Earlier this month, U.S. climate envoy John Podesta met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing to discuss climate financing for the upcoming years. The U.S. has long criticized China’s approach to confronting the climate threat, and continuously pushes Chinese leaders to do more.

At the same time, U.S. leaders label China’s investment into green energy technology as “exploitative” and attempt to sabotage its efforts with high tariffs, driving up the cost of Chinese imports, and making it more challenging to make the transition to green energy.

“They get less attention but they’re fully half of what’s causing global warming,” Podesta commented.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump officially cut off climate talks with China in 2017 after withdrawing from the Paris agreement. This past year, current President Joe Biden has made increasing efforts to engage with China on the topic before the end of his term.

The message is clear: China needs to contribute to the climate effort, but only in ways the U.S. deems acceptable.

This month’s climate talks were underscored by Beijing’s doubt over the upcoming election and the knowledge that any agreements would be undermined by another Trump win. Foreign Ministe Yi has also voiced concerns over U.S. “pan-securitism and protectionism”—kind words for describing U.S. actions that are accelerating a new cold war with China, including steps for conflict escalation by 2027.

Still, in the face of Washington’s increasingly threatening posture, Yi emphasized the importance of U.S.-China climate cooperation, saying the talks are “a positive signal to the outside world that as two major powers, China and the U.S., not only need to cooperate but can indeed work together.”

Discussions under the Biden administration began with former climate envoy John Kerry, who stepped down earlier this year. Kerry was one of the chief negotiators of the Paris climate agreement and had built strong rapport with top Chinese officials over the years. New climate envoy Podesta got his start in climate policy under the Obama administration, but is well known for serving as the White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton, and for his consummate insider status in wealthy liberal circles. He co-founded the Podesta Group with his brother, which operated as one of the most powerful lobbying firms before it was shut down following its association with the Robert Mueller investigations. He’s also the founder of the progressive think tank Center for American Progress, which was created with the support of other liberal elites.

As the newest climate envoy, Podesta joins a long line of wealthy U.S. political leaders more inclined to imperialist finger-wagging fueled by Western superiority and fears that China’s rise threatens U.S. global hegemony. So while the U.S. pushes China to do more, it also strategically undermines its efforts.

Let’s break it down.

Is China Doing “Enough?”

First, it’s important to note that China’s population makes up approximately 18% of the world, and its carbon dioxide emissions per capita fall short of many other countries, including the U.S., Canada, Australia, South Korea, and the UAE.

Additionally, China is a relatively new industrial power, and the total amount of CO2 it emitted over the last three centuries is incomparable to the 400 billion metric tons produced by the United States since 1750. It was only in recent years that China saw a sharp growth in emissions.

China’s early 20th century was marked by a political and social struggle of internal instability after the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911. After the establishment of the PROC in 1949, the challenge became improving the lives of its citizens. The Chinese government has been working to increase living standards across the country, and it is, in fact, the only country to rise from low to high on the United Nations Development Index since the program was created. Over 840 million people were taken out of extreme poverty, leading to a sharp rise in life expectancy, literacy rates, and quality of life.

In the early 2000s, as China became increasingly aware of the negative impacts of its fossil fuel use, leaders sought solutions that would create opportunities for future populations and not negate any of the progress made in the last century. Thus began China’s turn to manufacturing renewable technology in industries from solar to wind, green hydrogen, and geothermal energy. Today, China has approximately 80% of the world’s capacity for solar manufacturing. The mass production of renewable tech enabled lower sales costs, paving the way for nations in the Global South to afford making the move to green energy. In fact, China’s production of wind and solar tech enabled other nations to reduce CO2 emissions by over 800 million tons in 2023 alone.

In 2020, President Xi Jinping announced the plan for China to become carbon neutral by 2060, with a carbon peak no later than 2030. The declaration spurred new green projects and policies aimed at accomplishing the goal. The National Energy Administration (NEA), which regulates China’s energy, launched the Whole County PV program, which aims to install solar panels in half of China’s rural administration (a quarter of the population). China’s desert regions were deemed ideal locations for massive wind and solar farms, which will connect to towns and cities through high-speed transmission lines. In 2022, China installed as much solar capacity as all other nations combined, then doubled that number the following year–which was over twice as much as the United States.

It’s true that China still has a long way to go when it comes to switching away from fossil fuels, but it’s currently on track to reach its goals–and the Chinese government has a plan, which includes the construction of a unified power grid to better manage supply and demand.

So Why the Criticism?

Ultimately, the U.S. and China have different strategies of approaching the climate issue, and the U.S. isn’t happy with China’s methods. In fact, U.S. criticism over China’s green energy strategy lies partially in its condemnation of China’s monopoly over green energy tech, and the effects affordable prices could have on other U.S. business sectors, such as car manufacturing. Just last week, the U.S. locked in steep tariffs of 100% on incoming electric vehicles (EVs) from China, 50% on chips, and 25% on batteries. Chinese company BYD is the biggest EV manufacturer, with costs as low as $10,000 per car. Though not currently operating in U.S. markets, BYD electric cars with imposed tariffs would still be the cheapest option for U.S. consumers.

It seems likelier that U.S. politicians will protect the auto industry, which poured $85.5 million into lobbying efforts in 2023, a record high, rather than allow affordable, environmentally friendly electric cars from China to take over the market. Unfortunately, many politicians continue to call climate change a hoax and refer to EVs, like Trump did, as “green new scams.”

Chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, commented on the matter, warning that the high tariffs will “make it harder to coordinate policies that address global challenges, such as the climate transition.” Similarly, David Victor, professor of innovation and public policy at the University of California, San Diego, wrote that these policy moves are “bad for the environment” and will only “slow down the transition.”

The U.S. and China need to work together as two of the most powerful countries to pave the way to net global carbon neutrality.

The U.S. also continues to push China to contribute more money to fund countries in the Global South under the Copenhagen Accord drafted at the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15), in which multiple countries pledged to contribute to a $100 billion goal annually by 2020. However, while Podesta and Yi were talking about climate finance, other Chinese leaders were hosting the 2024 Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation with leaders from over 50 states across Africa. The summit concluded with China announcing an additional $50 billion in funding over the next three years, with a heavy focus on green energy transitioning. Additionally, President Xi announced plans to launch 30 new clean energy projects, as well as plans for EV manufacturing.

China’s rapid economic growth and growing global influence has enabled it to be an alternative source of investment for developing nations across the world. Western powers have been quick to criticize China’s global initiatives, brushing them off as self-interested and negatively impactful—though only when it’s outside the bounds of Western institutions like the International Monetary Fund. This is hypocritical, over-simplified, and misleading.

According to a McKinsey Global Institute report, delays in the global green energy shift will produce catastrophic results. As of right now, only 10% of the necessary low-emission technology needed to reach carbon neutrality by 2050 has been deployed. It’s crunch time, and slowing the transition due to political or economic interests is unacceptable.

Essentially, the U.S. orders China to contribute more to countering climate change, all while treating China’s growing dominance over the “green economy” as a security threat, and labeling China’s efforts to invest in green energy projects in the Global South as “geopolitical expansionism.” The message is clear: China needs to contribute to the climate effort, but only in ways the U.S. deems acceptable.

This strategy is ultimately counterproductive—it will only hinder the global effort to convert to renewable energy and delay climate goals, setting the stage for future potential environmental disasters. Instead, the U.S. and China need to work together as two of the most powerful countries to pave the way to net global carbon neutrality. This means removing tariffs on green energy tech, and providing avenues for all countries to make the transition. At the same time, the U.S. needs to make internal change, and defund the world’s highest polluting institution—the U.S. military.

As Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Ohio Sen. JD Vance prepare to debate this week, it’s worth looking at their approaches to tax policy, a critical throughline that helps determine not only the quality of public services in communities across the country, but also the overall fairness of our economy.

Lessons from the North Star State

Recent reforms signed by Walz have helped create a moderately progressive tax system in Minnesota, making the state stand apart from most that charge the rich lower tax rates than everyone else.

Our analysis shows that taxes on working-class families declined markedly over the last few years in Minnesota while taxes on high-income people went up slightly.

The most notable changes were signed into law by Walz in 2023 as part of a sweeping tax reform package. Some changes were temporary, like taxpayer rebate checks and expanded property tax credits. But the bill also included important permanent reforms.

In Minnesota, Walz has helped institute a tax system that asks wealthy households and profitable corporations to chip in more to help create a stronger, healthier, more equitable society.

Chief among those was a new Child Tax Credit that is expected to slash child poverty in Minnesota by one-third, according to Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy. The link between Child Tax Credits and child well-being is well established, as the financial security afforded by these credits is associated with improved child and maternal health, better educational achievement, and stronger future economic outcomes.

Other tax cuts signed by Walz include expanded exemptions for Social Security income and for student loan forgiveness, plus an extension of the Child Care Tax Credit to newborn children.

To help pay for all this, the 2023 bill included tax increases on high-income people and profitable corporations. Certain tax deductions claimed by high-income filers have been scaled back. Capital gains, dividends, and other investment income over $1 million per year is now subject to a modest 1% surtax. And multinational corporations reporting income overseas now face higher taxes as well, as the state opted to piggyback on a law written by congressional Republicans targeting companies’ “low-taxed income.”

Trickle-Down with a Twist of MAGA

Vance has not been a lawmaker for long and doesn’t have a robust track record on tax policy. The roughly dozen tax-related bills he sponsored or co-sponsored in Congress run the gamut. He has introduced bills that would use the tax code to fight the culture war against colleges, universities, and campus protesters. He’s signed onto several bills that would further enrich the richest, like eliminating the estate tax (which is paid almost exclusively by those inheriting more than $20 million) and making the 2017 Trump tax law’s subsidy for pass-through businesses permanent (which goes mostly to millionaires, who often game the system to extract the largest possible windfalls from this law).

Vance has also introduced legislation to repeal tax incentives for electric vehicles and replace them with tax breaks for buying American-manufactured vehicles, and signed onto a bill to eliminate rebates for upgrading to more efficient appliances. He’s also a co-sponsor of a bill to erode K-12 public schools with private school voucher tax credits.

In August, Vance floated increasing the Child Tax Credit to $5,000 per child for “all American families,” yet details remain scarce. His comments suggest he would make the credit available for many–but not all–the low-income families who currently earn too little to receive it as well as the wealthy families who earn too much (over $400,000). It’s unclear if Vance’s plan would help all low-income families currently left out by the credit’s lack of refundability–he’s never addressed that. While it’s promising that Vance talked about the Child Tax Credit, it’s hard to take his vague proposal seriously–especially after he sat out a vote in the Senate for a bipartisan bill that would have expanded this credit.

On the trail, Vance is hyping up many of his running mate’s tax proposals, including Trump’s tariff tax. This proposal–which would create a 60% tariff on Chinese imports and a 20% one on all other imports–would cost an average middle-class American family nearly $4,000 a year.

The tariff plan is a critical part of the Trump-Vance tax agenda because it’s one of a very small number of revenue raisers in a basket of special interest tax cuts. So, yes, it would help pay for some of those tax cuts (though at an estimated $2.8 trillion raised over the next decade it pales in comparison to the over $9 trillion in revenue loss from proposed cuts). But it would do it in a way that falls hardest on regular families, making our system fundamentally less fair in the process.

That stands in stark contrast to the reforms that Walz has shepherded. In Minnesota, Walz has helped institute a tax system that asks wealthy households and profitable corporations to chip in more to help create a stronger, healthier, more equitable society.

This is the type of tax system that most Americans say they want. It’s also exactly the kind that America desperately needs.

Every mother in America knows this struggle well: How do you afford to raise a child?

My daughter was born almost 14 years ago, and my family is still financially recovering from the struggle of supporting a newborn. And we’re not alone—American families are spending a greater and greater portion of their income on childcare.

According to the nonprofit Child Care Aware, the average cost of childcare in the U.S. is now more than $10,000 per year—and even higher for infants and toddlers. And the problem is only getting worse. It’s no wonder so many women are choosing not to have children because they say they can’t afford them.

I’ve come to understand my experience as a failure of our elected leaders to provide basic needs like affordable, accessible childcare and paid family and medical leave.

Right before I found out I was pregnant, I was let go from my job and lost my benefits and stable income.

Once my daughter was born, instead of enjoying every moment of being new parents, my partner and I were stressed about our financial situation. I didn’t have a job to go back to, and even if I did, we wouldn’t have been able to afford childcare.

I remember tirelessly googling childcare providers in the area and becoming exasperated at the costs. There was no way that we could afford to pay $300-plus a week just for daycare—we wouldn’t be able to cover our basic living expenses.

The situation became a Catch-22: If I didn’t work, it would be impossible to balance our bills and afford the essentials to raise a child. But if I did, we wouldn’t be able to afford those things anyway, because all the money would be going to daycare.

This is why so many mothers like me are driven out of the workforce. As one of the only industrialized countries in the world without national paid leave, the United States forces moms in particular to choose between continuing to work or raising our children.

The fortunate mothers who do have access to a paid leave program are significantly less likely to quit their jobs and more likely to work for the same employer after the birth of their first child. That’s not just good for mothers—that’s good for employers and our economy as a whole.

