.

While we may not be able to control every change AI will bring, we can decide whether workers will face those changes alone.

America’s unemployment insurance system was built for a different era entirely, one in which AI was nonexistent. It was built for an era that assumed stable full-time employment, long-term employer relationships, and relatively predictable layoffs. Today’s economy looks nothing like that.

Millions of workers now move between part-time jobs, contract work, temporary positions, caregiving responsibilities, and periods outside the workforce entirely. But unemployment insurance rules still exclude many of those workers from receiving help when they need it most.

Today, only about 1 in 4 unemployed workers receive unemployment benefits nationwide. In some states, fewer than 13% received support at all. And even when workers do qualify, benefits are often too low and too short-lived to keep families financially stable while they search for new work.

The result of this broken system is families scrambling to avoid financial free fall: draining savings accounts, falling behind on rent, or taking the first low-paying jobs they can find because they can’t afford to wait for something better.

That disconnect is already visible. While the number of unemployed workers has climbed sharply over the past year, unemployment claims have remained relatively flat—not because people are unaffected, but because so many workers are locked out of a system that no longer reflects the realities of modern work.

The first wave of AI disruption is already here. As adoption of these technologies increases, more workers will cycle between jobs, more families will navigate periods of unemployment, and more people will be forced to rebuild after losing work through no fault of their own.

And those burdens will not fall equally. Women—especially Black women, who are disproportionately represented in clerical and administrative jobs—are among the workers most vulnerable to displacement. Workers of color already face persistently higher unemployment rates because of structural inequities in the labor market. Yet when they lose work, they are significantly less likely to receive unemployment benefits and the economic stability those benefits are supposed to provide.

That reality is colliding with an already fragile economy. Data from the New York Federal Reserve shows that college graduates are now experiencing recession-level rates of unemployment. Over the last year, unemployment among young college graduates averaged 5.5%—the highest sustained level outside the brief peak of the Covid-19 pandemic since the aftermath of the Great Recession.

These are graduates who were told that if they worked hard, earned a degree, and applied themselves, they would find stability and opportunity. Instead, many are entering a labor market defined by uncertainty and shrinking opportunities, all while facing a weakening safety net.

That is why modernizing our unemployment systems must be part of the AI conversation.

A functional unemployment insurance system for today’s economy would cover more workers, including part-time, gig, and temporary workers. It would provide benefits that actually allow families to survive while searching for new work. It would make it easier, not harder, for eligible workers to receive support. And it would actually be prepared to withstand economic downturns.

Unemployment insurance should be understood for what it truly is: economic infrastructure.

Just as roads and bridges help goods move through the economy, unemployment insurance helps people move through economic change without falling into crisis. A strong UI system gives people the stability to search for good jobs instead of being pushed into the first low-wage position available. It stabilizes families, communities, and local businesses during periods of disruption.

The age of stable employment is fading. More workers will inevitably face periods of transition, disruption, and job loss in the years ahead.

While we may not be able to control every change AI will bring, we can decide whether workers will face those changes alone. Modernizing unemployment insurance is not simply a matter of compassion. It is a matter of economic readiness.

Clarence Thomas went more than 10 years without asking a single substantive question from the bench. His silence between 2006 and 2016 prompted commentators to call his courtroom quietude embarrassing, a sign of fatigue and a lack of intellectual candlepower. Even earlier in his career, he had earned the nickname of “Scalia’s Puppet” for his habit of joining majority opinions written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the outspoken and reactionary “originalist” who shared the dais with him until his death in 2016.

But the characterization of Thomas as an inattentive echo of Scalia is wrong. Thomas has always been more extreme and dangerous than Scalia, and his influence has never been greater.

After his bruising 1991 confirmation hearing, Thomas set his eyes on the goal of moving American law backward to the laissez-faire era of the Gilded Age, undoing the regulatory state of the New Deal, weakening the civil rights legislation of the 1950s and ’60s, and undermining many of the forward-looking precedent decisions issued by the Warren Court. As Thomas reportedly told two of his law clerks in 1993, he planned to serve until 2034, and until then would continue to make the lives of liberals “miserable.” He has already made good on that pledge: He is now the second-longest serving Supreme Court justice in history.

Thomas is best known for concurrences and dissents that seemed culled from the lunatic fringe when he wrote them, but were later embraced by the majority as the court moved hard right.

There is no telling how much more jurisprudential carnage he will cause or how much more disgrace he will bring to the reputation of the world’s most powerful judicial tribunal.

On affirmative action, in a 1995 case on government contracting (Adarand Constructors v. Pena), his concurrence denounced “remedial racial preferences” in federal hiring as a form of “racial paternalism.” This was an astonishing choice of words for the nation’s second Black Supreme Court justice, who overcame childhood poverty and, after a brief flirtation with Black nationalism, became the beneficiary of affirmative action at Yale Law School. Twenty-eight years later, however, in a majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts (Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard), the court ended affirmative action in higher education.

On abortion in a 2000 case (Stenberg v. Carhart) that invalidated Nebraska’s late-term abortion ban, Thomas dissented, arguing that the Roe v. Wade decision was “grievously wrong,” and that nothing in the Constitution “dictates that a State” must legalize abortion. Twenty-two years later, Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization adopted Thomas’ view.

Ditto for the Second Amendment. In Printz v. United States, a 1997 gun-regulation case, Thomas contributed a concurrence arguing that the amendment encompassed a personal right to keep and bear arms rather than simply a right connected with service in state militias, as prior case law had clearly held. Eleven years later, in District of Columbia v. Heller, the court recognized the personal right in an opinion authored by Scalia. Thomas went on to expand the personal right in 2022 with his majority opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, a decision that severely handicaps state and local authorities from enforcing gun-control laws.

Thomas is also on record advising the court to revisit its precedent decisions on the right to court-appointed counsel in criminal trials (Gideon v. Wainwright, 1963); the right of married persons to contraception (Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965); the right of adults to engage in private consensual sex (Lawrence v. Texas, 2003); and the right to same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015). He has also called for the court to reconsider 1964’s New York Times v. Sullivan, the landmark case establishing First Amendment protections in defamation cases involving public officials and public figures, which is widely considered the lynchpin of freedom of the press in America.

In a recent column published by the influential Scotusblog website, constitutional law scholar Erwin Chemerinsky noted that “Thomas is the only justice… who has openly said that precedent deserves little weight in constitutional law.”

Despite his laid-back courtroom demeanor, Thomas has also been an active and loquacious speaker out of court on the right-wing banquet and convention circuit, especially in meetings of the Federalist Society and events hosted by Hillsdale College, the Michigan-based private Christian institution long recognized as a hub for conservative thought leaders and a breeding ground for the right-wing’s ever expanding culture wars.

Supreme Court justices typically attend academic, judicial, and bar-related conferences, and initially, Thomas’ public remarks were fairly judge like, focusing on time-honored topics like judicial independence. But as his stature grew and the court’s lurch to the right accelerated, he shed whatever inhibitions he once had about voicing his personal beliefs, becoming in time a full-fledged and open culture war combatant.

n a 2011 address at a law student symposium sponsored by the Federalist Society in Charlottesville, Virginia, he devoted most of his time not to expounding on legal doctrine but to defending his tea party activist wife Ginni against adverse press coverage. He also exhorted his young audience to be wary of the “fundamental changes” wrought by the left that aimed to distort the original meaning of the Constitution. In a 2016 commencement speech at Hillsdale, he went further, urging graduates “not [to] hide your faith and your beliefs under a bushel basket… in this world that seems to have gone mad with political correctness.”

Thomas is now unbound and unrestrained. In a speech on April 15 at the University of Texas, he went “full Monty” in an unhinged broadside against liberals and progressives. “Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government declaring,” he declared, continuing:

It holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God but from government… [Progressivism] was the first mainstream American political movement—with the possible exception of the pro-slavery reactionaries on the eve of the Civil War—to openly oppose the principles of the Declaration.

He went on to blame progressives for the 20th century evils of racial segregation and eugenics, insisting that “Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao” were “intertwined with the rise of progressivism.”

All this from an angry and embittered ideologue who is also arguably the most corrupt justice in the Supreme Court’s history, having failed for 13 years to report his wife Virginia’s earnings on his annual financial disclosure forms, and who has been on the gimme end of lavish vacations funded by billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow.

Thomas celebrated his 78th birthday on June 23. He may not make it to his projected retirement date of 2034, but until he actually steps down, whether voluntarily or post mortem in the fashion of Scalia, there is no telling how much more jurisprudential carnage he will cause or how much more disgrace he will bring to the reputation of the world’s most powerful judicial tribunal.

Amazon wanted to build 250 diesel generators in a working-class Minnesota community and skip an environmental review that would have scrutinized emissions and pollution. A local organization decided to fight anyway, banded together with others, and won.

That organization was CURE, a grantee of the Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund, and last year's fight was about more than a data center. It was about whether Amazon could run 250 diesel generators next to a retiring coal plant in Becker, Minnesota without answering for what it meant for the air and water in a community already in the middle of an energy transition.

Those generators would have produced 600 megawatts of backup power, without the environmental review that would have examined their emissions impact. The community had no interest in absorbing the pollution costs of Amazon's AI ambitions.

I have spent 25 years in this work, first as an organizer and now as someone who helps fund it. What happened in Becker does not surprise me. CURE did not win because it got lucky. It won because someone had invested in that organization years before Amazon showed up, building the staff, the community relationships, and the knowledge of how a state utilities commission actually works. That is how organizing operates. The results are visible. The groundwork is not. And right now, that groundwork is being torn up on purpose. Philanthropy helped build it. Now it needs to decide whether it will defend it.

For many of the organizations we fund at the Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund, ours is the first climate grant they have ever received. That is not a boast. It is an indictment of how philanthropy has allocated its resources.

I saw what patient investment makes possible in the early 2000s, when I was part of an immigrant women's organization in San Francisco called Mujeres Unidas y Activas. We had four staff members and a big dream. Over the next decade MUA grew to 40 people and became one of the founding members of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which we built alongside a dozen other domestic worker groups who came together in Atlanta and decided to act as one.

The alliance went on to help win legal protections for the nannies, housekeepers, and home aides that federal labor law had excluded since the New Deal. None of that came from a single breakthrough. It came from funders who stayed in it long enough to see something grow.

That infrastructure is being dismantled right now, and the attacks are not accidental. When voter registration drives signed up new voters by the thousands, lawmakers in several states moved to criminalize the groups behind them.

Nick Tilsen founded the NDN Collective to defend Indigenous rights and land sovereignty in the Dakotas, and that work made him a target. He faced aggravated assault charges and the prospect of more than 25 years in prison for monitoring a police encounter in Rapid City before a jury deadlocked and all charges were dropped earlier this year. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which has tracked hate groups for more than 50 years, was federally indicted on fraud charges in April. You do not need to ban organizing if you can make it too expensive and too frightening to sustain.

What disappears when this work gets defunded does not make the front page. A permit gets quietly approved. A workplace complaint never gets filed. A hearing happens and no one is there to speak. Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and working-class communities have always been powerful. What they have not always had is the sustained investment they deserve.