As I think back to those days, I remember always feeling sad, not realizing that like 10-15% of new mothers I was likely dealing with postpartum depression. That feeling was only compounded by isolation and the stress of financial insecurity.

Paid leave can help address those mental stressors. According to one study, women who took longer than 12 weeks maternity leave reported fewer depressive symptoms, a reduction in severe depression, and an improvement in their overall mental health. I know I would’ve benefited greatly from knowing that I could take the time to care for my child without worrying about winding up in dire financial straits.

Having a child should be a joyful event, not a deeply stressful one. I’ve come to understand my experience as a failure of our elected leaders to provide basic needs like affordable, accessible childcare and paid family and medical leave.

I’m glad that unlike elections in the past, this crisis has become a major issue. I hope to see a day when no mother has to go through what I did.

By design, factory farms generate stunning amounts of waste from the thousands or even millions of animals they confine. And while the industry swears it treats that waste “responsibly,” neighboring communities know otherwise.

Under the Clean Water Act, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) should protect our water from harmful factory farm pollution. But the agency’s regulations have been failing for decades to achieve the act’s most basic requirements, a fact that EPA admits.

According to the agency’s own data, roughly 10,000 of the nation’s largest factory farms, also known as concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), are illegally discharging dangerous pollution to waterways without the required federal permit. As a result, we’re facing a pollution crisis of epic proportions, threatening our drinking water, health, and environment.

When allowed to handle their waste cheaply, with little regard for the toll on people and the environment, their profit margins soar.

So in 2017, we led dozens of allies to petition EPA to strengthen its regulations to ensure all polluting CAFOs have Clean Water Act permits that effectively protect waterways as the law requires. When it denied our petition and refused to act, we sued.

A host of industry groups representing factory farm interests intervened in the case to defend EPA’s refusal to act. This comes as no surprise, as the industry has long peddled misleading arguments and downright lies to preserve the status quo. That’s because factory farms reap huge benefits from the lack of regulation. When allowed to handle their waste cheaply, with little regard for the toll on people and the environment, their profit margins soar.

This September, I countered those arguments in person before the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, explaining why EPA must strengthen its CAFO regulations to safeguard our water and our health.

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Here’s the truth behind three false claims industry is pushing:

1.  The Harms of Factory Farm Manure “Management” Are Clear

In their brief, industry groups claim that “modern feeding operations are designed and engineered to produce healthy animals and minimize environmental impacts from manure.” This is patently false. The industry employs—and EPA’s lax regulations allow— the cheapest waste management practices possible, with little concern for public health or the environment.

For instance, factory farms store millions of gallons of waste in open cesspools that are designed to leak, threatening drinking water. And because hauling waste away is expensive, they dump as much as they can onto nearby fields, where it runs off into waterways.

We, the scientific community, and EPA all know that lax regulations have fueled the current factory farm pollution crisis.

This is a main reason why CAFOs’ waste is such a big threat to our water. They claim they’re using this waste to fertilize crops, but in reality, they apply far more than the land or plants can absorb. It’s also common practice to dump waste on land that has no hope of absorbing any of it, including fields frozen solid in the dead of winter.

There is a trove of scientific literature documenting all of this, and even EPA concedes that its faulty regulations are to blame. Yet, EPA claims it lacks enough information to improve its regulations. This reasoning is frankly ridiculous, especially since the agency admitted it had not even reviewed the thousands of pages of scientific and government data we gave to it when we submitted our petition, including research it conducted itself.

In their brief, industry groups aim to sow doubt on this topic, but we, the scientific community, and EPA all know that lax regulations have fueled the current factory farm pollution crisis.

2. Factory Farms Benefit from a Gaping Regulatory Loophole That EPA Can and Must Close

The industry also defended an EPA rule that has created a loophole enabling thousands of CAFOs to circumvent the law. Under the Clean Water Act, polluting facilities must get a permit that requires them to limit and monitor their pollution discharges.

However, since 2003 EPA has chosen to interpret the statute in a way that exempts a huge portion of factory farm pollution from regulation. This “agricultural stormwater” exemption has also allowed the vast majority of factory farms to evade permitting requirements altogether, even for pollution that doesn’t fall under the exemption.

So we’re not surprised that the industry is determined to preserve this loophole. In its brief, it falsely claims that federal law requires EPA to apply this exemption to CAFOs. But in fact, the congressional and regulatory records make clear that legislators never intended for the exemption to apply to CAFOs or their waste disposal practices, and EPA understood that.

Contrary to industry claims, EPA applied this exemption to factory farms by its own discretion; the law did not compel them to. Now, in the face of substantial evidence that thousands of operations are exploiting this free pass, EPA can and must narrow the exemption and place stringent regulations on polluting factory farms, as Congress intended.

3. The Status Quo Is Failing to Prevent Pollution

Finally, industry groups argue that the current regulatory regime is working. They even point to Iowa and North Carolina as shining success stories for manure management. What they fail to mention is that these states have some of the worst factory farm-polluted waters in the country, because state regulators allow these operations to pollute with impunity. In fact, these states have laws that prohibit their environmental agencies from passing factory farm water pollution regulations more stringent than EPA’s.

EPA itself admits its primary pollution control strategy, “nutrient management plans,” are inadequate. For decades, the agency has assumed these plans minimize pollution runoff from fields applied with manure. That’s what the industry would like us to believe, too. But the truth is—as EPA recently acknowledged—nutrient management plans don’t do enough to protect against pollution because that’s not even their main focus.

The reality is that the status quo is not protecting rural communities from harmful factory farm pollution.

Instead, they prioritize “maximizing crop growth” where manure is applied. To fulfill its obligations under the Clean Water Act, EPA must stop pretending that nutrient management plans are a silver bullet for factory farm pollution.

The reality is that the status quo is not protecting rural communities from harmful factory farm pollution. Weak state regulations matter even less when the national permit program—the bedrock of factory farm pollution regulation—isn’t effective. EPA can and must overhaul its factory farm regulations.

The EPA Must Hold the Industry Accountable

EPA’s foot-dragging is welcome news to the factory farm industry. Under the agency’s current regulations, factory farms can continue cutting costs through irresponsible manure handling. They can dump the costs of their waste onto their neighbors, leaving rural communities with undrinkable water, health problems, and devastated quality of life.

This needs to change. EPA must stop toeing the industry line and finally stop this pollution.

Arguing before the court in September, EPA agreed the factory farm pollution problem was severe, but it swore up and down it was taking it seriously, pointing to an ongoing study Food & Water Watch forced the agency to launch through other litigation and an advisory committee it convened after denying our petition.

However, these are simply delay tactics. The study focuses narrowly on pollution standards that only apply to permitted factory farms, even though the heart of the problem is that thousands of factory farms don’t have permits to begin with. To add insult to injury, the study group is controlled by industry representatives. It’s simply not believable that the study process will lead to stronger environmental protections.

EPA’s weak arguments underscore what we’ve known for years: to address this pollution crisis, the agency must step up and strengthen its regulations. Not only do suffering communities need EPA to do its job, but the law demands it.

The Israeli assassination of Hassan Nasrallah has implications for the struggle of Iran and its alliance of resistance against Israel and the United States. But I would like to step back and look at how we reached this juncture.

I lived in Lebanon on and off in the 1970s, when the Civil War (1975-1989) began. Lebanon is a country full of minorities, with no majority. Christians, Sunni Muslims, and Shiite Muslims are the major groups, but there are some smaller communities of great importance, including the Druze (an offshoot of Twelver Shiism) and the Eastern Orthodox Christians. Religious ethnicity, what the French call “confessionalism,” plays a role in Lebanon similar to that played in American society by racial ethnicity.

During the Civil War, each community threw up militias, usually more than one, and these militias often targeted one another as much as their enemies. In the south, East Beirut, and the Bekaa Valley, Shiites predominated. They were the poorest of the Lebanese religious communities, often consisting of tobacco sharecroppers and other impoverished agriculturists in the countryside. In East Beirut, they did day labor. Shiites back in the 1950s and 1960s had not been very involved in Lebanese politics, concentrating on the affairs of their villages. A few great landlords were in Parliament, but they had almost feudal relationships to the farmers.

In the 1970s, an Iranian cleric named Musa Sadr, transplanted to Lebanon, helped organize AMAL (an acronym for Troops of the Lebanese Resistance, but with the literal meaning of “hope”). It was a charity, a political party, and a militia. AMAL appealed to the new Shiite middle class, people who had relatives that had emigrated to West Africa or the Oil Gulf and sent back remittances. The incoming wealth allowed them to found banks and other businesses and to fund the activities of AMAL.

The idea of a party-militia was not new. Among the Maronite Christians, the Phalangist Party had modeled itself on Franco’s brown shirts and Mussolini’s black shirts. I used to see them doing drills in the street when I lived in Chiyah, Beirut.

Hezbollah... should have followed the rest of the militias into the Ta’if accords, laying down their arms and becoming solely a parliamentary political party.

Sadr was kidnapped by Moammar Gadhafi when he visited Libya in search of funding for AMAL. Maybe Gadhafi felt he hadn’t delivered on some promise. Maybe Gadhafi was increasingly deranged.

The 1979 Islamic Revolution radicalized some young Lebanese Shiites. Abbas Musawi hived off from AMAL and formed Islamic AMAL. They were in touch with the Iraqi Da’wa Party and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon in a quest to extirpate the Palestine Liberation Organization, subjecting Beirut to indiscriminate shelling. Among those who were appalled was Osama Bin Laden, who later said that he began aspiring to bring down U.S. skyscrapers on seeing what the Israelis did to those in Beirut.

The Islamic AMAL saw the Israeli invasion and occupation as a U.S. project, blew up the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983 and then targeted the U.S. Marines (on a peacekeeping mission) with a truck bomb, killing 241 U.S. service personnel.

In 1984, Musawi and others formed Hezbollah. The organization mobilized the poorer and more radical Shiites in East Beirut, Tyre, and the Bekaa for guerrilla warfare to get the Israelis back out of their country. Israel occupied 10% of Lebanon 1982-2000, but suffered increasing casualties from Hezbollah sniping and suicide bombing, a technique they picked up from the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.

In 1989, the Saudis sent Saad Hariri, a Lebanese Sunni who had made billions as a contractor in the kingdom, to try to end the war. That year at Ta’if most of the armed factions pledged to lay down their arms, which they did, and Hariri became prime minister. He began the process of rebuilding Beirut, a process that made his companies rich.

The only group that did not disarm was Hezbollah, on the grounds that it was fighting the occupation of the Lebanese south by the Israelis.

By 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak withdrew from Lebanon.

Hezbollah at that point should have followed the rest of the militias into the Ta’if accords, laying down their arms and becoming solely a parliamentary political party. Hassan Nasrallah, by then the leader, however, refused that path. He began pressing claims on the Shebaa Farms villages of Syria, which Israel had illegally occupied. These lands had been owned by Shiite Lebanese, and Syria said they could have them back if the Israelis would leave. Nasrallah had the Israeli settlements there shelled indiscriminately, which is a war crime since it puts civilians in harm’s way.

Moreover, Hezbollah planned terrorist operations, even in Europe. Had it stuck with a purely military struggle with the Israeli army, it might have avoided being listed as a terrorist group, which cost it all legitimacy in the industrialized democracies.

In 2004-05 a crisis unfolded in Lebanon over Syrian political meddling in the country. Hariri and most Maronite Christians demonstrated against the Syrians, and Hariri was killed in a truck bomb in February 2005—probably by Hezbollah, or by Hezbollah field officers working for Syrian intelligence. The March 14 coalition managed to convince the Syrians to pull their troops out of the country. Nasrallah’s March 8 coalition, joined by Michel Aoun’s Christians, held huge counter-demonstrations in favor of Syria but lost.

In 2006, Hezbollah attacks on Israel for the sake of getting the Shebaa Farms back were taken as a pretext by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who launched a wide-ranging war on Lebanon. Israel of course won, but it did suffer setbacks owing to Hezbollah guerrilla tactics. In the aftermath, Nasrallah apologized for dragging the country into a destructive war that set back its economy.

In 2008, Hezbollah fought Lebanese Sunnis over a number of issues, including control of telecommunications at Beirut airport. Nasrallah had earlier pledged never to use his arms on fellow Lebanese, but he reneged on that promise.

From 2013 on, Nasrallah sent Hezbollah fighters into Syria to help keep Bashar Assad in power, allying with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Russia against the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood and more radical, al-Qaeda-adjacent groups. Hezbollah’s name became mud among many Sunni Arabs, as it lost the popularity gained in 2006.

Hezbollah as a party did well in Lebanese elections and played an increasing role in the national cabinet.

Hezbollah built up a rocket arsenal with Iran’s help. It was only useful for defensive purposes, as a deterrent against Israeli aggression. Few rockets have guidance systems and so can’t be used in a targeted way. The U.S. Iron Dome anti-missile batteries made these rockets relatively useless and so removed their deterrent effect.

The outbreak of war after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel put Nasrallah in a difficult situation. His only source of popularity and legitimacy was resistance to Israel. Iran pressured him to keep a low profile and avoid provoking another war. Although 80% of the attacks at the Israeli-Lebanese border were launched by Israel, Hezbollah was baited into a tit-for-tat. Tens of thousands of Israelis were displaced from the north, just as tens of thousands of Shiites were displaced from the Lebanese south by Israeli airstrikes.

The Jewish Power government of contemporary Israel aims at a Greater Israel, ethnically cleansing Gaza and the West Bank and southern Lebanon in preparation for Israeli hegemony.

The fascist Israeli government of Benajmin Netanyahu-Itamar Ben-Gvir-Bezalel Smotrich, receiving unstinting backing from the Biden administration, has adopted a policy of Miloševićism. Slobodan Milošević aimed for a Greater Serbia after the breakup of Communist Yugoslavia, coveting much of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo and being willing to deploy the tools of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The Jewish Power government of contemporary Israel aims at a Greater Israel, ethnically cleansing Gaza and the West Bank and southern Lebanon in preparation for Israeli hegemony.

Despite Biden’s feeble and risible cautions against a wider war, the Miloševićist Israeli government had long been determined to go into Lebanon and to wipe out Hezbollah—and perhaps to reoccupy the Lebanese south. Unbeknownst to Nasrallah, his high council had been penetrated by agents working for Israel, so that the latter could booby trap their pagers and could determine Nasrallah’s whereabouts in real time.

Nasrallah left behind a Lebanon in shambles, its government so corrupt that it let the port explode and allowed the chairman of the National Bank to embezzle all the country’s money. Poverty skyrocketed to 40% of the population in what had been a prosperous country.

In the end, Nasrallah led a small organization of some 45,000 fighters that was attempting to punch above its weight. The Syrian intervention overstretched its resources and made it vulnerable in the Lebanese south. Its rockets were rendered ineffectual by the Iron Dome. Its cadres grew corrupt and open to Israeli shekels. It transitioned from a light, mobile guerrilla group with no return address to a quasi-governmental body with an HQ that could be struck by bunker-busting bombs.

Possibly Hezbollah will be forced now to go back to its guerrilla roots and a more secure cell structure. The Jewish Power and Religious Zionism fanatics who dream of re-occupying southern Lebanon and siphoning off the waters of the Litani River will likely discover, if they do so, that the potential for guerrilla resistance has not been and cannot be eradicated.

For the past four years, former U.S. President Donald Trump has been building a cult of election deniers who believe his false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.

They don’t care that no one has ever presented a shred of credible evidence to support Trump’s blatantly bogus claim.

Notwithstanding the lack of evidence, 69% of Republicans, including Republican-leaning independents, have said they believe Joe Biden is an illegitimate president, a direct result of Trump’s massive disinformation campaign.

Election deniers are preparing to try to elect Trump at all costs, no matter who the voters choose. An all hands-on-deck legal effort will be required to stop this from happening.

The election deniers’s movement has spent years getting ready for 2024 with the goal of ensuring that a Republican is elected president.

According to a recent study by the Center for Media and Democracy, there are 102 election deniers on election boards in eight battleground states. These election deniers, the study found, have majority power in 15 counties in battleground states, including seven in the critical state of Pennsylvania.

Now they are moving into action, preparing to throw up various roadblocks to help elect Trump.

One of their key lines of attack is to delay and obstruct the certification of the winner in their state. Under the Electoral Count Reform Act—enacted in the aftermath of Trump’s attempted 2020 election coup—the deadline for a state to certify its electors is December 11. Failure to meet that deadline could mean the electoral votes in that state would not be considered in the final tally.

If that happens in one or more states, it could mean that Trump wins the electoral vote majority or alternatively that the race is thrown to the House of Representatives where Republicans are expected to control a majority of state delegations and elect Trump.

(The Constitution provides that if a presidential race ends up in the House, each state delegation gets one vote.)

In 2020, Trump, in his infamous phone call, pressured and threatened Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find 11,780 votes that would give Trump the win in Georgia. Raffensperger, a Republican, rejected Trump’s pressure.

Georgia is once again center stage.

Georgia’s State Board of Elections is controlled today by election deniers and has been adopting new last-minute election rules with no plausible justification other than to tilt the state for Trump.

The Georgia Board recently adopted a rule requiring counties to hand count the ballots cast in the state to determine whether the number of paper ballots matches the voting machine count. While small rural counties may be able to comply with this burdensome last-minute requirement, large urban areas, which favor Democrats, don’t have the capacity to do this kind of paper ballot counting. Nor is it necessary.

The conservative Republican attorney general warned that the rule is likely unlawful. The rule is expected to be challenged in court.

This ballot-counting rule follows another rule by the Georgia Board that requires counties to make “reasonable inquiries” into the balloting before certifying the results, another rule subject to abuse by election deniers seeking to obstruct certification. This rule is being challenged in court.

Meanwhile, in Mississippi, a ridiculous challenge has been made in federal court to a rule—similar to one in place in 20 states—that allows a state to count mailed-in ballots received up to five days after Election Day if the ballot is postmarked by Election Day. This challenge, with national implications, was argued Tuesday before a conservative three-judge panel.

Election deniers are preparing to try to elect Trump at all costs, no matter who the voters choose. An all hands-on-deck legal effort will be required to stop this from happening.

Fortunately, that effort is underway.

That effort is being led by former U.S. Solicitors General Seth Waxman and Donald Verrilli Jr., two of the nation’s premier Supreme Court and appellate advocates. Also leading the effort are Dana Remus, a former White House counsel, with Covington and Burling; Bob Bauer, a former White House counsel; and John Devany, a Partner at Perkins Coie. They and a team of dozens of lawyers are representing Vice President Kamala Harris and the DNC.

Waxman and Verrilli, along with a third former U.S. solicitor general, the late Walter Dellinger, led the successful defense of the 2020 presidential election results, which included overwhelming victories against the dozens of baseless efforts by Trump and his supporters to try to overturn the Biden victory.

We can be confident that the supremely skilled and talented Waxman and Verrilli with their impressive history of major legal successes, and the team of dedicated colleagues, will protect our elections in the courts this election season.

Have our world’s super rich become absolutely paranoid about the future? Or do they, deep down, understand that our exceedingly unequal global distribution of income and wealth has placed them—and everyone else—in ever-present danger?

The Robb Report, a news service that offers our most awesomely affluent the ultimate in consumption advice, has no interest in psychoanalyzing what the wealthiest among us believe. But Robb Report analysts certainly do enjoy chronicling how these rich behave.

“Forget Butlers,” a Robb Report headline has just pronounced. “Private Security” has now become “the Ultimate Service for the Ultra-Wealthy.”

Real progress on the environmental and every other major problematic front, the new Oxfam report sums up, “will require all countries—both in the Global North and Global South—to realize that they have a common interest in tackling extreme concentrations of wealth.”

The Samphire Risk insurance firm, the Robb coverage goes on to relate, specializes in policies that insure the rich against the dangers that our world visits only upon them. Say, for instance, two monied motorcyclist pals get involved in a crash that leaves one of them badly injured and the other kidnapped amid the accident’s chaos. Samphire prides itself on providing “the connective tissue between the problem and the expertise needed” to solve whatever dilemma the rich may encounter.

The AHNA Group run by a Dubai-based former military operative from South Africa last year provided top corporate execs protective services for over 500 trips into more than four dozen countries. AHNA, says its mover and shaker Mac Segal, always goes the extra mile and even takes the time to prep its operatives on how to make conversation with their rich clients.

“You should speak in short sentences,” Segal advises, “so the client can stop the conversation whenever they want to.”

Still another new security service available for the fretful rich offers “a bodyguard in your pocket,” an artificial intelligence-powered mobile phone app that can tell if a deep pocket’s limo is following its normal daily route.

Budding entrepreneurs worldwide, in short, are devoting their time and talents to making our Earth as safe as possible for our planet’s most comfortable, that top 1% that now holds more wealth, relates a just-released report from the global humanitarian group Oxfam, than the entire bottom 95% combined.

This “immense concentration of wealth,” notes Oxfam’s new Multilateralism in an Era of Global Oligarchy analysis, has allowed large corporations and the ultra-rich “who exercise control over them to use their vast resources to shape global rules in their favor, often at the expense of everyone else.”

How dramatic has this wealth concentration become? Since 1987, as economist Gabriel Zucman has detailed, the combined wealth of the world’s 3,000 richest households—in effect, our richest 0.0001%—now stands at about $14 trillion. Their share of the world’s wealth has over that timespan more than quadrupled.

About 46% of the world’s population, meanwhile, lives on less than the local equivalent of $6.85 per day.

Our contemporary wealth inequality, Oxfam’s research details, connects up neatly with growing global corporate concentration. Seven of the world’s 10 largest corporations now have a billionaire either as CEO or top shareholder. Our wealthiest, Oxfam shows, don’t just benefit passively from all the corporate stock they hold. They’re increasingly shaping—in sectors ranging from pharmaceuticals to global digital advertising—exactly how corporations exercise their market and political power.

The ultra-wealthy and the corporations they dominate, as Oxfam puts it, are using “their vast resources to pressure governments”—through everything from lobbying and campaign contributions to influence over the media and threats to withhold investment—to lower the taxes rich people pay, weaken labor protections, and privatize public services.

In 2022, Oxfam points out, 182 of America’s largest corporations, spent $746 million on lobbying alone. For every lobbying dollar the nation’s 50 largest publicly traded corporations spent, they averaged back $130 in tax breaks and over $4,000 in federal loans, loan guarantees, and bailouts.

One consequence of this ultra-rich political influence: The Covid-19 pandemic, observes Oxfam, left in its wake at least 40 new billionaires.

The most dangerous long-term consequence of ultra-rich influence? That may well be environmental. The dollars of our global ultra-rich, notes Oxfam, continue to be “disproportionately invested in the companies driving climate breakdown.”

What can we do to break down this climate breakdown threat? Real progress on the environmental and every other major problematic front, the new Oxfam report sums up, “will require all countries—both in the Global North and Global South—to realize that they have a common interest in tackling extreme concentrations of wealth.”

“A more equitable international order,” as Oxfam’s latest research powerfully reminds us, “benefits everyone.”

Israel’s Biden-backed war machine is once again bearing down on defenseless Lebanese people. Hostilities on the Israel-Lebanon border have been occurring since the establishment of Israel and the dispossession of Palestinians and their land in 1948. But last week’s war-crime-laden escalation by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stunned the world.

It started with bombings followed by the simultaneous booby-trapped “red button” explosion of thousands of pagers and two-way radios inside Lebanon on September 17, 2024, and September 18, 2024, held by or near Lebanese militants, and civilian men, women, children, health workers, storekeepers, etc. Thirty-seven people were killed and 3,700 others were injured—losing hands, eyes, and fingers. Many also suffered internal organ damage.

Such an attack at this scale is unprecedented in human history. While the ambulances and overwhelmed hospitals were taking in the casualties, Israeli F-16s (provided by the U.S.) struck throughout Lebanon, killing over 700 people and injuring thousands, many of them women and children—a staggering total of 1,600 targets in two days.

Computers, motor vehicles, smartphones, and many other electronic products could become weapons of war.

International law experts condemned the mega-raid. They pointed to the war crime of booby-trapping a product, and the vast disproportionate harm to innocent civilians compared to Israel’s military objective to destroy Hezbollah’s militia that has been exchanging unequal missiles with Israel since October 8, 2023.

As has been the case for decades, Lebanese casualties were vastly greater than Israeli casualties. Israel has a modern air defense system that shuts down most of the incoming missiles. Hezbollah’s military might has been long exaggerated by its Israeli adversary to justify regularly bombing Syria, attacking Iran, and getting more weapons from the U.S.

In reality, Hezbollah—a political party and social service organization—has a militia greatly outnumbered and overpowered by the Israeli military in soldiers, destructive weaponry, and money from the U.S.

Furtively booby-trapping a consumer product like a pager or two-way radio opens a new phase of warfare. This savagery prompted Leon Panetta, former director of the CIA and former secretary of defense, in an interview on the CBS “Sunday Morning” news show to charge Israel with “terrorism.” No prominent national security figure has ever assailed Israel this way. Herewith his words:

“The ability to be able to place an explosive in technology that is very prevalent these days. And turn it into a war of terror. Really, a war of terror. This is something new,” said Panetta.

“I don’t think there’s any question that it’s a form of terrorism...This is going right into the supply chain, right into the supply chain. And when you have terror going into the supply chain, it makes people ask the question, what the hell is next?” added Panetta.

Panetta would never have uttered these words without the concurrence of the CIA and the Department of Defense. Still no consequences for Netanyahu by the U.S. government.

These officials now fear a new booby-trap era of warfare. Computers, motor vehicles, smartphones, and many other electronic products could become weapons of war. People all over the world now have this Israeli-triggered anxiety, dread, and fear. Netanyahu has made the push button a trigger for mayhem and murder—acts of large-scale terrorism. He and his predecessors have always characterized offensive acts violating the laws of war as “acceptable” defensive tactics. The supine Congress and White House regularly rubber-stamp their violations of several U.S. laws on behalf of the Israeli government. (See the letter sent to John Kirby on September 12, 2024).