For many of the organizations we fund at the Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund, ours is the first climate grant they have ever received. That is not a boast. It is an indictment of how philanthropy has allocated its resources, and it has to change. We call on donors to fund grassroots organizations now.

Fund them for years, not grant cycles. Do not pull back because the political moment got harder. That is precisely when this work needs you most.

Republicans hold complete control of state government in 23 states today, Democrats in 16. That map does not change through advertising. It changes through patient, ground-level organizing in the places the political class has written off, on a timeline of years, not election cycles. Cutting that work now is not fiscal discipline. It is a strategic concession.

Climate, democracy, and economic justice are not separate fights. They are the same fight, and the communities on the frontlines of all three have been saying so for years. “Affordability,” the latest political buzzword, is not new or distinct from these ongoing fights. In Becker, what was at stake was clean air, democratic accountability, and a community's right to shape its own energy future. CURE understood that. The question is whether the people and institutions with the resources to back that kind of work will understand it too, and soon enough to matter.

I still think about those four staff members at MUA, and what became possible because someone believed in the work long before there were results to show for it. Frontline communities are not waiting to be rescued. They are building, organizing, and winning. The question is whether philanthropy will stop watching and start investing.

Three Democratic candidates for House seats in New York prevailed on Tuesday night in a massive rebuke to the party establishment. Though each race was representative of a broader dissatisfaction with incumbents and specific district-level dynamics, the US relationship with Israel and funding from big-money lobbies, including AIPAC, became central components in each of these races.

Following in the footsteps Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral election in 2025, Brad Lander (NY-10), Claire Valdez (NY-7), and Darializa Avila Chevalier (NY-13) all scored wins in Tuesday’s primaries, putting them on a glidepath to Congress in November. Both Lander and Avila Chevalier defeated sitting House members.

Particularly in the 10th District, where Lander won nearly two-thirds of the vote, those questions were seen as central. As Politico put it, the challenger knocked out the “two-term lawmaker after a bruising campaign that focused heavily on their differences over Israel.”

“There is very little daylight between Brad Lander and Dan Goldman ideologically, except when it comes to Israel,” Adam Carlson, a Democratic pollster, told Responsible Statecraft (RS). “Yes, Lander has a long tenure representing much of the district, but he won by a nearly 2:1 margin because Goldman is deeply out of touch with the base of the party on Israel—and his association with AIPAC.”

“Some have criticized my supporting progressive insurgents. Tonight shows we have a new party.”

In a sign of how much the discourse of the Israel’s war in Gaza and US support for it has shifted since October 2023, Valdez, who ran for an open seat, criticized her leading opponent, Antonio Reynoso, for not calling the war a “genocide” until he announced his run for Congress. Nydia Velasquez, the popular incumbent who held the seat for more than three decades, endorsed Reynoso before Tuesday’s election.

In the 13th District, meanwhile, Avila Chevalier, who centered her opposition to US policy toward Israel, shocked Adriano Espaillat, the current chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Avila Chevalier has said she would support the “Block the Bombs” Act that would halt arms shipments to Israel and made headlines for attending a protest one day after the October 7 attacks, which she said was in recognition of “a pattern in which whenever there is an incident, the state of Israel engages in a response that is often disproportionate and creates a greater loss of life.”

Her victory was seen as notable not only because it pitted an outsider with no prior elected experience against an established incumbent, but also because she won in a less affluent, less white district. As Alex Kane wrote in Jewish Currents before the race, progressive activists saw her race as “a sign that anti-AIPAC politics can win outside of wealthier, more highly-educated progressive districts where it’s had success so far.”

In New York’s 12th District, an area of the city which is older and more Jewish than some other neighborhoods with competitive races, there were further signs of the degree to which the politics of the US-Israel relationship has changed. Carlson told RS before the vote that they would be watching for whether Nina Schwalbe, the only candidate to call the war in Gaza a “genocide,” could run close to George Conway, a former Republican and strong supporter of the traditional relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv.

At the time of writing, Schwalbe had garnered 7% of the vote compared to 6% for Conway. The two top vote-getters in the race, who were running to replace outgoing Rep. Jerry Nadler, both described themselves as pro-Israel but anti-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and said they would not vote to end military aid to Israel.

AIPAC itself kept some distance from the races in New York, though reporting indicated that apparent front organizations for the lobbying group have continued to fund candidates. Espaillat was the only candidate explicitly backed by AIPAC. Other pro-Israel groups, such as the Democratic Majority for Israel, have reportedly given money to Super PACs supporting Goldman and Espaillat.

More pro-Israel candidates have also had successes in other races, including in a Maryland Democratic primary race on Tuesday and in an earlier effort to oust incumbent Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky earlier this year.

Some sitting members of Congress framed the news as indicative of a larger wave sweeping over the party. “The progressive movement is crushing the establishment in NYC,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) wrote on X. “Some have criticized my supporting progressive insurgents. Tonight shows we have a new party.”

This week’s races in New York, all in deep blue districts, were certainly tied into other political dynamics, including the power of Mamdani (who endorsed all three progressive winners) and other district-specific issues. But as Democrats gear up for more primary races, ahead of November’s midterms and 2028’s presidential elections, it has become increasingly clear that unconditional support for Israel is no longer a winning issue in the Democratic Party.

Many of the criticisms being leveled against the Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and Iran—namely, that it is not that great a deal—are accurate and worthy of attention. But under the disastrous set of circumstances resulting from the US-Israeli war on Iran, it is probably the best deal that can be realistically hoped for, given that Iran clearly has the upper hand. Unfortunately, that has not stopped some Washington politicians, including many prominent Democrats, from attempting to undermine it.

Iran has suffered enormously in terms of damage to its military and civilian infrastructure and the killing of many in its clerical, political, and military leadership, among many other thousands of deaths. In response, the regime has demonstrated an effective new form of asymmetrical warfare, in which relatively cheap drones can continue to inflict an enormous amount of damage on US assets in the region, as well as on the military and civilian infrastructure of US allies, even when more than 90 percent of such projectiles are successfully intercepted via more costly technologies.

The United States cannot win this war against Iran.

The deal outlined in the Memorandum of Understanding is decidedly of greater benefit to Iran than the terms agreed upon in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—an agreement primarily negotiated by the Obama Administration and signed by six other nations with the support of the United Nations and the European Union. That deal was unilaterally broken off by President Donald Trump during his first term.

Trump’s new Memorandum of Understanding with Iran calls for Iran’s enriched uranium to be blended down inside the country rather than removed to another location. In addition, as much as $24 billion in frozen Iranian assets will be released, although Trump has repeatedly criticized the JCPOA for unfreezing billions in Iranian assets. And, unlike the JCPOA, this deal lifts sanctions prior to Iran’s implementing the nuclear provisions.

The Trump Administration emphasizes that its agreement forces Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and commits Iran to not developing a nuclear weapon. However, both of these were already the case prior to Trump’s launch of the war four months ago on February 28.

For Republicans who attacked President Barack Obama for the JCPOA to now defend Trump’s Memorandum of Understanding is beyond hypocrisy. But many Congressional Democrats are demonstrating their own hypocrisy in claiming that they oppose the war while actively undermining efforts to end it.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, referred to the agreement as “the art of surrender.” Senator John Hickenlooper, Democrat of Colorado, deemed it “despicable.” Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, said it was a deal in which Iran gets all the benefits. Former Clinton Administration National Security Advisor Susan Rice dubbed it a “jaw-dropping, horrific surrender.” Senator Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, said it was “a thorough capitulation.” Representative Seth Moulton, Democrat of Massachusetts, similarly claimed it was “basically a surrender document.” And Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, also called the agreement as an “unconditional surrender” by the United States, insisting it would be “dead on arrival in the Senate”—even though, since it is not a formal treaty, it does not require ratification or any other action on Capitol Hill.

Under international law, countries that engage in aggressive war are generally held liable for the damages inflicted upon the country they attack. The costs to Iranian society of the US-Israeli bombing has been estimated to be nearly $300 billion. The Memorandum of Understanding does not call for reparations, but it does make reference to a reconstruction fund in that amount, apparently led by Arab Gulf states; payments will likely be in the form of loans with a decent return on investment for those Gulf states. It is not US tax dollars that are being spent. It is not money that Trump is giving to Iran.

This has not stopped some Democratic leaders in Congress from claiming this is somehow a taxpayer-funded cash grant to the Iranian regime. Schumer insists the agreement would force the United States to “send Iran $300 billion when economic needs are severe here at home.” Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, falsely claimed these funds could be used to “end homelessness, fund cancer research for forty years, and give every child free pre-K for over seven years. Instead, Trump is sending it to Iran.” Blumenthal even claimed that Iran would be able to spend the money on supporting Hezbollah and other extremist Iranian allies, and rebuild its nuclear program. However, the investments would more likely actually be directed towards specific civilian infrastructure development projects under the supervision of the donor countries and private investors.

Misrepresenting arms control agreements is a time-honored tactic used by militarists. During the Cold War, these agreements frequently prompted rightwing claims that arms control locked in Soviet nuclear superiority. Trump himself insisted that the JCPOA, rather than make it physically impossible for Iran to develop a weapon, would have enabled them to do the opposite and destroy Israel and attack the United States.

By falsely claiming that the United States would pay Iran $300 billion, Schumer (who also opposed the JCPOA) and other Democrats are essentially trying to mobilize popular opposition to the ending of the conflict.

The big question: What is the alternative?

A return to a war on Iran that brings retaliatory attacks on a half-dozen Middle Eastern nations? The continued devastating Israeli bombardment of Lebanon? The indefinite closure of the Strait of Hormuz and its disastrous global economic impact, particularly on families worldwide living under the poverty line?

Some Democrats recognize this reality. “There is no good way out of a bad war,” noted Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland. “When you're in a hole, stop digging.” Similarly, Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, observed, “It’s a disaster, but it’s probably a necessary disaster.”

But the Democratic politicians who are joining rightwing Republicans in claims of “surrender” are assisting in the creation of a climate that might indeed lead the hawkish Trump Administration to break off the current agreement and return to war.

In many respects, this is nothing new. Democrats played an important role in working to undermine Obama’s efforts to negotiate a nuclear agreement with Iran, in discouraging President Joe Biden from returning to the deal, and in promoting a war in Iran that Trump finally brought to fruition in recent months.

Those of us interested in peace and security, however, should not encourage these actions. It is easy to criticize the agreement as a means of underscoring the tragedy of this reckless and illegal war, and to further discredit Trump as we approach the midterm elections. We must resist the understandable temptation to forward the memes, cartoons, and late-night jokes critical of the deal on our personal listservs and social media.

Doing so simply reinforces the efforts by Republican hawks, rightwing Zionists, and others who seek perpetual war. The unfortunate reality is that the implementation of the Memorandum of Understanding is probably the best hope at this point to end—or at least suspend—this tragic conflict.

Alan Greenspan, who served as chair of the Federal Reserve from to 1987 to 2006 and who died on Monday, was a monster. He was the Henry Kissinger of economic policy. Like Kissinger, he was mistakenly considered a genius. Reporters, businesses, and many members of Congress hung on his words—more accurately, his jargon-filled word salad, which obscured more than it explained—to understand what was going on in the economy. Despite the fact that his policies, like Kissinger's, were a blatant failure, he was, also like Kissinger (who also died at 100), still taken seriously by the media after he left government service, and made a ton of money as a consultant. Both men caused enormous harm and suffering for which they were never held accountable.