Consider the aftermath. No denunciation by U.S. President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, or Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. No condemnation or calls for public hearings by leading Republicans, or leading Democrats in Congress. The Hill reported that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said, “This attack clearly and unequivocally violates international humanitarian law and undermines US efforts to prevent a wider conflict… Congress needs a full accounting of the attack, including an answer from the State Department as to whether any U.S. assistance went into the development or deployment of this technology,” she added. Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) and Cori Bush (D-Mo.) were also critical of the attack.

Alarmingly, there were no editorials in the following week criticizing Netanyahu in The Washington Post and The New York Times.

Imagine if Hezbollah did this to Israeli society. The devaluation of Palestinian and Lebanese lives can only be called racist.

Biden’s forked-tongue address to the United Nations this week touted peace and democracy while his autocracy funds war.

Biden’s forked-tongue address to the United Nations this week touted peace and democracy while his autocracy funds war. Not a word against what his friend Leon Panetta called Israeli terrorism. Just another feeble fig leaf call for a 21-day truce mocked by the extreme genocidal Israeli regime, funded by coerced American taxpayers.

Hezbollah emerged after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 which lasted 18 years with the Israeli army occupying south Lebanon (and its coveted Litani River) where millions of historically downtrodden Lebanese Shia Muslims lived. They were abused by the Israeli army. Hezbollah was formed in 1982 to defend these impoverished, subjugated people.

In an ocean of lies, starting with his mysterious, still officially uninvestigated collapse of the multi-tiered border security system on October 7, 2023, which opened the door to the Hamas attack, Netanyahu has uttered one truth: “Nothing will stop us.” The nuclear-equipped Israeli regional empire dominates the Middle East. But it always needs an enemy for its internal domestic politics and for expanding its very advantageous alliance with the United States empire. Netanyahu is despised by 3 out of 4 Israelis but the next election is not until October 2026. Some in the pages of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz have argued that Netanyahu may be scuttling talk of a cease-fire to avoid his pending criminal trial for corruption.

Iran, a poor nation with about 91 million people and a GDP considerably smaller than the GDP of Massachusetts, has been a target of the U.S. since the CIA overthrew the popularly elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. His crime: he wanted to take control of Iranian oil from the foreign Anglo-Iranian oil company.

It was the U.S. government that supported then-Iraq ally Saddam Hussein to invade Iran in 1980, which cost Iran hundreds of thousands of lives. It was former President George W. Bush who called Iran one of the countries making up the Axis of Evil and proceeded to encircle it with the U.S. military from Iraq to the Afghanistan borders. Do you wonder why Iran’s rulers are freaked out over its national security and build allies in the face of both punishing U.S. sanctions harming civilian lives and recurrent Israeli sabotage and killings inside Iran?

Violently messing around in other weak countries’ backyards, and backing dictators and coups are the touchstones of empire. Eventually, all empires devour themselves.

In the meantime, are you surprised that the CIA and Department of Defense have teams studying what they call “blowback”—a term they coined before 9/11? You know how that attack convulsed our country, deprived our domestic needs, and intensified Bush/Dick Cheney’s fury into even more countries (e.g., invading Iraq) pushing ever bigger, draining military budgets?

U.S. blowback analysts are apprehensive about the spread of Israeli-style “red button” explosives and the ingenious, and ever-cheaper armed drones. They see such technologies as potential threats within the U.S.

Such is the peril of nations whose leaders wage constant profitable, preventable wars and decline to wage muscular peace with comparable determination.

Nayib Bukele has proudly called himself “the world’s coolest dictator.” On October 8, his government will begin an unjust trial of five water defenders from El Salvador. These men are heroes of El Salvador — and they never should have been arrested.

In these two weeks leading up to the trial, human rights supporters across the United States, Canada, Germany, and elsewhere are joining counterparts in El Salvador to call for the five to be freed.

In January of 2023, Bukele’s attorney general arrested five prominent environmental defenders and charged them with a murder that took place in that nation’s brutal civil war 35 years ago. It doesn’t matter that the government has no evidence to back up the charges or that the five are covered by a 1992 amnesty. Bukele has no use for domestic or international law as he bulldozes civil liberties in mass arrests under the banner of eliminating gangs.

Opposition to these mass arrests is now rising — some from parents whose children were wrongly swept into his prisons, some from human rights defenders, and some from communities that fear he will undo the seven-year old ban on mining which was won by communities that placed the health of their rivers and lands over the profits of mining corporations.

This is where Bukele’s argument that he is only arresting gang members gets murky. In a fact-finding delegation to El Salvador last fall, eight of us from the U.S. and Canada found that thousands of innocent people had also been arrested. We found cases of torture. And we found that Bukele had been locking up opponents, including labor leaders and leaders of the successful fight against mining.

In reality, it’s Nayib Bukele who will be going on trial on October 8 — the trial of global public opinion. If there is any justice left in El Salvador, these five will be freed and the charges dropped. If Bukele instead is insisting on total control of his courts, then the public will see him for what he is: a vindictive bully who has no respect for either human rights or the environment in El Salvador.

On September 26, at protests in front of Salvadoran embassies and consulates in Washington, DC, Ottawa, Toronto, and Vancouver, people gathered to call for justice. IPS joined the Committee in Solidarity With the People of El Salvador (CISPES), and the Washington Ethical Society at the Washington protest.

Bukele hopes to squash democratic opposition to his policies with this trial, and the groups that IPS joins under the rubric of International Allies Against Mining in El Salvador are responding that they will not be moved.

A word of hope, and a word of shame.

In terms of hope, the efforts of organizations in Canada, German, France, and the UK have convinced those four governments to express discontent over the arrests of the five by agreeing to send representatives to the October 8 trial.

In terms of shame, the United States government stands tall. Despite a clear condemnation of the arrests by 17 members of the U.S. Congress, the U.S. government is shamefully remaining silent on the trial.

IPS’s Trade and Mining Project has worked with allies on the ground in El Salvador since 2009, when IPS awarded its prestigious Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award to the National Roundtable on Metals Mining in El Salvador. And just as IPS has fought for justice for 48 years in the assassinations of our IPS colleagues Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt, we will fight for justice for the Salvadoran water defenders.

Like it or not, abortion access has always been viewed as a “women’s problem.” Men rarely talked about it, at least not publicly, and it didn’t seem to rank very high on their list of political priorities.

Not anymore.

Since Donald Trump proudly took credit for overturning Roe v. Wade with his anti-choice Supreme Court appointments, men have been forced to pay more attention — particularly in red states with the most restrictive abortion policies.

As the costs of extreme abortion bans have mounted, men have seen their partners forced to delay or forgo essential medical care — whether bleeding out in emergency room parking lots while suffering a miscarriage or taking on the huge expense of traveling between states. In extreme cases, they’ve seen their partners die.

Husbands with wives who’ve been denied care when a pregnancy goes wrong are now waking up and speaking out.

As a recent Washington Post article highlighted, one such couple had to drive 400 miles from their home in Arkansas to reach an Illinois clinic willing to end a pregnancy with a malformed fetus that would be stillborn if carried to term. The ordeal was enough to convert the husband from abortion opponent to pro-choice advocate working to get an abortion measure on the state ballot.

In states that ban abortion, virtually all clinics have closed since the Dobbs decision obliterated a woman’s right to control her own body. Facilities in bordering states have meanwhile been inundated with pleas from desperate couples seeking help.

More and more men are stepping up and joining Men4Choice, a national organization dedicated to recruiting men in the fight for safe and legal abortion. The group hosts community education events with young pro-choice men and organizes Get Out the Vote events mobilizing hundreds of male allies for contacting voters.

“It’s not just about abortion. It’s about freedom. It’s about power,” founder Oren Jacobson told the Post. A prominent ally is second gentleman Doug Emhoff, who helps the group with outreach to broaden their membership.

According to data reported in the New York Times, more than 171,000 patients traveled for an abortion in 2023. That’s double the number who crossed state lines for an abortion in 2019, accounting for nearly a fifth of recorded abortions. It’s a grim reminder of the upheaval in access since the overturn of Roe v. Wade. 2024 data is of course not complete, but there’s no evidence that cross border trips for the procedure have slowed.

Then there are the uncounted casualties of these draconian bans: women unable to travel out of state for an abortion even though they desperately want or need the procedure. That includes women working at low wage jobs who can’t afford to take time off, cover child care costs while they’re away, and pay for gasoline, food, and lodging for the trip.

Who knows how far this could go? Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) has already signaled his support for prosecuting women who cross state lines for abortions. And in some states, zealots are trying to revive the 1873 Comstock Act to make birth control pills illegal.

There’s no reason to think they’ll stop there. Why not limit men’s choices too? Outlaw vasectomies and take condoms off the drug store shelves. Don’t laugh — it could happen.

Bottom line: men, particularly in restrictive red states, are waking up and speaking out. It’s a good bet their numbers will grow, and access to abortion will at last no longer be seen as just a woman’s problem. Because it isn’t.

“Whoever controls the media controls the mind.” — Jim Morrison

After Ronald Reagan struck down the Fairness Doctrine and the Equal Time Rule, Republican money men got the memo. Whichever party controlled the most states would have a big edge in both the Senate (and thus control of the Supreme Court nominations) and the Electoral College, and most of the low- and medium-population states had relatively inexpensive media markets.

You could buy or lease radio stations for less than a party might spend over a four-year electoral cycle on advertising, so why not simply acquire a few hundred stations across a dozen or more states and program them with rightwing talk radio 24/7?

This became particularly easy after Bill Clinton signed the neoliberal Telecommunications Act of 1996 that ended limits on how many radio or TV stations a single corporation or billionaire could own. Within months of that bill passing into law, Clear Channel and other networks had gone from small regional groups to massive nationwide radio empires.The strategy worked, and today there are over 1,500 rightwing radio stations in America, along with another 700 or so religious stations that regularly endorse Republican memes and candidates for office.

I wrote the original business plan for Air America Radio back in December of 2002 with an article I published that month on Common Dreams.

Right-wing talk radio has been integral to Republican strategy for decades. In 1994, when Newt Gingrich took control of the House of Representatives, he understood the power of talk radio.

“For the first 100 days of the congressional session,” writes Randy Bobbit in his book Us Against Them, “talk radio hosts broadcast live from the capitol building…. When the talk radio throng outgrew the working spaces available, Gingrich allowed some hosts to work in the extra space in his office.”

George W. Bush repeatedly invited talk-radio hosts to broadcast from the White House lawn, although Obama cancelled the tradition; Trump then continued the Republican seduction of the media that dated back to the 1990s.

And the GOP hold on most of American radio seems pretty unshakable.

A few years ago, a billionaire acquired one of the largest networks of these stations (800+ stations) and a senator I’ve known for years invited him and me to meet in his office near the US Capitol. The Senator asked the billionaire — who then owned several hundred stations programming exclusively rightwing content — if he’d ever considered putting some progressive content on the air.

Right-wing talk radio has been integral to Republican strategy for decades.

The billionaire leaned back in his chair, took a deep breath, tented his fingers in front of his mouth, and then said, carefully but emphatically:

“I’ll never put anybody on my air who wants to raise my taxes.”

A few years earlier, I’d sat at lunch at a Talkers Magazine conference with a vice president of what is arguably the most influential of the rightwing radio station networks; the company had started out as a bible publishing business and moved from there into radio and then into political radio.

I asked him if he’d consider putting a progressive show on any of his stations (they were all 100% conservative talk) and he bluntly told me it was “never going to happen” because, he said, “It’s impossible for a liberal to be a true Christian.”

Along with Fox “News,” rightwing talk radio is the main way Republicans have seized and held control over multiple red states. History shows that putting progressive programming on the air in those states could reverse that trend.

Back in 2008, Air America was broadcasting on 62 radio stations that covered a large part of America, including rural areas that had never before experienced progressive talk radio. Most of the stations were leased from Clear Channel, which also owned and programmed rightwing radio on several hundred of its stations.

I’m not aware of any studies proving or disproving the hypothesis, but I believe a large factor in President Obama’s election in 2008 was Air America promoting his candidacy relentlessly. It certainly didn’t hurt: we reached millions of people every single day during that election.

Liberal talk radio carried important messages that were vital to the rural parts of America. That we are all interdependent; that none of us can entirely stand alone unless we are fabulously rich, which is the sales pitch the billionaires try to sell us with their libertarianism; that without government supports and a social safety net, farming would be so vulnerable and financially dangerous (particularly with our weather emergency) that it wouldn’t be viable.

Think about it — political campaigns will pay thousands for a minute of advertising, and find that to be so effective that they continue to buy ads year after year. If that minute can be so influential, how about a host — who’s built a relationship with his or her listeners — telling them dozens of times a day who they should vote for and why? You literally can’t buy promotion like that; you have to buy the station instead.

I wrote the original business plan for Air America Radio back in December of 2002 with an article I published that month on Common Dreams.