The New York Times obituary has a few paragraphs about writer and pseudo-philosopher Ayn Rand's influence on Greenspan, but doesn't do justice to the fact that Rand's inner circle wasn't just a discussion group. It was a cult. Greenspan absorbed her belief that selfishness was the highest principle. It was that view that guided his economic thinking, including when he was Fed chair, and before that, chief economic advisor to President Gerald Ford.

The core of Rand's influence was Greenspan's belief that government should play no role in regulating business. He believed that corporations could police themselves without any government rules. He reflected Rand's belief that corporations' self-interest and greed, and those of major shareholders, would lead them to behave responsibly.

Greenspan was appointed Fed chair by Ronald Reagan in 1987 and reappointed by George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. He was also part of the corporate ruling class, serving on the boards of several Fortune 500 corporations, including Mobil Oil, J.P. Morgan, the Aluminum Corp. of America (Alcoa), Morgan Guarantee Trust Co., Automatic Data Processing Inc., Capital Cities/ABC, Pittston Company, and General Foods.

Greenspan's influence, along with the intense lobbying by the banking industry, provided the justification for the dismantling of dismantling of decades of government bank regulations, providing lenders with the leeway to engage in an orgy of mergers, speculation, and risky and racist lending practices that ultimately led to the collapse of major Wall Street firms.

The banking industry's greed—its insatiable appetite for profits and wealth—led to the 2007 mortgage meltdown, the implosion of the housing market, the near-collapse of the financial industry, and the breakdown of the whole economy, including widespread layoffs and foreclosures, from which we have still not fully recovered. But it was made possible by the see-no-evil views of Greenspan and his ilk.

In the late 1990s, during Greenspan's watch at the Federal Reserve, banks and private mortgage lenders began pushing subprime mortgages, many with “adjustable” rates that jumped sharply after a few years. These risky loans comprised 8.6 percent of all mortgages in 2001, soaring to 20.1 percent by 2006. That year alone, 10 lenders accounted for 56 percent of all subprime loans, totaling $362 billion. These loans were a ticking time bomb, waiting to explode.

Starting in 2007, housing prices fell by third. Americans lost $7 trillion in wealth. Over 5 million Americans lost their homes. The drop in housing values affected not only families facing foreclosure but also families in the surrounding communities because having a few foreclosed homes in a neighborhood brings down the value of other houses in the area. The neighborhood blight created by the housing collapse was much worse in African-American and Hispanic areas because they were the primary victims of subprime loans and almost twice as likely as whites to lose their homes to foreclosures.

Brooksley Born, chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 1996 to 1999, wanted her agency to regulate derivatives and other exotic financial investments (including credit default swaps) that she accurately predicted were too risky and would lead to disaster. But Greenspan, along with President Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and economic advisor Larry Summers, stopped her from exercising the kind of regulatory authority that would have prevented the calamity. In 2000, Edward Gramlich, a Federal Reserve Board member, repeatedly warned Greenspan about subprime mortgages and predatory lending, which he said jeopardized the twin American dreams of owning a home and building wealth. He tried to get Greenspan to crack down on irrational subprime lending by increasing oversight, but his warnings fell on deaf ears.

Greenspan was the leading culprit of the policies that led to the economic collapse. He allowed the banks' short-sighted gluttony to cause enormous human suffering.

It wasn’t until the system imploded that Greenspan gained any insight about the fundamental flaw of his belief that greed is the best operating principle for the economy. In 2008, testifying before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Greenspan admitted: “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief…. This modern [free market] paradigm held sway for decades. The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of last year.”

Of course, there was plenty of evidence throughout history that big corporations do NOT behave responsibly unless they are required to do so by government regulations and enforcement. This has been especially true of banks. But because Greenspan was such a libertarian ideologue, in thrall to Rand and others, he could not, or refused to, see what was right in front of him. For the millions of Americans who lost their homes, their jobs, and their small businesses through no fault of their own. Greenspan's self-awareness came much too late.

I’ve written repeatedly about community resilience over the years; for example, I penned an article in 2017 for Bloomberg on rebuilding for resilience after the devastating wildfires in Sonoma County, California, where I live.

In this piece, I want to tackle an even tougher case. The city of New Orleans dramatically exemplifies all the paradoxes, problems, and opportunities of resilience building. It is also a second home to me and my wife Janet: She was born there, many of her relatives still live there, and we spend at least a week each year in the Big Easy. So, I know a bit about New Orleans, and I care about the place and its people.

New Orleans also happens to be a lot of fun to write about. So, let’s go!

Vulnerable, Precarious, Beautiful

Just 21 years ago, New Orleans was nearly wiped away. Hurricane Katrina brought high winds and drenching rain; after levees and pumping stations failed due to human error, much of the city was flooded. It took 43 days to pump the floodwater into the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain. Nearly all the surviving residents had been evacuated. They returned after weeks or months to find buildings destroyed, possessions ruined or gone, entire neighborhoods devastated, and the city steeped in the stench of decay. Over a thousand fatalities were recorded. The hurricane quickly achieved a mythic status, and, today, every New Orleanian over age 30 has an emotion-charged story to tell about loss and survival.

The inherent challenges of maintaining New Orleans are so great that there’s an ongoing debate about whether the city should simply be permanently abandoned.

This wasn’t the first hurricane or flood for New Orleans. The city is geographically disaster prone, built on a subsiding river delta, mostly below sea level, with a bowl-like topography. The metropolis is squeezed between two major bodies of water, making it highly susceptible to catastrophic storm surges and flooding, which have taken a heavy toll on several occasions. One was Hurricane Betsy (September 9, 1965), a massive Category 3 storm that flooded eastern New Orleans. It was the first US hurricane to cause $1 billion in damages.

The Crescent City is kept habitable by a 90-mile system of canals and pumping stations, along with huge levees along the river and lakefront. The stations together can pump a staggering 24,300 cubic feet of water per second. Yet, during heavy rains, they sometimes struggle to keep up. That struggle is about to get harder in the context of more extreme temperatures, ongoing loss of coastal land, stronger hurricanes, and rising seas.

New Orleans also faces inherent economic challenges. Its revenues derive mostly from tourism, offshore oil and gas production, shipping, and fishing. Oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico oil is currently riding high, but oil is, after all, a depleting non-renewable resource. Tourism is sensitive to gasoline and jet fuel prices, and dependent on tourists having disposable income. Fishing is vulnerable to a host of environmental and economic issues, including overfishing, oil spills, runoff pollution from the Mississippi (which has created a growing “dead zone” in the Gulf), and rising ocean temperatures.

The inherent challenges of maintaining New Orleans are so great that there’s an ongoing debate about whether the city should simply be permanently abandoned. I’ll return to that.

Still, New Orleans residents are fiercely protective of their city. And lots of folks who live elsewhere love to visit the Big Easy. That’s because New Orleans has some things going for it.

Is New Orleans America’s Most Magnetic City?

A Maison Bourbon sign is shown. (Photo via Adobe Stock)

The Crescent City has a long, colorful cultural history; for a taste, I recommend Gary Krist’s book Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans. Today, the city’s culture persists in a unique dialect (“Yat,” derived from the common greeting, “Where y’at?”), as well as foods, architecture, and music that often make you feel you’re somewhere in the Caribbean rather than the United States.

Of all the city’s unique cultural achievements, its music is perhaps its greatest source of pride. Hundreds of full-time musicians carry on New Orleans-related traditions, somehow making a living alongside potential competitors. The fact that so many succeed is largely due to the city’s plethora of live music venues. WWOZ (a listener-supported radio station that plays New Orleans music of all varieties 24/7) publishes a daily online and radio-delivered summary of who’s playing where (the Livewire); even on a weekday, it usually takes the announcer several minutes to name all the performers and venues.

What does culture have to do with survival in the face of past and impending disasters? Plenty, it turns out.

To illustrate the degree to which New Orleans’s music culture has gotten under my own skin, permit me to divulge a little personal info. When I first started visiting the Crescent City, I was a semi-professional classical violinist. Most of the music I listened to consisted of Bach, Brahms, and Paganini. Gradually I added a little Louis Armstrong to my sonic diet. Then, in 2021, a fingertip injury forced me to abandon the violin altogether. I decided to learn piano instead (its flat keys don’t trigger the same nerve pains that metal strings did). I started with a few easy pieces by Bach and Scarlatti but soon found myself gravitating to the New Orleans sound.

New Orleans boasts a long tradition of jazz and blues piano playing, stretching from Jelly Roll Morton in the early years of the 20th century to Fats Domino, Professor Longhair, James Booker, and Dr. John in the rock era; to Jon Batiste, Tom McDermott, Jon Cleary, Harry Connick, Jr., and many others today. There are currently so many great New Orleans pianists that WWOZ hosts an annual “Piano Night” of live performances, during which each of the invited piano pros is given 10 minutes to shine; the quality of their playing ranges from terrific to phenomenal, and the event typically lasts five to six hours. That’s plenty of inspiration for an aspiring keyboard novice like me. These days, I’m working on learning several songs by Jelly Roll Morton and one by Dr. John.

It’s a common story: Many of the “New Orleans musicians” I’ve talked to were born elsewhere, but then became so enraptured by the relaxed, bluesy style of the city’s music that they decided to move to the Big Easy and devote their lives to its culture. One example is a band of 40-somethings called Tuba Skinny, whose eight-or-so members formerly played in grunge bands around the US (its leader, cornetist Shaye Cohn, had a legit musical education on piano). They individually moved to New Orleans after Katrina, then gradually coalesced into a street band with a shared interest in the collective improvisation of 1920s and ’30s jazz and blues. There are plenty of other trad jazz (and so-called Dixieland) groups in New Orleans, but Tuba Skinny has brought an admirable commerciality-be-damned dedication to their art. They can still be heard on the streets of the French Quarter playing for tips, but they also perform at many of the city’s music clubs, and they’ve recorded numerous CDs and toured North America and Europe.

Okay, so New Orleans has plenty of unique culture. What does culture have to do with survival in the face of past and impending disasters? Plenty, it turns out.

Community Resilience, New Orleans Style

Political scientist Daniel Aldrich, who was living in New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina approached, later decided to conduct a sociological study centered on the question, “Why do some communities recover more quickly and successfully than others in the wake of disaster?” He reported his findings in a book, Building Resilience: Social Capital in Post-Disaster Recovery.

Aldrich’s research suggested that an important factor in determining how well communities recover from crisis is social capital (specifically, the balance of three different kinds of social capital; see my interview with Aldrich). Social capital is essentially the relationships that people in a community have with one another, manifested in trusting neighborly relations, local gatherings and celebrations, formal and informal community “institutions” (e.g., a convivial neighborhood cafe, a quirky local tradition, a long-standing religious community), and participation in civic life, etc.

New Orleans has a lot of social capital, including not only thriving community organizations but also identifiable local traditions in food, architecture, and music. People talk to one another on the street and ask about their families. Still, as Aldrich found, this fabric of social connections does vary from one neighborhood to the next.

After Katrina, Aldrich studied two neighborhoods, both with approximately equal per capita pre-Katrina incomes: the Lower Ninth Ward, and the largely Vietnamese Village de l’Este in the northeast corner of the city. The Ninth Ward was still devastated years after the disaster, whereas Village de l’Este was 90% repopulated within two years. The difference: While there was plenty of one-on-one social bonding in the Ninth Ward, the neighborhood had poor bridging with government at all levels. Social capital isn’t just about the richness of direct contact between people (though that’s vital), but also the functionality of connections between different ethnic and religious groups within the community, and between ordinary people and the holders of resources and decision-making power both within the community and in the larger society.

Tragically, social capital is undervalued in modern society: Globalization undermines it, and usually only deep cultural traditions and activist efforts can preserve it against the onslaught of atomizing trends. We stare at our screens rather than talking to our neighbors.

The New Orleans Chamber of Commerce lists 66 community and civic organizations currently active in the city—but this is a fraction of the institutions supporting social capital. There are countless informal clubs, interest groups, and associations, and the city is chock full of locally owned businesses, religious communities, gorgeous parks and museums, vibrant music venues and art galleries, and is home to several community-oriented local radio stations.

In short, New Orleans has tons of social capital. But sadly, its cultural richness and rootedness may not be enough to enable it to survive much longer.

The Last Second Line

I think a lot about the future of New Orleans, so naturally I watched Dr. Emily Shoerning’s recent climate video on the prospects for Louisiana in a 2°C world. Her forecast for the southern region of the state, based on the most recent county-by-county National Climate Assessment, is devastating. Later this century, New Orleans will be an island effectively cut off from the Mississippi River and hence its main source of fresh water. Even if people continue living in the parts of the city that are still above sea level and they manage to harvest and purify rainwater on a sufficient scale, the prospects for maintaining anything like current levels of population and economic activity are dim indeed.

A recent study published in Nature Sustainability concluded that New Orleans residents should plan now to move away from the city. For the hundreds of thousands who live in New Orleans, and the millions of others, like me, who love the Crescent City, this is an incredibly sad conclusion. And it’s a conclusion that many other cities rich in culture and history will face around the world as sea levels rise.

We’re all living in some version of New Orleans. Every place on Earth is now vulnerable, each community held together by ecosystems under attack and culture that’s unraveling.

Somehow, we must imagine ways to transplant the culture of New Orleans to other places. Musicians and listeners can adopt the city’s music anywhere, and chefs in Los Angeles and Peoria can learn to make decent beignets and red beans (many already do). But it would be even more important to identify one or two places where archives, people, and perhaps even some buildings could be rehomed. The American Resiliency climate video for Louisiana, linked above, suggests Lafayette or Baton Rouge as possible sites.

It’s been a life-changer to know New Orleans these last 35 years or so. I hope to keep going back as long as I can. I feel as privileged as the folks who knew Paris in the 1890s or Harlem in the 1920s must have felt. Those of us who’ve been to the Big Easy can make our own communities more resilient through what we’ve seen, heard, and tasted there.

Meanwhile, we’re all living in some version of New Orleans. Every place on Earth is now vulnerable, each community held together by ecosystems under attack and culture that’s unraveling. Still, if we face a century of crises, it’s good to have songs to sing, friends you can count on, and recipes that remind you of good times. Those are just some of the gifts of New Orleans.

Since President Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, his administration has waged war on nonprofits. Actions have included federal funding cuts to the tune of billions of dollars, targeting of specific organizations with investigations or indictments, and threats to tax-exempt status. While some efforts have been turned back by the courts, the administration has been unrelenting and, sadly, every American community will suffer as a result of this sustained attack.

Presidential announcements warn of “anti-American NGOs” and allege without any credible evidence that networks of nonprofits are acting as “domestic terrorist organizations.” Recently, the administration issued proposed regulations intended to impose sweeping new restrictions on nonprofits that receive federal funding—including that such organizations not advance diversity, equity, and inclusion or assist in voter registration.

The consequences of these attacks are dire. New data from a survey our organization conducted earlier this year show that nonprofits, which employ 1 in 10 Americans, are reeling. We see a dramatic increase in burnout among nonprofit leaders, whose stresses often include new worries about the safety of their staff and those they serve; financial distress as more organizations book deficits; increased difficulty raising funds from foundations (which are facing unprecedented demand as nonprofits look to replace lost government funding); and cutbacks to programs and staff in order to keep their doors open. On top of all this, demand for nonprofits’ services has increased as communities struggle amid higher inflation and cuts to federal programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Fully two-thirds of nonprofit leaders say they have concerns about their organizations’ financial sustainability. We’re seeing a growing number pause operations, scale back services, or close altogether. This is happening to organizations that provide vital services to people of every geography, party affiliation, and political ideology—services such as food, housing, and substance abuse prevention; assistance for survivors of sexual assault; teen violence prevention; and general community support.

The time is now to make your support known publicly by giving whatever you can to the nonprofits in your community that you care about.

This attack on the nonprofit sector is unprecedented. In his 1988 Republican National Convention speech accepting the nomination for president, George H.W. Bush famously talked about local nonprofits as “a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky.” In a similar vein, nonprofit leader and former Democratic cabinet official John Gardner once quipped, “If you can’t find a nonprofit institution that you can honestly disrespect, then something has gone wrong with our pluralism.”

This vision of organizations pursuing varied and diverse objectives has its roots in the origins of this country and in the First Amendment, and was famously observed by French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835 who remarked, with admiration, that Americans are “forever forming associations.” He saw these organizations as a ballast to a strong democracy—and a deterrent to despotism.

Whether they know it or not, every American’s life is touched for the better by nonprofits: through an after-school program, visits to a museum or a trail created by a local land conservation nonprofit, or help provided by frontline human services organizations like food pantries or domestic violence shelters. Nonprofits provide job training to veterans and other populations needing support. They do crucial research on diseases. They staff crisis hotlines, clean up parks and streets, and rush in to help after a natural disaster. “Nonprofits have been taken for granted in American society as institutions that will always be there to catch us when we fall,” notes Akilah Watkins of Independent Sector.

Most nonprofits are small and community based, and they are the infrastructure of American communities. They are, by law, nonpartisan; many are religiously affiliated. In practice, local nonprofits are one of the few places that volunteers and staff come together in pursuit of the common good without regard to political party or ideology.

This crisis is unlike anything either of us have seen in our 25-year careers working in philanthropy. Nonprofits experienced a similar increase in demand in 2020 during the pandemic, but, at that time, the federal government increased funding to nonprofits to help them navigate the crisis. This time, it is the government that has created the crisis, by cutting funds that have been duly congressionally allocated and by targeting organizations with which it disagrees.

The federal government has historically relied on nonprofits to deliver a range of essential services to people in communities across the country, regardless of their political affiliation. While the government has targeted specific nonprofits before—during the civil rights movement, for example—this administration is going after the entire sector as a whole.

It is this attack on nonprofits that is, in fact, anti-American.

Every American should be concerned about the health of the American nonprofit sector. The time is now to make your support known publicly by giving whatever you can to the nonprofits in your community that you care about—whether that’s money, time, or both.

As Diane Yentel of the National Council of Nonprofits says: “Nonprofits are the backbone of this country, providing critical support to improve communities and save lives. Defending and supporting them should not divide us along political lines—it should unite all Americans.”

Years before Republicans overturned Roe v. Wade, I sat in a hospital bed, preparing for my own abortion after a devastating pregnancy loss.

The grief was consuming. My husband and I were mourning the abrupt loss of a future we had longed for. At the time, I never considered myself to be fortunate. That feeling didn’t seep in until nearly eight years later—when Republicans began passing extreme abortion bans across the nation, unleashing widespread, preventable suffering upon millions of women.

In that hospital room, I was surrounded by compassionate doctors who offered me a choice between a surgical or medication abortion—the best forms of treatment available to prevent severe bleeding and infection. Yet now, those same methods of care are considered felonies across dozens of states, and are being actively targeted by Republicans. While I was welcomed into the wing of my local hospital for the procedure, women today are forced to travel hundreds of miles for care or told to wait in hospital parking lots until their lives are in jeopardy before they can legally be treated. While I took time to recover at home—both physically and emotionally—after leaving the hospital, women today are handcuffed, investigated, and even threatened with murder charges after suffering their own miscarriages.

Republicans have made it clear: They don’t care about the cruelty of their bans, the women’s lives that are being lost to them, or that the vast majority of Americans want abortion access to be legal and protected. Their extremist agenda has not only stripped women of their freedoms; it has caused widespread pain—including sharp spikes in life-threatening infections, infant and maternal deaths, and worse miscarriage outcomes than in states without abortion restrictions.

As attacks remain in full steam, abortion has already had an outsized influence on the 2026 midterms.

But the most horrifying part of all is that Republicans are not stopping here.

Emboldened by extremist MAGA allies, the US Supreme Court is currently considering whether to outlaw telehealth, mail, and pharmacy delivery for abortion medication, instead requiring patients to obtain it in person. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is conducting a sham Food and Drug Administration “review” of mifepristone—a safe, effective, and FDA-approved medication used in the majority of abortions in the US—in order to lay the groundwork for national restrictions. These attacks could result in the biggest rollback to abortion access since the Dobbs decision.

As the president of EMILYs List, I’ve seen firsthand that Republicans’ relentless pursuit of their anti-abortion agenda remains a motivator for voters nationwide. American women are fed up with their bodies, their health, and their lives being treated like political pawns—and until Republicans stop attacking our rights, the desire to protect abortion will continue driving voters to the polls.

That proved true in 2025, when Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger won historic governorships against anti-abortion Republicans who had clear intentions of enacting extreme restrictions in their home states. Abortion was also one of the most powerful drivers of Democratic wins downballot across Virginia, where every EMILYs List-endorsed woman running to flip a Republican-held seat did just that in November, protecting our majority in the House of Delegates and protecting Virginians from a surefire ban.

As attacks remain in full steam, abortion has already had an outsized influence on the 2026 midterms. Over the last two months, I’ve met with voters on the ground across the nation, including in key US House flip districts, where Denise Powell (Neb.-02), Lindsay James (Iowa-02), and Marni Von Wilpert (Calif.-48) battled out competitive primary victories solidified by their staunch pro-choice bonafides. We’re seeing this at the state level too, like in Pennsylvania, where Brittany Bloam (Pa.-HD45) cruised to a primary win over Pat Catena, a Democrat who unsuccessfully tried rebranding as pro-choice, despite a record proving the exact opposite.

Voters trust women like these to fight for abortion access in their communities because they have never wavered in their support of women’s right to choose, and they have the track record to prove it. These women are our strongest pathway to taking back power in Congress and pumping the breaks on Republicans’ unhinged agenda.

Four years without Roe, it’s clearer than ever: As long as Republicans are in power, none of our rights are safe. They are decided election by election, one seat in Congress at a time. And this November, they depend wholly on firing anti-abortion Republicans, and electing Democratic pro-choice women to lead the fight to take back our freedoms.