Sheldon and Anita Drobney, two venture capitalists from Chicago, read the article and called me up; the next thing I knew I was in the Midwest helping them and Jon Sinton game out how to bring a progressive network into being. Sheldon wrote about it in his book, The Road to Air America, including reprinting my original article.

Impatient to prove the concept of progressive talk radio could work, I started my own program on a local Vermont station in March, 2003, and then moved it to a radio network in 2004. When Air America came online in 2005, we moved it to that network and picked up SiriusXM.

Then Mitt Romney decided he was going to run for president. No slouch, Mr. Romney: he understood the power of media and so apparently directed his private equity firm, Bain Capital, to purchase the entire portfolio of Clear Channel radio stations in the summer of 2008.

Within two years, heading toward the 2012 election when Romney challenged Obama, most all of their stations had flipped their programming from Air America to sports. It killed Air America, although my show was the lone survivor and is still on SiriusXM, Free Speech TV, and stations across the country.

Around the time Romney was buying Clear Channel, a group of Air America talent and I met in DC with a group of Democratic members of the House and Senate. We suggested they should reach out to big Democratic donors and encourage them to buy stations, so if Clear Channel ever pulled the plug on our leases we’d still be on the air.

We argued that, just as Republicans have discovered, it would be a lot cheaper than spending billions on advertising every two or four years.

Initially, the response was positive until one of the senators, who later ran for president, threw cold water on the idea, arguing that the “free market” should determine things like who owns radio stations, rather than a political party or people aligned with it.

Time has passed and word has spread. Entrepreneurs across America have bought or started radio stations — some normal, some “low-power FM” that works just fine in urban areas — to carry progressive programming. It’s a growing trend, and there are even rumors that George Soros is investing in the business.

I’ll be the opening keynote speaker for the Grassroots Radio Conference this week in New Orleans; progressive radio station owners, operators, programmers, and talent from more than half the American states will be there. This is a big step.

A Pew study found that 16 percent of Americans get their election-year information from talk radio. In rural states, where radio stations are cheap, people are far more likely to drive long distances and listen to local radio than in cities; flipping smaller red states shouldn’t be impossible if progressives could put up a few good stations in each state.

While Democrats spend over a billion dollars on paid advertising every two years, and several billion every four years, Republicans use this model of long-term trusting relationships with radio hosts to get out the vote for the GOP.

They know the truth of the old advertising saying, “Nothing beats word-of-mouth.” And a recent Neilson survey supports that adage when it found that 92 percent of consumers “believe recommendations from friends and family over all forms of advertising.”

In 2016, right-wing talk radio gave Donald Trump the boost he needed to put him in the White House. The hosts loved him and promoted him relentlessly. The same went for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, as talk radio became the primary locus for swift-boating John Kerry.

It works. Every weekday, all across America, people get into their cars and drive to or from work listening to the radio; as the nation’s largest statistics organization, Statista, notes, “During an average week in September 2020, radio reached 90.9 percent of all American men aged between 35 and 64 years of age.”

Radio engages, persuades, and informs — and, when done right, builds trust. And the first rule of politics is that trust wins elections.

In politics, just a few points usually decides winners and losers — and talk radio has reliably delivered that incremental edge to the GOP for three decades.

Democrats must get into the talk-radio game. As the old saying goes, “You can’t win if you don’t play.”

Bomb threats against city hall. Proud Boys marching. Schools emptied. The residents of Springfield, Ohio are learning firsthand what it means to be caught in the crosshairs of Donald Trump’s dangerous tirades against immigrants in this nation. Long after the headlines have moved onto Trump’s next target, this town will be left to pick up the pieces.

We say “next target” because the Republican presidential nominee’s comments against Haitian immigrants during the September 10 debate were not a one-off, but an inevitable result of the anti-Blackness deeply rooted in our nation’s immigration policies and narratives. Until leaders in both parties step up to reject this racism, we can expect the consequences to continue.

This pernicious history goes back hundreds of years. Although Haiti became an independent nation in 1804, the United States refused to officially recognize Haiti’s independence for nearly another six decades - because white politicians feared the revolution would spread to enslaved Black people in the U.S. But echoes of the past reverberate. In 2021, horrific images surfaced showing border patrol agents on horseback, whips in hand, using excessive force against Haitian families along the Rio Grande.

Trump himself has a long track record of discriminating against Black people in this country, including but not limited to Black immigrants. Decades ago, he systematically denied housing to Black tenants in New York. He called for the execution of five innocent young men of color known as the Central Park Five and has continued peddling birther conspiracies against President Obama. During his presidency, Trump called African and Haitian nations “shithole countries” and instituted Muslim and Africa bans, the effects of which are still felt today.

But racist immigration policies transcend political party. Last year, the Biden administration began requiring people fleeing danger to use the CBP One app to make their asylum appointments – among the app’s many glitches included facial recognition technology that failed to consistently recognize the faces of Black people. In June of this year, Biden placed a harsh and arbitrary limit on the number of people who can seek asylum, effectively slamming the door on people trying to access safety. These policy failures disproportionally harm Black immigrants, though their effects are widespread.

One of the key lessons of the events in Springfield is that anti-Blackness doesn’t just hurt the intended target, but whole communities. While those who called in bomb threats may have aimed to hurt Haitian immigrants, a far larger group of residents experienced the evacuations of schools, hospital lockdowns, and the cancelation of an annual festival. This is unsurprising: we have seen repeatedly that attempts to harm one group of people have far-reaching ripple effects. Whether we are immigrants or born here in the U.S., our lives are intertwined, and it is in our collective interest to confront this racism and make clear it has no place in the future of this nation.

Looking back at our nation’s history, we know American cities have a rich history of integrating immigrants even after a bumpy start, including Irish and Italian immigrants in 19th and 20th centuries in New York, Liberians in the 20th century in Philadelphia, and more recently Ukrainians fleeing war. Those arriving from Haiti and African countries must be welcomed too. The federal government must do its job and support welcoming efforts so places like Springfield can access resources for integrating new residents.

Springfield’s leaders have been clear that Haitian immigrants have revitalized the city, working and contributing to the community. Once newly arrived people get their bearings, they become friends, neighbors, and leaders who expand cultural life, grow the economy, pay taxes, and work essential jobs. In 2022 (the most recent data available), immigrants in Ohio paid $7.0 billion in taxes, including $2.4 billion in state and local taxes. What the city needs is support to help incorporate this new group of people, including translation services and hospital staffing. These are real but solvable logistical challenges that deserve practical solutions – not the racism, dehumanization, and lies from shameless opportunists like Donald Trump and JD Vance.

It is past time that we turn the page. We as a country must prioritize confronting anti-Blackness in our immigration system and reject the tired Birth of a Nation political playbook of stoking fear using immigrants of color as scapegoats. Our collective future depends on it.

In Donald Trump’s unsuccessful effort to reverse his 2020 election defeat, he exploited the vulnerabilities of the Electoral College process. For the election of 2024, he found new ones.

An Anti-Democratic Process

A presidential candidate’s political party names a slate of “electors” to represent that candidate in the Electoral College. When voters cast their ballots, they’re actually voting for a candidate’s electors. Only the slate of a state’s popular vote winner counts toward the 270-electoral votes required to win the presidency.

Although the courts withstood Trump’s specious attacks on the 2020 election, the past is not prologue.

The process requires several steps:

• To determine the popular vote winner, each county board assembles the results from its precincts and certifies the totals.

• The county boards report their results to the state’s election board (and/or the secretary of state). The statewide totals go to the governor.

• The governor signs a final “Certificate of Ascertainment” listing the names on the electoral slates for each candidate, the number of votes each received, and which individuals have been appointed as the state's electors.

• The Certificate goes to the National Archives where, along with all other states’ certifications, it waits to be counted at Congress’ special session the following January.

“For Want of a Nail, the Shoe Was Lost…”

Every step in the Electoral College process is fraught with danger to democracy. And Trump knows it.

• In an effort to reverse his swing state losses in 2020, he twisted the arms of election officials in Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, urging them not to certify the results. They rebuffed him.

• In Georgia, Joe Biden won the popular vote, but Trump pressured Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger—a Trump supporter—to “find” enough votes to make Trump the winner. Raffensperger resisted, and Trump now faces 32 felony criminal charges in the state.

• Trump pressed Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and Arizona Governor Doug Ducey not to certify their respective states’ results. They refused.

• Meanwhile, Trump’s allies created slates of his “alternate electors” in key swing states. Those Trump supporters swore under oath that they were their states’ proper representatives in the Electoral College. But Trump had lost the popular vote in those states, and more than 60 court cases confirmed his defeat. Many of his “alternate electors” are now facing criminal charges for their false statements.

• At a special session of Congress on January 6, Vice President Mike Pence became Trump’s last hope to retain power. If no candidate received a majority of electoral votes, the election would move to the U.S. House of Representatives where each state’s congressional delegation would get a single vote. Republicans would have the advantage, and Trump would win the presidency after losing the election.

• Because Pence would preside over Congress’ special session, Trump urged him not to count Biden’s electoral votes from key swing states. That gambit failed too.

With local election officials, governors, and Trump’s vice president resisting his unlawful attempts to subvert the election, Trump played his final card: Inciting the violent insurrection to block the transition of power.

Unsettling Precedent

Having learned from their mistakes in 2020, Trump and his MAGA allies have now corrupted the system from within. More than 100 “election deniers” who have refused to accept Trump’s 2020 defeat now serve as local election officials in the eight swing states that will decide the 2024 contest: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Some have already demonstrated their willingness to wreak post-election havoc.

• In 2022, the Republican-led commission of Otero County, New Mexico, refused to certify primary election results. One commission member was co-founder of “Cowboys for Trump.” The Democratic secretary of state sued to force board certification of the vote totals.

• In 2024, two Republican members of a Michigan county board refused to certify the results of an election that led to the recall of three commission members.

• In Arizona, GOP lawmakers sued to reverse the state’s top Democratic officials’ requirement that local boards automatically validate their election results.

• In Georgia, Trump’s allies have suppressed the vote—and found new ways not to count the ones they don’t like. At his August 3 rally in Atlanta, Trump announced the state’s three GOP election board members by name, calling them his “pit bulls” fighting for victory. Three days later, those members formed a 3-2 majority adopting a new rule empowering local boards to pursue a “reasonable inquiry” (undefined) into election results before certifying an election. Ten days later, the board asserted the authority to “examine all election related documentation created during the conduct of elections prior to certification of results.”

• And Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, said that if he had been vice president on January 6, 2021, he would have insisted that “Pennsylvania, Georgia, and many others” have “multiple slates of electors.” He would not have certified Biden’s 2020 victory.

Don’t Worry, Be Happy!

A prominent election law scholar assures us that the weaknesses in the Electoral College process are not a problem. Notre Dame Law Professor Derek Muller argues that local election officials perform only “ministerial” acts—“little more than making sure all precincts have reported and the arithmetic is correct.”

“[T]here are ample safeguards to ensure ballots are tabulated accurately and election results are certified in a timely manner,” Prof. Muller urges.

Muller is talking about judges. He believes that they remain the critical guardrails protecting voters from MAGA loyalists in key election positions because “[a] court can quickly and easily ensure election results are certified in a timely fashion.”

But “can” doesn’t mean “will.” And some “won’t.”

Although the courts withstood Trump’s specious attacks on the 2020 election, the past is not prologue. For more than three years, Trump and his allies have pushed his Big Lie, poisoned the body politic with false claims about non-existent “voter fraud,” and infiltrated the election system with MAGA loyalists determined to assure Trump’s 2024 victory.

And for more than three years, Americans have witnessed the courts’ epic failure to hold Trump accountable for his treasonous misconduct.

A Better Plan

Relying solely on the courts is a prescription for interregnum confusion, chaos, and violence. Trump is desperate and afraid. If he loses the election, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.

Despite the dismal judicial record of the past three years, perhaps the legal system will begin to deal with Trump and his MAGA allies effectively. Meanwhile, here’s another idea:

Ignore Trump’s outrageous rhetorical distractions and shine a bright light on his dark mission – winning at all costs. To prevail, he’s willing to dismantle democracy.

Social Security is a top issue for voters in the 2024 election. It is especially key for older Americans, who vote at higher rates than their younger counterparts. Indeed, for the 67 million current beneficiaries, their families, and the millions more working families approaching retirement age, Social Security is a bread-and-butter issue.

Donald Trump understands the politics of Social Security and the risk it poses to his campaign. He is distracting from his history of supporting benefit cuts by promising to end the taxation of benefits (along with many other phony promises of tax cuts) and lying about undocumented immigrants receiving Social Security. His campaign is flooding Pennsylvania and other swing states with pro-Trump and anti-Harris mailers, as well as TV ads, about Social Security.

Voters have shown that they will support the candidate who fights to protect and strengthen Social Security.

The best way for the Harris campaign to counteract the Trump narrative on Social Security is by pouring resources into a narrative of its own: Kamala Harris is fighting to strengthen Social Security by requiring billionaires to contribute their fair share, while Donald Trump will slash Social Security (as he has tried to do in the past) if he returns to the White House.