Juneteenth celebrations in my town were lit. There were so many events I had a difficult time choosing which ones to attend. As a grandmother, I ended up at the event on the grounds of the Historic Harriet Barber house (circa 1875) in Hopkins, South Carolina, where my daughter and her 3-year-old son were drumming. The celebration was filled with spirited performances, great food, and camaraderie. Historical reflections centered on the origins of Juneteenth, commemorating June 19, 1865, when African-descended people who were enslaved in Texas finally learned of their freedom—more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation had officially declared them free. Many gave shout-outs to African American ancestors for all of their visions, sacrifices, and accomplishments. It was a joyful space.

While we are still in the Juneteenth celebratory spirit, we should not sleep, lest it will be another two-and-a-half years when we wake up and realize that our freedom has been lost through a series of recent institutional white supremacist political maneuvers such as: weakening voting rights; attacks on Black political districts, and bans on African American studies.

In his classic 1933 book, The Mis-Education of the Negro, Dr. Carter G. Woodson, father of Black History Month, warned Black people not to believe the lies taught in school that are full of distortions, intentional inaccuracies, and omissions. He also warned that one of the most effective tools of institutional white supremacy is to recruit Black voices to legitimize and advance ideas that work against Black liberation. Nearly 100 years later, we are still facing the revision and erasure of Black history.

For example, PragerU—a conservative website that promotes conservative viewpoints via digital media—has produced a series of edu-tainment videos full of revisionist historical distortions and half-truths.

Juneteenth reminds us that freedom is not simply a legal status. Freedom requires historical memory, vigilance, and the courage to question what we are told.

One video, "The Inconvenient Truth About Juneteenth," is narrated by a young Black man, Xaviaer. In the 56 second TikTok-style video, the narrator presents himself as an “influencer” and is casually walking down the street, iced coffee in hand, as he opines that Black folks are mentally enslaved for believing the conventional story about Juneteenth.

Immediately, evoking the name of Rosa Parks, Xaviaer signifies that Rosa should have made the viewers sit in the front of the bus and take a history class. The cleverness of the misinformation, though, is apparent when he says that Democrats kept Black people enslaved two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. This slight of hand fails to clarify that the ideologies of the Republican and Democratic parties switched around 1870. Before that time, Republicans controlled the government and used its power to protect Black people who were formerly enslaved and guarantee their civil rights during Reconstruction. Most Democrats, particularly in the South, opposed many of these efforts. However, as the nation shifted its attention toward economic growth and industrial expansion, support for Reconstruction began to wane. Many Northern Republicans became less willing to invest political capital in protecting Black rights in the South.

By the mid-to-late 1870s, the Republican Party had largely retreated from its commitment to reconstructing Southern society and safeguarding the rights of African Americans. Following the Compromise of 1877 and the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, White Democrats regained political control across much of the region and systematically dismantled many of the gains Black people had achieved during Reconstruction. Over the following decades, political allegiances gradually shifted, and by the mid-20th century, many African Americans increasingly aligned with the Democratic Party, particularly as it became more supportive of civil rights initiatives.

Xaviaer concludes "The Inconvenient Truth about Juneteenth" by admonishing Black people for referring to Juneteenth as a Black Independence Day. He argues that the political left has repackaged the holiday through what he characterizes as a segregationist lens. He adds a mocking remark, suggesting that if viewers truly believe Juneteenth is a separate Black Independence Day, he does not want to see them "twerking on a boat" on the Fourth of July—not resisting the urge to slide in a stereotype.

The comment is intended to be humorous, but it serves a deeper purpose. By ridiculing those who celebrate Juneteenth, the video dismisses the historical reality that many enslaved African-descended people were excluded from the freedoms celebrated on July 4, 1776. Rather than engaging this historical contradiction, the video substitutes mockery for analysis and caricature for historical understanding.

From a critical perspective, Black people should not be getting history lessons from social media influencers, political propagandists, or organizations masquerading as educational institutions. History is too important.

Fortunately, other scholars have challenged the distortions and omissions that permeate traditional historical narratives. While Dr. Carter G. Woodson's The Mis-Education of the Negro remains one of the most important warnings about the dangers of accepting history uncritically, James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, exposed how textbooks sanitize and distort the past. Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States intentionally centers the experiences of people who were oppressed, marginalized, and excluded from dominant historical accounts.

Misinformation is not merely about getting facts wrong. It is about shaping how people understand themselves, their communities, and their possibilities. Dr. Carter G. Woodson once reflected that it took him 20 years after earning his doctorate from Harvard University to recover from what he described as his intellectual conditioning. James Baldwin similarly observed that it took years to free himself from the myths and falsehoods he had been taught about race, history, and human worth.

The stakes are especially high when misleading narratives are packaged in entertaining videos designed to reach young people. And by the way, Dr. Carter G. Woodson, father of Black History Month, cautioned that one of the most effective tools of institutional white supremacy is to recruit Black voices to legitimize and advance ideas that work against Black liberation.

Juneteenth reminds us that freedom is not simply a legal status. Freedom requires historical memory, vigilance, and the courage to question what we are told and the understanding of the need to seek truth from credible sources.

It’s still hard to swallow, almost 24-hours after one of the most intense, indeed stressful election days in Colombia that I’ve witnessed, albeit from here in New York.

Colombian right-wing candidate Abelardo de la Espriella does appear to have clinched a very narrow victory in Sunday's presidential election, at least according to the initial ballot count that still needed to be officially verified as of this writing.

De la Espriella had 49.66% of the vote while his rival, Senator Ivan Cepeda, trailed by roughly 250,000 votes at 48.70%, according to the national registrar's tally of just under 100% of ballots in the runoff election.

In trying to make personal sense of the closest presidential elections in recent Colombian history, I can’t help but think that the final results are a reflection of how Colombia has failed to acknowledge its stained history of state-sponsored, politically motivated violence, even ten years after a fragile peace accord was signed that put an end to one aspect of the decades-long conflict.

What we must not take away from this electoral outcome is that de la Espriella is an “outsider” who, by challenging the political status quo in Colombia, will bring something new in his approach to governing the country.

This latest election represents a national rejection—albeit by a very narrow margin—of the policies of “total peace” of the current administration of President Gustavo Petro. The results are an affirmation of and an open call for “total war,” reminiscent of some of the darkest days of the widespread regional violence that occurred throughout the country at the turn of the century and the early stages of this century.

A portion of the Colombian electorate—almost half—continues to view the country’s troubles through a fractured lens of national security, of unrepentant militarism, and of the firm belief in the need to apply the heavy hand of the state to confront criminality. These Colombians have essentially vetoed their collective memory of generational violence, of a civil war whose origins have always been traced back precisely to the lack of a state presence where it is most needed—in a sustainable public health system; in accessible housing and education; in the opportunities that come with equitable distribution of land, the protection of human rights, and universal support for robust democratic participation across the citizenry, regardless of race, class, or political affiliation.

Instead, they’ve voted for a person openly committed to gutting 40% of the already weakened state in all these sectors. De la Espriella has blamed Petro, the former M-19 guerilla leader and outgoing president, for the country's current economic and security troubles. The growth of these armed groups throughout the country in recent years are attributed to Petro’s attempt to negotiate directly an end to the violence during his time in office. Rarely are the policies of Petro’s predecessor, Ivan Duque, mentioned in this context, despite his deliberate efforts to jettison just about every aspect of the 2016 peace accords between FARC and the Colombian government, leading in many ways to the expansion of these groups.

And now, the president-elect has vowed to end all talks with the armed criminal organizations, while boosting the oil and gas sector, lowering taxes for the middle and upper classes, and building massive prisons to detain indefinitely all the criminals they can find in the process, a la strongman Nayib Bukele of El Salvador. He pledges to fortify the military and manage the state security forces with an iron fist, something that will be made much easier by a blank-check insurance policy granted to him by the Trump-Rubio-Hegseth Western Hemisphere doctrine of domination and control.

The opposing candidate of the left-of-center coalition known as Pacto Historico, Senator Ivan Cepeda, 63, had pledged to continue many of the policies of President Petro, the country's first leftist president. Those policies included state pension payments for the poor, union-backed labor reforms, a moratorium on new oil projects, and continued peace talks with armed groups to try to put an end of the ongoing violence. Some analysts think Cepeda should have distanced himself a bit more from Petro on the campaign trail, given how the media openly embraced the Kryptonite narrative that Petro represents for the left in Colombia. Instead, Cepeda, himself the victim of state-sponsored violence, stuck to a set of arguments tied to building peace through social justice, human rights, and most importantly, not returning to the past.

Despite the youthful energy and visible enthusiasm of the very diverse range of supporters who came out for Cepeda’s candidacy, it was not enough to put a pause on the establishment’s profound, almost religious hatred of left-wing leaders with social movement connections, who are almost instantaneously written off as puppets of guerrilla terror, branded threats to the Colombian homeland. In many ways, it’s much like the simplistic MAGA refrain for attacking their opponents as un-American or enemies of the people, except in the Colombian context, it is a recipe for extreme violence, death sentences for many of those on the receiving end.

Over 12 million Colombians did not vote for this reactionary, ahistorical vision for the country. More than 12 million voters placed their bets on a future of peace and dignity for all Colombians.

What we must not take away from this electoral outcome is that de la Espriella is an “outsider” who, by challenging the political status quo in Colombia, will bring something new in his approach to governing the country, a tantalizing myth that somehow caught traction during the campaign in the Colombian corporate press and their counterparts in the US media. De la Espriella may not have the privileged political pedigree of the openly nepotistic tradition that has characterized over a century of Colombian political history, but to call him an outsider in 2026 is to ignore the foundation of his success as a defense attorney, a businessman, and of the fortune that allowed him to fund his campaign independent of the “mainstream” power bosses of the Colombian political elite.

He is an entrenched insider within the right-wing, para-state apparatus that had metastasized like a slow-moving blood cancer into every part of the governing class in Colombia since the early 2000s. This para-state infrastructure was built on the backs of the millions of internally displaced Black, Indigenous, and peasant communities; tens of thousands of forcibly disappeared; and the many innocent civilians murdered in countless massacres that brought fear to the countryside for decades.

While FARC rebels were guilty of much of the violence in Colombia since the mid-1990s, it was the brutal reaction to FARC criminality carried out by the unholy alliance between large landowners, narco-traffickers, and the military that blew the lid open for the widespread terror we saw from 2000 to 2010.

Behind this was a public discourse framed by the term “democratic security,” coined by former two-term President Alvaro Uribe Vélez, and backed wholeheartedly by the US under its Plan Colombia project. It was followed by eventual “negotiations” between the paramilitaries and the Uribe government, as well as a major scandal where it was exposed that almost half of the elected members of Colombia’s Congress had direct ties with the paramilitary organizations that were responsible for the above-mentioned crimes. De la Espriella understood this when he defended many of the paramilitary leaders and narco-traffickers implicated in these crimes. This is an insider who made his mark in this process. There’s no denying this.

The tough-guy approach to national politics that the “Tiger” so openly declared on the campaign trail is the continuation of a long process of authoritarian, right-wing extremism that emerged in the early 1990s, one that sees any opposition to their political, economic, or territorial control of the country as the equivalent of terrorism that must be liquidated militarily. This is the profound danger I see right now in the days, months, and years ahead for Colombia.

Nevertheless, with all these dark clouds on the horizon, for the millions of people who supported Ivan Cepeda in these elections, there is room for some optimism, albeit with considerable caution.

That is the fact that over 12 million Colombians did not vote for this reactionary, ahistorical vision for the country. More than 12 million voters placed their bets on a future of peace and dignity for all Colombians. They hit the streets and attended rallies and posted online videos recalling the darkest days of the war, shouting the names of the victims of this violence, saluting the brave mothers who still demand justice for their sons killed by state security forces.

They did not vote against their collective memory.

They are a very powerful force today, and for the future of Colombia.

They will not be backing down any time soon.

For they’ve faced the barrel of many guns in the past, and they’re still here.

“The pump don’t work ‘Cause the vandals took the handles.”—Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues

Sometimes President Donald Trump’s diatribes reveal his own guilty behavior. Take his disastrous promotion of the makeover of the Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC. Not only did he hire an incompetent contractor whose prior work for Trump at Mar-a-Lago gave him the shady inside track, but also Trump’s insistence on an environmentally disastrous “royal blue” caused an increase in the amount of algae now polluting the pool. Perhaps it might be time to break out a new MAGA hat, all in green, with the words, “Make Algae Grow Again.”

Of course, neither Trump nor his buddy contractor would admit their malfeasance and responsibility for what has happened. Given Trump’s other corrupt vandalism of national sites in DC, why should we fleeced taxpayers and residents of the city expect accountability from such grifters? Instead, the predictable accusation by the Orange Menace is that vandals were the cause of the algae bloom. The real vandals, Trump and his enablers, were operating in plain sight and with presidential impunity.

Indeed, Trump’s vandalism has engulfed the White House and environs. From the destruction of the “Rose Garden” (heaven forbid that he would want to wake up and smell the roses) to leveling the East Wing for his ballroom and bunker (again, at the taxpayers’ expense), the wrecking of the grounds continues unabated. Added to this devastation was the garish Claw, erected for the UFC blood sport on the White House lawn. Oh, yeah, the lawn is gone. Perhaps to be replaced by what—a Circus Maximus!

As the decrepit old man occupying the White House tries to surround himself with imperial glitter and glory, his power is actually diminishing even as the damage, unfortunately, expands.

And speaking of Rome, the actual sacking of the city by the Vandals in 455 only lasted some two weeks. Trump’s pillaging of the federal government has lasted more than a year. While the most obvious physical vandalizing is very evident, buried in much of the legislation and executive orders is a massive amount of damage to people’s lives and the future of the country and the world.

Only now are we reckoning with the harm caused by Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”

Hundreds of thousands thrown off Medicaid, children and families denied basic foodstuffs. Trump and his Republican allies apparently aren’t even interested in offering “bread” along with the circuses that Trump revels in.

Meanwhile, Trump’s insane pal at Health and Human Services, brain-worm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is sacking those doctors who believe in science in order to hire charlatans whose medicinal palliatives are hardly better than reading entrails. Eliminating tried and true medical practices, such as vaccines, has led to outbreaks of measles and will, undoubtedly, cause additional health problems.

And it should not be surprising that his toxic masculinist buddy, Pete Hegseth, the white Christian nationalist who occupies the office of the “Secretary of War,” now is overseeing a flu outbreak among the troops in the aftermath of making a vaccine “voluntary.” On the other hand, the 200-plus boaters murdered by Hegseth’s Pentagon pals in Latin America did not have the “luxury” of a choice about their well-being!

And speaking of well-being, the predictable worldwide deaths of people who relied on medical assistance from the United States was caused by DOGE’s slashing of international aide. Trump’s fellow vandal, the neo-Nazi Elon Musk, haughtily embraced such pillaging, seeing it as a way to extirpate empathy from any and all governmental policies.

Another fellow vandal on the world stage is Bibi Netanyahu. With the assistance of the US, Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. (As the historian Tacitus reflected on the depredations of the Roman military campaigns: “They made a desert and called it peace.”) The devastation wrought by these two bullies has spread to Lebanon and Iran. However, these vandals may have overplayed their hand in Iran.

Finally, one of the most egregious examples of Trump’s vandalism is sending out legions of armed thugs to cause murder and mayhem on the streets of major cities around the country. From Los Angeles to Minneapolis, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents harass, intimidate, and kidnap thousands of innocent people, sending many to prison hellholes built by the private corporate buddies of Trump.

As the decrepit old man occupying the White House tries to surround himself with imperial glitter and glory, his power is actually diminishing even as the damage, unfortunately, expands. Trump’s vandalism, and that of his enablers, will only be terminated when they are unceremoniously expelled to those islands of incarceration where others now languish.

In December 2025, I volunteered on an educational mission with the Johns Hopkins Program for International Education in Gynecology and Obstetrics, or JHPIEGO, teaching neonatal ICU nurses in East Jerusalem about modern care of premature infants. As a neonatal and pediatric critical care nurse, this training meant a great deal to me. I knew it would help these nurses save the most fragile newborns. When I was offered the opportunity to return a few months later for additional educational work, I immediately took it.

I knew about the arbitrary and unpredictable barriers Israel erects in front of anyone trying to help Palestinians. Still, I thought that with my Jewish heritage and American citizenship, I would be the last person blocked from Israel-Palestine. I unfortunately learned that being of Jewish descent, an American, and a nurse affords no protection in the eyes of the Israeli or American governments. I was there to help Palestinian babies, so I was a threat.

My grandmother, Sylvia, was a genuinely beautiful soul. She was born in 1928 to an Ashkenazi Jewish family in London. I was born on her birthday, and we lived two houses down the street from each other, so naturally she and I became best friends. As a child I had tea with her almost every day after school. She loved to be silly and to laugh, but she also shared the pain of her childhood. She once told me about British Nazi sympathizers throwing rocks at her grandfather on his way to synagogue. Imagining her as a little girl, seeing her grandfather violently dehumanized like that, I wondered how anyone could be so cruel to another human being.

Because of my grandmother’s stories, visiting the DC Holocaust Memorial Museum as a child was deeply personal. What I experienced going through the museum shocked me, and I was left wondering what my grandmother couldn’t bring herself to tell me about that time in her life.

I felt a deep sense of responsibility to show the Palestinians that there is someone who does not look like them or speak their language, but sees them as human beings who are worthy of being supported and cared for.

What did it feel like to be dehumanized like that? To know that powerful “others” regard you as disposable? Grandma was the most childishly playful person I’ve ever known. Still, when I heard her talk about her own childhood, and what it was like to live in Jim Crow America, it was impossible to miss the pain of her own childhood.

Grandma knew nothing about the United States when she arrived here, and she quickly learned that her new country was far from the bastion of freedom she was expecting. Discrimination against African Americans in particular shocked her. Having been on the receiving end of European antisemitic racism, she simply couldn’t understand why people would hate others in this way. She would often remind me, “We all bleed the same color.” Despite—maybe because of—her having little formal education, Grandma could see toxic ideas for what they were.

Jennifer Arriaga's grandmother is shown as a young woman in London.

Since childhood I’ve cared deeply about the fight for human rights in my own country and the state of Texas. But before October 7, 2023, I paid no attention to Israel or the Palestinians. As much as I loved my grandmother, neither Judaism nor Israel were important in my upbringing or my adult life. But as I watched the assault on Gaza through my phone, I became disgusted by political leaders and those around me who blindly “stood with Israel.” In 2024 a neonatologist I worked with, Dr. Yassar Arain, volunteered in Gaza. When he returned we spoke about his time there, and about the complicity of the United States in the genocide.

Yassar’s descriptions of the conditions in Gaza were beyond anything I’d ever imagined. In my mind the kind of vicious dehumanization that allowed people to kill babies had been left in my grandmother’s past. Today we have the Geneva Conventions and iPhones. But as the assault on Gaza seemed to reach ever higher levels of depravity, I couldn’t take it any longer. By December 2024, I answered a call to volunteer for a medical mission to Gaza.

Gaza was my first time volunteering internationally. My family, friends, and co-workers were worried, but once I saw the call for volunteers I couldn’t ignore it. I didn’t really consider my distant Jewish heritage, but more so what Grandma would say about what I was doing. I guessed it would be something like: “The world has forsaken these children, just like it did my family. Go help them.”

As a nurse and a human being, it is ingrained in me that all people have a right to live. Seeing the attacks on innocents, even within the walls of hospitals, I felt a deep sense of responsibility to show the Palestinians that there is someone who does not look like them or speak their language, but sees them as human beings who are worthy of being supported and cared for rather than as “an infrastructure to be destroyed.”

Blocked

Israel controls all access in and out of Gaza. With the Rafah Crossing closed, entry for all humanitarian workers starts in Jordan. On January 22, 2025, I landed in Amman and met the team for the first time.

“We’ll get the final list late tonight,” our mission coordinator told us. “Someone always gets denied, so just be prepared for that.”

“Sorry,” I cut in. “Denied?”

“COGAT” she explained, referring to the Israeli military office, “will send a list of who was approved. Everyone else is denied.”

To tell a doctor or nurse that they cannot help someone punctures both their sense of self and their faith in humankind in ways that are difficult to explain or anticipate.

I didn’t know how to respond. Israel tells doctors and nurses where they can and can’t go? Who they can and can’t help? That night we learned three physicians and one nurse from our team would be blocked from entering Gaza. I was allowed in.

The effect on my colleagues was devastating. One might think it would be a relief to be blocked from entering one of the most violent places on Earth. But the moment one learns that their name is not on “the list,” issued by an unaccountable and faceless entity, is the moment a healthcare worker realizes something about themselves. Healthcare workers help people. We devote not only our careers but our whole selves to this pursuit. To tell a doctor or nurse that they cannot help someone punctures both their sense of self and their faith in humankind in ways that are difficult to explain or anticipate.

One of those blocked was Sandra (name changed). Sandra is a pediatrician, a Canadian citizen of Indian origin. She was enthusiastic and kind. Her smile was incredibly warm, and I could picture children responding to it and feeling safe with her. She and I were sitting next to each other at dinner when we were told she had been blocked.

I’ll never forget the shock and devastation on Sandra’s face. She tried to stay calm but burst into tears, trying to speak through them to say she was glad at least I would be able to go. More than a year later she still does not understand: “Why was I blocked from entering? What did I do?” She doesn’t understand that the simple fact is there’s only one reason to stop a pediatrician from doing their work: to enhance the suffering of children. In Gaza, my bunkmate was also a pediatrician. I remember her coming to our room at the end of every day, exhausted, and telling me how badly pediatricians were needed. After all, half of Gaza’s population is children, and by many measures they are the sickest and most traumatized kids on the planet.

John (name changed), a family doctor and wound-care specialist, had been to Gaza twice before. He left his wife and two toddlers to volunteer a third time. His first two trips showed him just how much damage Israel’s US-backed assault on Gaza’s healthcare system had done. Hoping to bring back useful solutions, he spent the eight months between his last trip and this one investigating wound-care techniques in resource-limited settings, knowledge he was eager to spread to his Palestinian colleagues.