Data for Progress’ polling demonstrates that Social Security should be a winning issue for Democrats, as their policies on Social Security align with the views of the overwhelming majority of Americans. Seventy-four percent of likely voters want to increase Social Security benefits, while only 2% want to cut them.

Kamala Harris agrees. According to her campaign website:

“Vice President Harris will protect Social Security and Medicare against relentless attacks from Donald Trump and his extreme allies. She will strengthen Social Security and Medicare for the long haul by making millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share in taxes. She will always fight to ensure that Americans can count on getting the benefits they earned.”

And yet, with only weeks to go before the election, most voters are unaware of where the parties stand on this crucial issue. Only 22% of voters say that they know “a lot” about the Democratic and Republican plans for Social Security, and one-third of voters know “nothing at all.”

Even when directly asked about Harris’ position, less than half of voters are aware of her support for strengthening Social Security. Just as importantly, only 44% percent of voters know that Trump has supported cutting benefits.

While these figures are alarming, they also present the Harris campaign with a massive opportunity to inform, energize, and mobilize voters by making Social Security a key election issue.

The best way for the Harris campaign to counteract the Trump narrative on Social Security is by pouring resources into a narrative of its own.

When voters are informed that Harris supports increasing Social Security benefits, while Trump supports cutting them, Harris draws in an additional 4% of likely voters in a head-to-head race against Trump.

Voters have shown that they will support the candidate who fights to protect and strengthen Social Security. During the 2022 midterms, Democrats in swing districts won by campaigning on strengthening Social Security. Data from AARP found that older voters in swing districts backed Democrats by a 3-point margin, defying the stereotype of seniors as a conservative voting bloc. This happened because Democrats hammered home their commitment to Social Security, and voters responded.

The Harris campaign is making significant progress in reaching out to seniors on drug prices, and a similar focus is needed with regards to Social Security. If the campaign can break through the noise, voters will know that Kamala Harris is the only candidate fighting for seniors.

This is a most unusual election season. While the media focuses on Georgia and Nevada polling, the world is aflame. Those who have the greatest power to stop the killing are either missing in action or profoundly complicit as they refuse to exercise their diplomatic leverage.

President Biden refuses to join rising European voices urging a ceasefire and negotiations for the Ukraine War and continues to deliver weapons to Israel that make the ongoing genocide in Gaza and murderous devastation of southern Lebanon possible. Donald Trump has welcomed Russia to invade NATO nations that don’t spend at least 2% of their GDP on their militaries, while he urges Netanyahu to “finish the job” in Gaza. Meanwhile Kamala Harris poses as a military hawk, promising the world’s “most lethal military” while talking her way pas serious questions.

Wars and Mounting Dangers

U.N. General Secretary Guterres warns that “The world is becoming unhinged as geopolitical tensions rise and it seems incapable of coming together to respond to mounting challenges.” There are disturbing parallels to the forces that triggered the First World War. As in 1914, there are tensions between rising and declining powers, arms races with new technologies, complex alliance structures, intensifying nationalism, territorial competition, economic integration and intense competition, and wild card actors. Yet—unlike Sarajevo in 1914—an incident, accident, or miscalculation, today could trigger escalation to thermonuclear war.

With the Ukraine War, we face the dangers of political and military miscalculations leading to vertical (weapons) or horizontal (geographic) escalation. After its many nuclear threats, what might the Kremlin’s response be if Biden gives the okay and Kyiv launches a long-range missile at a Russian city, if Ukraine actually threatens Russia control of Crimea, or if a senior Russian political leader is killed by Ukrainian drones hitting in Moscow? What would happen if Russian missiles malfunction or purposely hit Polish cities?

Putin could respond by launching low-yield nuclear warheads. In addition to the resulting unimaginable devastation of Ukraine, our lives would also hang in the balance. There is no certainty that fighting a limited nuclear war is possible. A first limited strike could easily escalate to Armageddon.

In the Middle East, unable to eliminate Hamas or the idea of Palestinian nationalism, Prime Minister Netanyahu is pressing a second and greater Palestinian Nakba, and with his campaign of assassinations, the state terrorism of exploding pagers, and with his bombing campaign he seeks ethnic cleansing in southern Lebanon. Iran’s nuclear infrastructure could become an Israeli target, should the U.S. be drawn into the wider war with Netanyahu’s assassinations and bombings in Damascus and Iran.

On numerous occasions—most recently during the Iraq Wars—the U.S. has prepared and threatened to initiate nuclear attacks. What President Putin will tolerate on Russia’s southwestern flank before again rattling his nuclear sword is an unknown. But recall that in the first days of the 1973 October War Gold Meir threatened to unleash Israel’s “Temple Weapons.” We cannot expect the Arab Street to remain silent in the face of a second Nakba or that Hezbollah and Tehran will continue to calibrate their responses to Israel’s brutality.

Further east, the planet U.S.-Chinese competition for regional hegemony in the Taiwan Strait, the South and East China Seas, an accident or miscalculation could all too easily spark a great power, and potentially nuclear. The same applies to U.S.-Russian provocative shows of force in the Baltic and Black Seas. And then there are Korea and Sudan....

These wars and confrontations serve as major obstacles to the cooperation needed to address not only essential human needs like health, housing, education, jobs and more, but the other existential threat to humanity: the climate emergency. It is not for nothing that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warns that it is 90 seconds to midnight.

Common Security: A Way Out of Here

Decades ago, Bob Dylan sang “there must be some kind of way out of here.” There is. It is the alternative that, buoyed by the protests of millions of people, served as the diplomatic paradigm that ended the Cold War: the ancient truth that no nation can achieve security at the expense of its rivals. With very few exceptions, and despite nations’ differences, peaceful coexistence and security can be achieved only through mutual recognition, and respectful, if difficult, win-win negotiations between rivals. It is called common security diplomacy.

Common Security is a realist, not an idealistic, approach to stop the killing, to relieve suffering, and to ensure human survival. Those who advocate common security have no illusions about how difficult such diplomacy can be or that it can address every problem we face.

In the early 1980s, as the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race and threats brought us to the brink of nuclear apocalypse. Sweden’s Prime Minister Olof Palme had the wisdom to convene The Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues. It was comprised of the most senior national security advisors to Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev, including U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Georgi Arbatov Gorbachev’s senior security advisor, Egon Bahr Germany’s Secretary of State, and others. Their mandate was to develop a strategy to halt the spiraling arms race and prevent a nuclear war. After difficult but rich discussions, they recognized that fears, as well as bureaucratic and vested interests, drove the arms race. They agreed that when for defensive purposes one side augments its nuclear forces, its rival experiences that as a threatening escalation, and responds in kind, inciting new fears and fueling a spiraling arms race.

The Commission’s answer was to insist on difficult diplomacy in which each side names its fears, does the difficult work of discerning win-win solutions that addressed legitimate fears and enhances each side’s sense of security. Their 1982 Common Security Report provided the paradigm for disarmament diplomacy that followed and resulted in the Intermediate Forces Treaty. The Soviets agreed to forego deployment of nuclear armed SS 20 missiles which would have held all of Europe hostage. And the U.S. committed not to deploy Pershing II missiles that could devastate Moscow and decapitate Soviet leadership in the Kremlin in eight minutes, as well as disavowing deployment of first strike nuclear armed cruise missiles in Europe. With that agreement, and the Gorbachev-Reagan 1985 statement that nuclear war cannot be won and must not be fought, the Cold War functionally came to an end in 1987 two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

We should also appreciate that it was popular movements, with millions of people demonstrating in cities and towns across the West and beyond for a halt to the arms race, as well as the wisdom of statesmen, that fueled the creation of the Palme Commission and its recommendations.

The INF Treaty was followed by the Paris Charter, the NATO Russia Founding Act, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation’s 1999 Charter for European Security. Each included the commitment that no nation would seek to enhance its national security at the expense of another. These commitments were enhanced by the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

I am sorry to say that it was U.S. arrogance, beginning with President Bill Clinton, combined with the residual fears of many Eastern European nations, that led to NATO’s expansion to Russia’s borders and thus to the decline and then collapse of the European Common Security order.

To prevent a catastrophic war, the Palme Commission had recognized the need to engage in diplomacy. It stressed that “A doctrine of common security must replace the present expedient of deterrence through armaments. International peace must rest on a commitment to joint survival rather than the threat of mutual destruction.” It announced its support for the United Nations’ and Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty’s “goal of general and complete disarmament.”

In 2021 and 2022, as great power confrontations again posed existential threats to survival and the Doomsday Clock approached midnight, non-governmental organizations updated the call for common security diplomacy to prevent catastrophe and to provide a foundation for a sustainable, if not perfect, peaceful international system. Led by the Palme Center, the International Peace Bureau, and the International Confederation of Trade Unions, and backed by a commission of present and former government and U.N. officials and scholars, they produced a successor report, Common Security 2022: For Our Shared Future. Drawing on the Palme Report, it reiterated that ”global peace and security are created jointly—that when your counterpart is not secure, you will not be secure either,” and they pointed to Common Security’s potential to “bring us back from the brink.”

Common Security 2022 was based on six principles that are universally applicable:

1. All people have the right to human security.

2. Building trust between nations and peoples is fundamental to peaceful and sustainable human existence.

3. There can be no common security without nuclear disarmament, strong limitations on conventional weapons, and reduced military expenditure.

4. Global and regional cooperation, multilateralism, and the rule of law are crucial to tackling many of the world’s challenges.

5. Dialogue, conflict prevention, and confidence-building measures must replace aggression and military force as a means of resolving disputes.

6. Better regulation, international law, and responsible governance need to be extended to address new military technologies.
Common Security for Middle East, Ukraine, and the Indo-Pacific Region

How might these apply to the horrors of the current Middle East and Ukraine Wars and to the new cold war across the Indo-Pacific region?.

Hamas’s October 7 massacres were indeed abominations, but by blocking nonviolent opposition and meaningful diplomacy to brutal decades-long occupations, something had to explode. Neither Hamas nor Palestinian nationalism will be eliminated, even as there is no safe place to hide for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank or for increasing numbers of Lebanese. Predictably and tragically Israelis have earned and suffer pariah state isolation. Israel’s economy is flagging, and the country’s northern and southernmost communities have become uninhabitable.

Since the UN’s 1947 partition of Palestine, the world has understood the importance of a common security solution to this legacy of colonialism. The dignity and rights to national self-determination and security must be respected for each of the two peoples as well as between Israel and its neighbors. U.N. resolutions, the Arab Peace plan of 2022, and the sometimes secret 1970s and 80s negotiations between some of Israel’s founders and senior PLO figures have all sought a path for a two-state solution.

Since Israel’s conquest of the West Bank in 1967, Israeli settlements and highways have been designed to eliminate the possibility of the creation of a credible Palestinian state. But, as the former Israeli general and courageous peace campaigner Mattityahu Peled argued, what humans have created can be changed by humans. The establishment of a single secular democratic state may be an ideal worth aspiring to, but with decades of Palestinian and Israeli traumas that will reverberate for generations, such a possibility cannot be realized in the foreseeable future. It can only emerge after trust is restored following years of peaceful coexistence and mutual recognition. As the Palestinian journalist Ramy Khoury explains, with a two state agreement, the spectacular potential of each of these peoples and of the Arab world can be released and realized.

Khoury also reports that the destruction of Israel has never been Hezbollah’s ambition. Rather it has been to defend Lebanon’s long marginalized Shiite population, especially from Israeli attacks. That it would act in solidarity with Gazans under Israel’s indiscriminate massacres should come as no surprise,

Then Ukraine. Over the centuries it has been a divided nation. Its borders have constantly changed. It has been part of the Lithuanian, Polish, and Russian empires. It has been divided by language, religion, and economic ties. It is the borderland over which armies flowed in both directions. In addition to the devastation of Ukraine and its people, the post-Cold War security architecture was shattered on February 24, 2022. With it went all but a few remnants of trust and strategic stability established over sixty years

We now have numerous proposals for Ukrainian peace or an end to the war: Russian and Ukrainian, Chinese, Brazilian, and more. Most urgently we need a ceasefire and interrelated common security negotiations in three dimensions: Ukrainian-Russian leading to a Ukraine which is a neutral sovereign nation with credible security guarantees and as the Czech president recently acknowledged, territorial compromise; U.S/NATO- Russian negotiations for a new European security architecture; and U.S.-Russian negotiations to restore a modicum of trust and strategic stability, including renewal of arms control and even nuclear disarmament negotiations.

In conclusion and turning to the competition for regional and potentially global hegemony, there are the growing dangers of war across the Indo-Pacific region. A working group comprised of engaged scholars and national peace movement leaders from South Korea, Japan, India, Mongolia, the Philippines, the United States and the International Peace Bureau in Germany will soon release a Common Security report for the Indo-Pacific Region.* It identifies off ramps from the sleepwalking marches to what Australia’s former Prime Minister and current ambassador to the U.S. Kevin Rudd terms an “avoidable war.” The report’s key recommendations include:

1. Commitments to common security diplomacy and war under any circumstances must be prevented. Build common security via negotiations, diplomacy, trust, tolerance, and understanding of other cultures.