John was so devastated by the news that he was being blocked from Gaza that, while everyone was focused on Sandra, he silently got up from the table and left to see his family in Amman. We did not see him again until we ran into him at the Jordanian border the next day. Instead of going with us to Gaza, he was going to attempt to visit Jerusalem.

This state of affairs seemed so outrageous that I couldn’t sleep that night. Sandra, John, and the others were not allowed to… heal people? Lying in bed I tried to convince myself: It can’t be just because we were going to heal Palestinians specifically. Right? There must have been some kind of security concern! But as I dragged my bags across Kerem Shalom, I had to face reality: That morning, both Sandra and John visited Jerusalem as tourists. How could they be security concerns in Gaza but not in Jerusalem?

Months later, John still refused to believe that anyone would deliberately stop a doctor from providing care. “Clearly I’m not a threat,” he told me, just before trying to return to Gaza again. “I was approved to enter Israel! It was just a mistake.” He signed up for another mission. On August 18, 2025, Israel blocked him from Gaza again.

I wonder if whatever Israeli bureaucrat at the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs came up with this particular assault on human dignity is proud of themselves.

“You Can Sleep Here or in Jail”

When I left Gaza, I promised my Palestinian colleagues I wouldn’t forget them and would bring their stories to my family, friends, and community in Texas. I organized speaking events at local churches to reach people who, like me, knew nothing about what Israel is doing to the Palestinians with our tax dollars and weapons. I signed an open letter to President Donald Trump, along with 151 other American healthcare workers who had volunteered in Gaza, telling him what we had seen with our own eyes.

Then, in August of 2025 I connected with a nurse practitioner who was looking for a neonatal ICU nurse to go to East Jerusalem for the JHPIEGO educational mission. I quickly signed up. As the trip drew closer, the possibility of being blocked started to worry me. I had come to know dozens of other healthcare workers who had been denied entry into Gaza, and Israel had started blocking healthcare workers from volunteering in the West Bank as well.

I entered Israel through Ben Gurion Airport with little difficulty. Meanwhile my co-volunteer Heather (name changed), a British physiotherapist who had never been to Israel or Palestine, was blocked from entering. At the end of that trip, JHPIEGO asked me to come back and teach again in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, just one month later. I happily agreed, especially since it seemed that I was one of the few people who could enter consistently.

How would my grandmother understand all of this? What would she think about her suffering being weaponized against her granddaughter and other healthcare workers because we internalized her love of humanity and refused to accept the dehumanization of others?

Five weeks after this educational mission ended, I landed at Ben Gurion Airport again, on January 28. I presented the visa I had been given in December. The agent asked me a series of questions and then told me her supervisor would like to speak with me. After two hours, I was called into a small office with one unidentified man, asking questions and writing my answers down on a scratch piece of paper. I was asked exactly the same questions as before and gave exactly the same answers.

Then I was taken to another holding area and told to wait. After about one hour the same man came over and handed me a piece of paper telling me I was being denied entry to Israel. The organization I was volunteering with, he said, was “blacklisted.” I explained that it was not blacklisted; they had an established office in Jerusalem. He insisted they were indeed blacklisted and told me to proceed with him to a detention area.

I called my team’s handler in the United States. “They’re saying JHPIEGO is blacklisted,” I told him. No, he explained, it most certainly is not. Another physician had entered with JHPIEGO one week prior and had been told the same thing. At that time JHPIEGO contacted Israeli border control, cleared up the misunderstanding, and she was allowed entry. I explained this to the nameless Israeli agent, who said it didn’t interest him. I contacted an Israeli lawyer who has helped international volunteers enter Gaza, but before I could explain the situation a new nameless Israeli agent showed up and demanded that I follow him to security for inspection.

It was now late at night, and the airport was mostly empty. The nameless agent took me, along with two elderly people who were also being deported, to an empty gate and told us to stay there until the morning. I managed a laugh and asked, “We’re sleeping in the airport?”

“You can sleep here or in jail.”

“Okay,” I said, taken aback. I would be fine, but it seemed like cruelty for its own sake to require an elderly couple to sleep on an airport floor. “Do you know how we can get our luggage?”

“Your luggage isn’t my problem.”

At that moment, my team called and said they had called the American embassy and asked them to explain to the Israeli government that JHPIEGO is not a blacklisted organization. “But”—my hopes were raised, only to be dashed—“the embassy wants nothing to do with this.”

After exhausting every avenue, reality started to set in. My Jewish heritage and my American citizenship wouldn’t help me help people, because I was there to help the wrong people. Suddenly I was overwhelmed, the same way Sandra and John had been when they were blocked from Gaza. Oscillating between anger and sadness, I broke down crying.

On May 18, a colleague of mine texted me, “I joined the club for people not allowed into Israel.” A blonde, blue-eyed, American-born nurse practitioner in her late 60, she has been working with the Palestinians since the 1990s. She has flown through Ben Gurion Airport more than a dozen times. This time, at the request of JHPIEGO’s East Jerusalem office, she was on a team of six healthcare providers traveling to the West Bank to teach the pediatric Fundamental Critical Care Support course offered from the Society of Critical Care Medicine. She would have taught Palestinians how to save the sickest children’s lives. Israel blocked 5 out of their 6 teachers. “No real explanation—except our visa was not the right one for a volunteer mission. Totally false.”

How would my grandmother understand all of this? What would she think about her suffering being weaponized against her granddaughter and other healthcare workers because we internalized her love of humanity and refused to accept the dehumanization of others? Would she even believe someone who told her that a self-declared Jewish state denies sick infants access to volunteer nurses and doctors?

Ali

In January 2025 I worked with a nurse named Ali Al-Najar in the pediatric ICU (PICU) at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, a city in the middle of the Gaza Strip. We were caring for a 3-year-old boy, Ibrahim (name changed), who had been shot. The physicians decided Ibrahim needed a CT scan, requiring us to transport this incredibly sick child to another building and back.

This is risky work under controlled circumstances. But in Gaza, where the elevator and electricity frequently fail and human resources are stretched thin, it seemed to me like an impossible task. But Ali reassured me: We can do it together. So, we made a plan: He would guide us down the stairs and through the hallways, while I would monitor Ibrahim. I would care for Ibrahim; Ali would care for me.

Ali picked Ibrahim up and placed him on a transport stretcher. I held onto the breathing tube in his throat, pushed oxygen into his lungs with an Ambu bag, and slung the intravenous drips of medications keeping Ibrahim alive and asleep over Ali’s shoulders. We carried Ibrahim down the stairs of the pediatric building, outside into the utter chaos of the strip, into the main hospital building, and over to radiology.

In Gaza, every step was fraught with uncertainty. But Ali, like everyone I met there, just kept moving forward.

While carefully walking down the many staircases, over the broken and uneven pavement, and trying to balance the stretcher with one hand and push air into Ibrahim’s lungs with the other, all the while blindly trusting Ali, my mind flashed back to when I saw Ibrahim rushed into the ED. I had watched him go through surgery for his gunshot wound and performed chest compressions on him when his heart stopped after surgery. He had been through so much in his short three years of life. “He survived all of that,” I told myself. “We will get him to radiology.”

When Ali placed Ibrahim into the scanner, the tech reminded him to avoid the bullet fragments lodged in the machine’s bed. Ibrahim was sedated and certainly wouldn’t comprehend English, but I talked him through what was happening anyway while continuing to push air into his lungs. Anywhere else in the world a lead apron would have been available to shield me from the scan’s radiation. When the scan was finished, we did the whole exercise in reverse, bringing Ibrahim back to the PICU. The excursion took well over 90 minutes, an eternity of risk for this fragile, grievously injured toddler.

My mission in Gaza ended before Ibrahim awoke, but on my way out of Gaza, as I was processing all the emotions from the trip—an impossible task, as one cannot exit Gaza without driving through the largest fields of rubble on Earth—I received a text from another nurse. It was Ibrahim, awake and smiling, drinking juice.

Transporting Ibrahim was one of the most stressful things I’ve ever done. In the United States we would have had a mobile ventilator, a respiratory therapist, and both myself and a nurse assistant. We would have had a working elevator, dependable electricity, a clear hallway, protection from radiation, and a CT scanner that worked reliably and hadn’t been shot. In Gaza, every step was fraught with uncertainty. But Ali, like everyone I met there, just kept moving forward. His family was displaced and homeless. He couldn’t assume he or any of his loved ones would be fed or alive when he returned “home” to his tent. But despite all of that, he dedicated himself not only to Ibrahim but even to me, making sure that I felt I could provide the best care possible in this healthcare nightmare.

A few months later, in Fort Worth, I took another patient to the CT scanner. As we raced through the halls of the hospital I couldn’t help but think of my time in Gaza with Ibrahim and Ali. I told my astonished co-workers what it was like to do this in Gaza, fondly recalling Ali’s guidance and care.

After my shift I couldn’t stop thinking about Ali. I texted him but got no response. I figured he was busy. But a few days later I saw a post about him on Instagram. On May 2, 2025, Israel murdered Ali and his brother, blowing them up with a drone.

Sylvia and Ali

Working with the Palestinians taught me more about the world than I expected. My grandmother was everything I knew about Judaism as a religion and Jews as a people. I simply cannot recognize her in the unnamed and casually cruel men at Ben Gurion Airport. I don’t see her in either the drone operator who pushed the button that ripped my friend Ali to shreds or in the state organizing and carrying out the genocide in which he was killed.

I see my sweet grandmother’s face in my memories of Ali. I see her in the nurses and doctors I met in Palestine, and in the mothers of Gaza who deprive themselves of everything to keep their children alive for just one more day. The beauty, resilience, and dignity that my grandmother carried in her heart and soul is found today in Gaza and throughout Palestine. And the ugliness of the neo-Nazis who threw stones at my great-great grandfather for being Jewish is manifest nowhere more than in the ultra-racist arrogance of Danny Danon, Bezalel Smotrich, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Daniella Weiss in Israel, and Ted Cruz and Randy Fine here at home.

A fanatically Jewish supremacist, “super-Sparta” state of Israel, serving as American gendarme over the people of the Middle East forever, is no solution to the problem of Jewish safety. Neither the United States nor this distorted and perverse conception of an exclusively Jewish state act to keep Jews safe.

We, and plenty of others, are not safe precisely because the United States and Israel insist on committing monumental crimes in our name.

I’m hardly the first person to say so. Jewish thinkers from Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt to Benjamin Balthaser, and Palestinian intellectuals from Walid Khalidi to Edward Said, have all argued as much far more convincingly than I can. Josh Nathan-Kazis recently noted that “Jewish establishment groups rushed to yoke themselves” to the illegal US-Israeli assault on Iran despite the obvious fact that “they are setting up American Jews to take the blame if the war goes badly, as it appears destined to do.”