2. The U.S., China, and Taiwan take actions simultaneously to lower tensions in the Taiwan Strait to avert war. The Strait should be demilitarized, with a shared understanding that the solution to the Taiwan issue should not be by military means. There are specific recommendations for Beijing, Taipei, and the U.S.

3. Declare the end of the Korean War and conclude a Peace treaty. Reduce conventional armaments in Northeast Asia, denuclearize the Korean Peninsula and establish a Northeast Asian Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone. War prevention and peacebuilding forums are needed that involve all parties to the Six Party Talks.

4. Demilitarization and denuclearization of the South China Sea. Respect the security interests of all nations involved in the Law of the Sea Treaty and the U.N. International Court of Arbitration decision. Multilateral and bilateral ASEAN-Chinese negotiations for a South China Sea code of conduct.

5. The legitimate security interests of small states must be respected by the major powers. The role of small states in facilitating regional security cooperation must be recognized.

6. Universalization of No First Use nuclear policies, Resumption of U.S.-Russian arms control negotiations. Strategic stability diplomacy between the U.S., China, Russia, and Japan. Establishment of nuclear weapons-free zones. Freeze in military spending as well as a halt to high-tech weaponization research, development, and deployment.

7. Avoid crystallization of strategic bloc building and related military alliances.

8. Active engagement of the peace movement - nationally and internationally.

How to achieve a second common security order? Several years ago, Noam Chomsky put it well, reminding us that we know the solutions to the existential threats facing humanity. The question, he said, is whether we have the political will to bring them into being.

This article is based on a talk given at a side event organized by the International Peace Bureau and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung during the United Nations Summit for the Future.

*Common Security In the Indo-Pacific Region is scheduled for release on October 8, 2024 and will be found here as well as on other websites.

As racial tensions escalate in Springfield, Ohio, Haitian families are facing violent threats and harassment, reflecting a wider pattern of fear and division that’s being felt across the country. This isn’t just about racism and xenophobia; it’s also about political leaders exploiting white fear to distract from systemic failures.

But there is hope. Shelbyville, Tennessee—a town with similar challenges—demonstrates how communities can transform this tide of hate into a movement for justice.

While smaller and less white than Springfield, Shelbyville shares a common profile: Both towns have faced long-standing economic hardship, spurred by the loss of manufacturing jobs. Both have also seen more recent immigrant arrivals. With this combination of economic struggle and demographic shifts, both towns have been targeted for racial scapegoating and organized white hate.

Unlike many anti-racist efforts among white people that focus on personal behavior or privilege awareness for a liberal, middle-class audience, the BCLP focused on real-world issues affecting white working-class people.

Much like how the Proud Boys and KKK descended on Springfield, white nationalists set their sights on Shelbyville five years ago. They chose the town because Somali refugee resettlement challenged their vision of a “white ethnostate.”

But instead of giving in to fear, many in Shelbyville pushed back. They organized counter events, like a pozole potluck just blocks away from the white nationalists’ rally—a peaceful, community-centered response that drew far more participants than the hate rally itself.

Similarly, many in Springfield have flocked to Haitian businesses in support, rejecting white, racist hate.

In Shelbyville, a handful of residents knew more needed to be done to confront the hate long-term, and they could not leave the fight solely to their immigrant neighbors. They needed to address the root causes of division and show white community members that their true enemies weren’t refugees or immigrants.

They started small, going door to door to alert neighbors about the hate group’s presence, identifying allies, and asking residents about their real concerns. What they found was telling—most people were far more worried about economic issues than about immigration. Residents complained about a few exploitative landlords monopolizing rental housing in the mostly low-income town.

Springfield faces similar challenges: a severe lack of affordable housing (a crisis across the nation) and politicians blaming Haitian Americans for those problems instead of tackling the real culprits—such as failed policies and exploitative landlords. Indeed, residents of Springfield have long faced a lack of adequate services across the board. One Springfield resident, interviewed by journalist Aymann Ismail, explained how he receives just $23 per month in food stamps, nowhere near enough to survive. When pressed further, many residents agreed that government neglect, not Haitian families, was responsible for their struggles.

Back in Shelbyville, the rejection of organized hate grew into something bigger—the Bedford County Listening Project (BCLP). The group adopted a “shared interest” approach, highlighting how white residents, struggling just as much as their immigrant neighbors, could benefit from joining forces to fight systemic injustices. The BCLP shows white residents that racism isn’t just morally wrong—it is a tool used by the powerful to divide them and maintain the status quo.

Unlike many anti-racist efforts among white people that focus on personal behavior or privilege awareness for a liberal, middle-class audience, the BCLP focused on real-world issues affecting white working-class people. They organized for tenant’s rights, fought to improve housing policies, and even helped elect one of their own to the city council—unseating a decades-long incumbent. They also tackled racism head-on, playing a key role in defeating an anti-refugee ordinance in 2019 and standing up to the KKK’s efforts to intimidate the town during the 2020 election.

This isn’t some story about a group of progressive activists. As their staff organizer explained, “None of them were activists prior to this. And nobody was Democrat.” Some even voted for former U.S. President Donald Trump in 2016, though most had not voted at all. What united them wasn’t ideology, but a shared desire to improve their lives and community.

One BCLP member summed it up: “That [anti-]refugee thing was doing nothing. It was just another dumb tactic” to distract from what really matters—jobs, schools, and housing.

The Shelbyville case is proof that when communities come together—across racial and class lines—they can challenge hate and demand real change. The real question is which groups will reach these communities first, those like the Bedford County Listening Project or hate groups like the Proud Boys?

The BCLP isn’t an isolated example. It’s part of a growing movement, supported by national groups like Showing Up for Racial Justice and other grassroots organizations that are working to unite predominately white communities with people of color in the fight for justice. These groups know that we’re all in this fight together, and they need our support.

As our nation encounters mounting levels of extremism and political violence, intentionally fueled by mainstream political actors, communities like Shelbyville and Springfield show us two ways forward. One succumbs to fear and division, while the other fights for solidarity and justice.

The choice is ours.

Thursday was the United Nations International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. This day was initially declared in 2013 as a way to heighten awareness of the threat of nuclear weapons in an attempt to educate the world community and reaffirm its commitment to global nuclear disarmament. Next year is the 80th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the first and only use of nuclear weapons, immediately killing an estimated 210,000 men, women, and children with scores dying in the ensuing years from cancers, burns, injuries, and other lethal effects of the bombs.

Following World War II, nuclear disarmament has been one of the highest priorities of the United Nations and was the subject of the first General Assembly resolution in 1946. Unfortunately, the aftermath of WWII also saw the Cold War and the first nuclear arms race between the United States and the former Soviet Union. By 1986 this armed the world with 70,300 nuclear weapons. Through arms reduction treaties over the years that number has been reduced to approximately 12,100 weapons this year.

While the significant reductions in nuclear weapons is notable, the knowledge of the humanitarian consequences following the use of nuclear weapons from only a single weapon or a limited or full-scale nuclear war confirms the insanity of the very existence of any number of these weapons.

With the passing of the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, let us ensure that future generations look back on our time here and realize that we saw the threat to our existence and took the necessary actions to eliminate that possibility.

Yet today we remain as close or closer to nuclear war than at any time since the dropping of the first nuclear weapons. The world is full of potential nuclear hot spots: the current war in Ukraine with Russian President Vladimir Putin threatening the use of battlefield nuclear weapons and more, the war raging in Israel against Gaza, the constant tensions between India and Pakistan, the tensions between China and Taiwan, and finally ongoing tensions with North Korea.

These flash points, in addition to the growing catastrophic effects of climate change resulting in further international conflict, as well as disruptive technologies, including cyber attacks and the potential use of AI, caused the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to move their infamous Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight for the second year in a row.

In this setting, and in the midst of the current U.S. presidential campaign, mainstream media has largely been oblivious to or unaware of the growing national and international nuclear abolition movement and efforts therein. The presidential campaign has seen no discussion of nuclear weapons or abolition, and only candidate Trump has mentioned them in vague reference to deterrence or World War III. Neither candidate has volunteered positions during this campaign on nuclear arsenals or nuclear abolition, due to either not wanting to appear weak or a lack of understanding of the risks of their continued existence.

Certainly the awareness and understanding of the consequences of nuclear weapons and their use can be overwhelming, paralyzing, and often daunting to address. Yet we must be aware of the risks they pose and the opportunities before us. This past year has seen significant increased awareness of nuclear weapons following the Oppenheimer film; the subsequent New York Times series, “At The Brink,” covering our nuclear world; and finally Annie Jacobsen’s New York Times best-selling book, Nuclear War: A Scenario, which describes in graphic detail the end of civilization playing out in 24 minutes, following a hypothetical nuclear attack by North Korea on the United States and the self-fulfilling prophecy of the reflexive apocalyptic response. This book should be mandatory reading for any presidential candidate or member of Congress, requiring their response for how they plan to prevent this scenario.

On this week of the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, there is much happening, both internationally and here in the United States. As people are made aware of the sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, they are demanding abolition of these weapons and for our leaders to take action immediately. Internationally, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has three new nations ratifying the treaty this week, bringing the total to 73—with 25 additional signatory nations awaiting ratification.

This movement has been spearheaded by ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear weapons. In the United States there is an intersectional grassroots movement that is rapidly growing called “Back From the Brink.” Supporting the TPNW, this movement calls on the United States to take a leadership role in convening the nine nuclear nations for a verifiable, time bound effort to abolish all nuclear weapons. In addition, it includes the actionable precautionary measures until abolition has been realized. These include a no-first-use policy, eliminating the authority of any president to initiate nuclear war, removing our weapons from hair trigger alert, and finally canceling the plan to replace all of our nuclear weapons with new, enhanced nuclear weapons.

Back From the Brink has the support of 490 organizations, 77 cities and counties, eight state legislative bodies, 44 members of Congress, and 428 municipal and state officials. It also has a U.S. House of Representatives resolution, H. Res 77, sponsored by Massachusetts Rep. Jim McGovern and supported by 44 members of Congress. Back From the Brink can be endorsed by all, and currently there are 19 local hubs across the nation working collaboratively and in coalition with their communities to build support for this effort.

With the passing of the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, let us ensure that future generations look back on our time here and realize that we saw the threat to our existence and took the necessary actions to eliminate that possibility. Each of us has a role to play in making this a reality.

Imagine yourself in space, looking down on our world and yet unable to return any time soon.

Consider it our bad luck, in fact, that Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams were the two Americans sent to the International Space Station, 250 miles above this planet, for a few days in June and now find themselves stuck there until perhaps next February. If only it had been former U.S. President Donald Trump and running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio).

If only indeed.

Of course, in some sense, both of them are already in deep space, far beyond where Wilmore and Williams find themselves. And if you don’t believe me, just ask any dog or cat from Springfield, Ohio.

If, however, you want an appropriate nickname for him under the circumstances, here’s a possibility to consider: “Satan.” After all, as far as we can tell, he has no hesitation about the idea of taking humanity to hell and back, while he has the time of his life.

Here’s the truly sad thing, though: if Donald Trump were once again to become president (and Vance his veep), the rest of us would undoubtedly find ourselves spinning somewhere in space with nowhere to go, nowhere to land, and only piles of AR-15s in sight (and all too sadly in use).

In fact, let’s not mince words. Were Donald Trump reelected this November, he would not only be the oldest president ever to take office, but he might represent nothing less than the all-too-literal end of the world, at least as we’ve known it all these centuries, even if in distinctly slow motion. And typically of The Donald, it would happen slowly enough that, at age 78, he wouldn’t be around to pay the full price or even take the full blame for the nightmare to follow.

Think of it this way, if you want: His election would give the phrase “hot-button issue” a genuinely new meaning. (And believe me, I’m already sweating!)

After all, right now, in September 2024, we’re living on a planet that has never, not at any time in human history, been hotter. Our world has, in fact, been setting remarkable heat records, one after another, month after month—August was the 15th straight month to be the hottest of its kind ever—year after year. In fact, 2023 set a global heat record and 2024 has a 95% probability of smashing that record. And the weather of such an overheating planet should already be taking your breath away, even if we’re still early (more or less) in a process that could indeed create nothing less than a genuine hell on Earth.

All the greenhouse gases that have been and are being sent into the planet’s atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels are creating ever more heat, about 90% of which is at present being absorbed by global waters and is already altering our world in stunning ways. Recently, for instance, there has been devastating climate-change-related flooding globally, whether you’re talking about parts of China, Nigeria, or most recently central Europe that suddenly found themselves underwater (while, by the way, Portugal was burning with more than 100 fires). The droughts have similarly been horrific, while the fires—oh, yes, those fires!—have been beyond fierce, including the recent blazes in Southern California and the 1.9 million (yes, 1.9 million!) acres scorched in Oregon’s record summer fire season. And don’t forget those Canadian fires of 2023 and 2024 that set such grim records in a world where “nearly 12 million hectares [of forests]—an area roughly the size of Nicaragua—burned in 2023, topping the previous record by about 24%.”