I hope my experience can help others, especially those who can’t work directly with Palestinians, to see these simple truths. I’ve seen what occupation and genocide are, up close, if only for a few weeks. They are systems that prioritize state power and control over the welfare of children and the lives of healthcare workers. Israel’s own behavior convinced me that even the most cynical argument for why all of this is necessary—without it, the Jews will never be safe!—is absurd. We, and plenty of others, are not safe precisely because the United States and Israel insist on committing monumental crimes in our name.

Our real allies are the people who want what everyone wants: to live their lives in peace, to watch their children grow and thrive. Our real allies are the nurses at Nasser Medical Complex, not the thugs in Tel Aviv’s airport.

The 60-day extension of the ceasefire between the United States and Iran may lead to lasting peace or it may be over within a week, doomed by the dysfunctional alliance between the US and Israel. If it holds, it could mark the beginning of a transition away from the doctrine of “low-intensity conflict” that has shaped US foreign policy for decades.

Talks between the US, Iran, Pakistan, and Qatar began in Switzerland on June 21. But Iran was firm that it holds the United States responsible for Israel’s violations of the US-Iran memorandum and cannot move forward with other parts of the agreement until the US fulfills its part in Article 1, which requires an actual Israeli ceasefire and withdrawal from Lebanon.

If the memorandum agreed between Iran and the United States fails, the world will be left with vastly reduced oil and gas supplies and a regional war between Iran, Israel, and the United States from Lebanon to the Persian Gulf.

This entire crisis is one more devastating result of the world community’s failure to tame Israel’s war crimes and genocide or end its illegal occupation of Palestine and attacks and invasions in neighboring countries—all of which the United States continues to enable and support through its military and diplomatic alliance and arming of the Israeli military.

This moment could become a critical turning point in reining in US aggression and Israeli regional expansion.

President Donald Trump seems to understand the rapidly deteriorating position of the US and Israel, and to recognize that his own political future now depends on extricating the US from the war on Iran that he and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cooked up. Voices of peace from around the world support the tentative ceasefire extension and oppose efforts to sabotage it by politicians in Washington and Tel Aviv.

But to understand the roots of this crisis in US foreign policy, we have to look back. Since the 1980s, aggressive US foreign policy has dragged the Middle East and much of the world into a state that US military planners call “low-intensity conflict” or “LIC.”

Under this doctrine, the United States, and now its protégé Israel, claim the freedom of action to use military force in flagrant and widespread violation of international law, while deterring the rest of the world from mustering the political will to enforce the law or hold them accountable.

The US doctrine of low-intensity conflict was a deliberate policy choice by the Reagan administration in the 1980s, after the US defeat in Vietnam. After President George Bush II and Vice President Dick Cheney’s catastrophic full-scale US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Presidents Barack Obama, Trump, and Joe Biden reverted to low-intensity warfare, but globally expanded its scope.

This US choice to expand low-intensity warfare followed the example and the techniques of the British Empire in its final phase in the 1950s. From the Suez crisis to guerrilla war against communist revolutionaries in Malaya and Mau Mau torture camps in Kenya, the deliberate and deadly violence of Britain’s imperial policies was hidden from its own people and the world behind a tapestry of lies.

In 1989, Michael Klare and Peter Kornbluh edited a book titled Low-Intensity Warfare: How the USA Fights Wars Without Declaring Them.

They wrote that the official description of low-intensity warfare was deliberately broad and ambiguous, embracing drug interdiction in Bolivia; the occupation of Beirut; the invasion of Grenada; the airstrikes on Libya in 1986; as well as covert “special operations,” “special activities,” and “unconventional warfare.”

They concluded that low-intensity conflict was in fact “a strategic reorientation of the US military establishment, and renewed commitment to employ force in a global crusade against Third World revolutionary movements and governments.”

Today’s nominal but false ceasefires in Gaza, Lebanon, and the Persian Gulf fit squarely within that doctrine. They allow the US and Israel to continue illegal uses of force while appearing to respond to international demands for negotiations and diplomacy.

But the US involvement in low-intensity conflict today is not limited to the Middle East. It also encompasses the proxy war on Russia centered in Ukraine; the savage, deadly siege of Cuba; US and Western piracy on the high seas; the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and his wife; and economic and financial coercive measures or “sanctions” that impact about 40 countries.

Today’s low-intensity warfare also includes deploying US special operations forces in up to 140 countries. Since 2001, US special operations forces claim to have suffered 40% of all US military casualties, including many of the 8,492 American deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Concentrating such a large share of US war casualties in such a small force—about 70,000 men and women at any one time—helps to give most American families the illusion of living in peace, even as the United States projects military force across the world and kills thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of people abroad.

The doctrine of low-intensity warfare depends on a fundamental assumption: that the countries targeted by the United States and its allies will remain too weak, too isolated, or too divided to effectively resist. But that assumption is increasingly being tested.

Iran has made great strides in developing effective military defenses and demonstrating to shocked US and Israeli officials that it can now defend itself. But the deadly results of false ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon stand as concrete evidence that Israel and the United States still favor low-intensity warfare over real peace.

Even as Trump presents himself as a peacemaker, he remains committed to funding an enormous war machine that can ratchet the intensity of military and covert operations up and down in different parts of the world as it adjusts to new forms of resistance and responds to fluctuating international diplomatic pressures.

But the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza opened the eyes of a new generation of people all over the world to the reality of US imperialism. The official lies that undergird low-intensity warfare are wearing dangerously thin. People are no longer swallowing the false narratives of US and Western politicians and establishment media.

US political, military, and business leaders face a crisis of credibility and legitimacy that only grows as they take off the gloves and ratchet up the intensity of these campaigns, from escalating the war on Russia and the brutal blockade of Cuba to murdering innocent fishermen and ferry passengers in the Caribbean and Pacific and threatening traditional allies like Canada and Denmark.

In the US-Israeli war on Iran and the negotiations to end it, we are witnessing a serious effort by an attacked country to stand up to the bullies, redress the imbalance of power, and uphold international law.

Whatever one thinks of the Iranian government, Iran’s pursuit of a durable peace based on sovereignty, security, and international law deserves the support of governments and people around the world, including Americans.

This moment could become a critical turning point in reining in US aggression and Israeli regional expansion. It could even give humanity a chance to end this cycle of endless war and begin working together to address the existential crises threatening the world in the 21st century.

As the people of the United States commemorate the 250th anniversary of its founding, and the violence of the US empire comes home to attack us and our neighbors in our own homes and streets, we should find common cause with, and learn from, our neighbors around the world who have been resisting US imperial violence for generations.

It is ultimately up to us to take our future in our own hands and begin the essential transition from empire to democracy.

That is why CODEPINK is calling for a Summer of Peace and Love, a time to reject fear, militarism and empire, and to organize our communities around the simple but radical demand that our country stop making war on the world and start investing in life.

Now that an initial diplomatic deal between the US and Iran has been signed and intensive negotiations are under way to fully end the war, Congress should do everything possible to ensure this agreement is fully implemented. While the agreement is likely to have imperfections—thanks in large part to President Donald Trump harming US leverage and interests with a disastrous war—it would be a massive mistake to attack the deal simply because it comes from this president. The key question to consider is what steps Congress can take to ensure it becomes a durable peace—rather than merely a pause before the next round of war.

With all the human loss, destruction, and global stakes, we must stop this war, but also ensure that the conditions of peace don’t lay the groundwork for a return to conflict—or inspire its repetition elsewhere. The political and financial cost of ending this war must fall on those who aided and profited from it. The question is whether we build the safeguards to make it last.

In June 2025, it was already clear that accepting President Trump’s false narrative of absolute victory (claiming to have fully obliterated Iran’s nuclear sites) would not end US-Iran tensions. Any peace will remain fragile if the conditions that produced the war persist: the might-makes-right mindset that proved hollow against Iran’s strategic resilience; the preference for militarism over diplomacy, from Trump’s Joint-Comprehensive Plan-of-Action withdrawal to Biden’s failure to pursue a serious alternative to “maximum pressure” sanctions; the unconditional support for Israel even when it runs counter to US interests.

It is highly possible that during the initial 60 days of negotiations contemplated in the MOU, Israel will continue military action against Iran or in Lebanon to provoke a reaction and restart the cycle. The US cannot fully control what Israel would do. But it can stop aiding and abetting the war, which would make it far more difficult for Israel to sustain a campaign to spoil diplomacy.

The problem is not a single president or party. It is the power structures that ensure those who profit from war never pay its cost, regardless of who holds office.

Military action against Iran failed at producing any of its intended objectives, while it incurred costs that are in some cases irreversible and in others generational. The lives lost will not come back. The destruction of civilian infrastructure will shape Iranian society for decades. And the war has granted perverse legitimacy to a brutal regime, recasting the government of the Islamic Republic not as the oppressor it is, but as David against Goliath, the underdog resistor against foreign aggression. Diplomacy produced better results at far lower cost on every measure that matters.

This war confirmed what few wanted to acknowledge: that US military bases across the Gulf, sold as a projection of strength, are also a profound vulnerability. Each base became a potential target, each host government a hostage to escalation. For many Gulf governments, American military backing is a useful substitute for political legitimacy at home. Yet the war exposed the limits of that bargain: The same shield that promised security also turned them into targets.

Turning the Strait of Hormuz into a battlefield made this dynamic undeniable. Its closure hit energy markets and created rare pressure for de-escalation from Gulf elites who felt the costs directly. But while some elites were squeezed, others made billions. The system is designed so the profiteers are never the ones paying the ultimate price. That is exactly why temporary market pressure is not a substitute for structural accountability to prevent future conflicts.

Those who profit from war have learned over many years that neither Republicans or Democrats will hold them accountable. A new Congress post November has a real opportunity to change that—to serve US interests, meaning the American people, not a select elite. With $72 billion spent on the Iran war, a $1.5 trillion military budget, and war contractors more powerful and unaccountable than ever, Congress needs to investigate all war profiteers, from arms contractors to companies like the drone firm backed by the Trump sons that sought to sell interceptors to the very Gulf states being attacked, a direct conflict of interest.

In a relatively new dystopian innovation in war capitalism during the war, prediction markets like Polymarket saw millions in bets on everything from the timing of strikes to casualty estimates. Suspected insider accounts netted $2.4 million on Iran War bets with a 98% win rate. This kind of betting on war outcomes by those with proximity to power blurs the line between forecasting and profiteering. It must also be addressed.

We do not even have to wait for elections in November to start this process. The growing support for War Powers resolutions with majority house support just this month, and the 40 senators backing the Joint Resolution of Disapproval to withhold certain arms from Israel, show what may be possible when Congress does its job. Congress should condition support, block escalation, and hold hearings on the legality of what has been done.

Such measures would serve a deeper purpose: signaling that a new Congress, and eventually a new administration, can offer something more than a return to the previous status quo: a set of concrete actions that change how war is authorized, how money is spent, and who benefits.

The problem is not a single president or party. It is the power structures that ensure those who profit from war never pay its cost, regardless of who holds office.

Corruption and war profiteering are not merely governance issues. They are theft from the American people, through unaccountable war spending, the unaffordable prices it produces, and an elite class that never pays for the policies it pushes. A Congress that treats corruption and war profiteering as harm against the public and responds accordingly would demonstrate what a functioning democracy actually looks like.