And the heat? Well, don’t get me started on that. This year, records have been smashed again (and again) across the American West—and significant other parts of the planet.

And let’s face it, even without Donald Trump, the United States, a country that likes to think of itself as the good guy in so many situations, has historically been the worst of bad guys when it comes to what’s now known as climate change (a term, by the way, that’s far too mild and unassuming for the set of distinctly [un]natural phenomena it represents). It’s true that China, while installing significantly more solar and wind power than the rest of the planet combined (no, that is not a typo!), still beats the U.S. right now when it comes to pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, though its emissions may peak soon.

Thank you, coal, of which China also now uses more than the rest of the planet combined and is still building coal-fired power plants in a striking fashion! Nonetheless, when it comes to filling the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses, this country might be considered top dog (sorry, Springfield!) if you take into account China’s population size and ours. Not exactly something to be proud of even without Donald Trump.

In fact, to be fair to The Donald, while President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris did indeed take some significant steps toward greening this country, mainly through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), during their time in office, the U.S. has remained the leader globally in producing oil and natural gas. In 2023, for the sixth year in a row, it set an all-time global record for oil production and another for natural gas exports. And don’t forget about methane, a truly potent greenhouse gas, where the American record is equally grim.

Still, the man who demanded a billion dollars in campaign contributions from a group of leading oil executives and lobbyists at a dinner at Mar-a-Lago last spring, while promising to reverse Biden administration environmental rules and regulations, has, as Kamala Harris reminded us in their debate, repeatedly dismissed the phenomenon as a “hoax.” Worse yet, it’s obvious that, should he enter the White House again, Trump and his compatriots are planning to let the fossil-fuel companies run wild and wreak havoc. He also plans to do his damnedest to limit the production of electric cars (despite the backing of Elon Musk)—“I will end the electric vehicle mandate on day 1”—and so much else to ensure that we live on what, barring some remarkable surprise in the decades to come, will be a planet from… yes, hell.

Not that Donald Trump has to be worried about that. By the time global warming truly becomes global frying, he (like the author of this piece) will be long gone. If, however, you want an appropriate nickname for him under the circumstances, here’s a possibility to consider: “Satan.” After all, as far as we can tell, he has no hesitation about the idea of taking humanity to hell and back, while he has the time of his life.

And oh yes, that Heritage Foundation plan, Project 2025, that he claims he hasn’t read (and it’s true that, as far as we know, he doesn’t read much, other perhaps than Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf or the collection of that monster’s speeches, which he once reportedly kept near his bed). Still, Project 2025, created by so many people connected to his first term in office, already promises, according to The Guardian‘s Oliver Milman, “a widespread evisceration of environmental protections, allowing for a glut of new oil and gas drilling, the repeal of the IRA, and even the elimination of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service so they can be replaced by private companies. The conservative Heritage Foundation, which leads Project 2025, has said a new Trump administration should ‘eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.’”

The estimate is that if Project 2025’s authors have their way, the result will be an added 2.7 billion tons of carbon emissions by 2030 and 26 billion tons (no, that is not a misprint!) by 2050. A cheery prospect for sure on a planet already heating in a historic (or do I mean post-historic?) fashion.

Here’s a simple fact, though not one you would know if you were only listening to Donald Trump and crew: We’re already living on a wounded planet and, were he reelected, he could help make that wound so much deeper. (By the way, in case you were wondering why there are no section breaks in this piece, as there normally are in all TomDispatch pieces, it’s because the Trumpified version of climate change that we might indeed face, beginning in January 2025, will be a genuinely unbroken horror.)

Yes, it’s true that climate change isn’t the easiest way to destroy this planet in an ultimate fashion. After all, the very country Donald Trump might once again preside over invented atomic weapons, using two of them in August 1945 in a devastating fashion to end World War II. Now, of the nine countries that possess such world-ending weaponry, the U.S. and Russia have the largest nuclear arsenals, with China coming in third. And mind you, that all-American arsenal is already in the process of being “modernized” to the tune of perhaps $1.5 to $2 trillion over the coming decades. And don’t forget that, according to former White House chief of staff John Kelly, The Donald, while president, actually discussed using such weaponry against North Korea (and blaming it on another country). More recently, in relation to the war in Ukraine, he suggested that President Biden could threaten Russia with a nuclear attack and dispatch some of our nuclear submarines to cruise off the Russian coast.

And all of this from a man who, soon after becoming president, pulled this country out of the Paris climate agreement and, when he isn’t simply calling climate change a “hoax,” explains what’s happening and what’s going to happen on this planet in this fashion:

You know, when I hear these poor fools talking about global warming. They don’t call it that anymore, they call it climate change because you know, some parts of the planet are cooling and warming, and it didn’t work. So they finally got it right, they just call it climate change. They used to call it global warming. You know, years ago they used to call it global cooling. In the 1920s they thought the planet was going to freeze. Now they think the planet’s going to burn up. And we’re still waiting for the 12 years. You know we’re down almost to the end of the 12-year period, you understand that, where these lunatics that know nothing, they weren’t even good students at school, they didn’t even study it, they predict, they said we have 12 years to live. And people didn’t have babies because they said—it’s so crazy. But the problem isn’t the fact that the oceans in 500 years will raise a quarter of an inch, the problem is nuclear weapons. It’s nuclear warming… These poor fools talk about global warming all the time, you know the planet’s going to global warm to a point where the oceans will rise an eighth of an inch in 355 years, you know, they have no idea what’s going to happen. It’s weather.

As climate-change expert Bill McKibben points out, such classic Trumpian language is “gibberish in the service of something very important and very dangerous: doing all that he can to block the energy transition.”

We’re talking, of course, about the man who generally summarizes his stance on energy and this planet in a simple phrase: “Drill, baby, drill”—sometimes adding “and drill now!” Honestly, you couldn’t be blunter than that, could you, when it comes to the fate of our world?

If Satan were indeed to become president again, you can at least rest assured of one thing. Unlike his first administration, thanks to Project 2025’s planning, this one could be far more effectively organized in a whole range of areas that matter to the rest of us and, all too sadly, climate change would distinctly be one of them.

In fact, consider it beyond strange that, knowing what we do now (or at least what we should know now), anyone would want to vote for a candidate guaranteed to do his and his associates’ damnedest (and that’s distinctly the word to use) to finish Earth off as a reasonable place to exist.

Yes, the wars on this planet—the three of them in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan—are an ongoing nightmare of the first order, themselves pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in an unnerving fashion. In fact, from the devastated Ukrainian borderlands to the utterly destroyed 25-mile-long Gaza Strip, we humans regularly seem to have the urge to create a set of hells on Earth. But none of that, short of actual nuclear war, would do what electing a “hot-button” president would.

A Trump victory could, in every sense, put us in a lost universe, floating not just in space but in a space growing hotter by the year.

It would represent a defeat of an almost unbearable sort for humanity on a planet growing ever less comfortable.

The state of Missouri murdered Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams on Tuesday, September 24, at 6:00 pm Central Time. His last meal was chicken wings and tater tots; his last words were, “All praise be to Allah in every situation!” His execution was the third execution in Missouri this year and the 100th since Missouri reinstated capital punishment in 1989.

Khaliifiah had hundreds of thousands of supporters behind him worldwide for decades. Millions making calls online and signing his petitions, hundreds in person bringing their grievances to the Missouri Supreme Court, and the prosecution lawyers and family of Lisha Gayle, the social worker and former newspaper reporter who was murdered during a burglary of her home, whom this case revolves around, calling for the death penalty to be dismissed during this case.

Khaliifiah has also held his innocence since the beginning of this trial in 1998, with no forensic evidence supporting Khaliifah as the offender. Each time he was set to be executed, his murder was halted due to further DNA and forensic research, which never got to conclude before his death, nor did the impending Supreme Court case.

The disparities found in Khaliifah’s case are ones systemically embedded in the groundwork of death penalty trials and throughout the entire criminal justice system in the U.S., with many other past cases resurfacing because of Khaliifah’s murder.

Khaliifah never had a fair trial. When first tried in 2001, he was not granted his constitutional rights to a fair jury. Instead, Black jurors were barred from entering the jury because they “looked like Williams.” In his reasoning for going forward with Williams’ execution, Gov. Mike Parsons said that Williams had “exhausted due process and every judicial avenue.” However, Parsons denied Khaliifah’s clemency request to change his sentence to life in prison and also rejected a request to cancel the execution so that a lower court could make a new determination about the discriminatory circumstances of his 2001 jury. Gov. Parsons has never granted clemency for a death penalty case.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), 16 prisoners have been executed in 8 states in the United States this year, and nine more executions are scheduled throughout 2024.

The death penalty and the cruelty of cases like Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams’ exemplify the systemic racism and throughlines of enslavement that are still housed within the U.S. criminal justice system today. Capital punishment has been around since enslavement, with states like North Carolina using it as a way to squash rebellions and those working to free enslaved individuals. The Jim Crow era continued with lynchings and public executions seemingly becoming interchangeable, with almost all cases of the death penalty being against Black men. And with the 1990s era of mass incarceration, the war on drugs, and a renewed surge of the death penalty—the United took the reins of the highest incarceration population in the world. Today, despite making up 13% of the U.S. population, Black folks make up 42% of those on death row ( according to a 2020 Prison Policy Initiative report).

Robert Dunham, the DPIC executive director, writes:

What is broken or intentionally discriminatory in the criminal legal system is visibly worse in death penalty cases. Exposing how the system discriminates in capital cases can shine an important light on law enforcement and judicial practices in vital need of abolition.

The disparities found in Khaliifah’s case are ones systemically embedded in the groundwork of death penalty trials and throughout the entire criminal justice system in the U.S., with many other past cases resurfacing because of Khaliifah’s murder.

Like many others, I recount these facts about Khaliifah with tears running down my face and anger in my heart—and all I can think about is time. Khaliifah spent two decades in prison for a crime he did not commit. U.S. President Joe Biden sits in a long line of masterminds that got us to the prison-industrial complex that we have today, with many who were sentenced to death while Biden was gunning for the 1994 Crime Bill still awaiting their fate. A prison-industrial complex that has not only murdered and harmed millions of Black and Brown people in the U.S. for centuries but has weaved its web throughout the world, implementing torture, starvation, and capital punishment of its own sort throughout places like Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Sudan, and Congo.

And as we run into a new election cycle fueled by feminism and a new wave of young organizers ready to believe in the system at large because of who is heading it, I must ask, where is feminism in this? Where is feminism when we have so many women as elected officials in the U.S. who could not even utter his name, not the name of any individual who the heinous system has touched? Where is feminism as we look out onto almost a year of genocide and nearly 76 years of occupation in Palestine? Where is feminism when our tax dollars go toward the public execution of innocent mothers, fathers, and children who got no jury, no trial, and no time?

From Missouri to Palestine, not even time is a human right.

Below, “The Perplexing Smiles of the Children of Palestine” by Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams

CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash are taking well-deserved heat for making and repeating a demonstrably false accusation of antisemitism against Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI). The story has been widely reported (see here and here, for example) and is also summarized below for anyone who might have missed it. The bottom line is that, in an interview, Tlaib objected to Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s decision to prosecute pro-Palestinian student protestors. In response, Nessel falsely claimed that Tlaib “used her (Nessel’s) religion” to imply she was biased.

Tapper and Bash repeated the Attorney General’s false accusation and accused Tlaib of antisemitism, even after the reporter who spoke with Tlaib tried repeatedly to correct them. The CNN journalists finally walked their comments back, kinda-sorta, but not in a way that absolves them.

It’s ironic. Despite the mainstream media’s much-repeated concerns about “disinformation”—a concern CNN has often echoed—these two media stars participated in a disinformation campaign against the American people. But moral outrage, however justified, shouldn’t obscure something else this episode taught us about Tapper and Bash: they’re also very bad at their jobs.

Ethics and Standards

Don’t take my word for it. Their chosen profession has ethics and standards, by which they must be judged harshly. The Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) states clearly that journalists must “verify information before releasing it,” which Tapper and Bash clearly did not do.

Despite the mainstream media’s much-repeated concerns about “disinformation”—a concern CNN has often echoed—these two media stars participated in a disinformation campaign against the American people.

The SPJ also advises that journalists “use original sources whenever possible.” But Tapper and Bash don’t even seem to have read the original interview with Tlaib, even though it was freely available online. By all appearances, they relied solely on the Attorney General’s angry tweet. That’s shockingly unprofessional.

Journalists are expected to “acknowledge mistakes and correct them promptly and prominently,” and must “explain corrections and clarifications carefully and clearly.”

“Promptly”? It took days to respond. “Carefully and clearly”? Tapper said that he “misspoke,” and Bash’s walk-back was even weaker. “Tlaib did not reference (the Attorney General’s) Jewish identity,” said Bash, and “her office says that is not what she meant.” But Bash repeated the false accusation when she added that Nessel (who is hardly an objective source) “says she still believes (Tlaib’s statement) is antisemitic.”

The Code of Ethics also states that journalists must “support the open and civil exchange of views,” adding, “even views they find repugnant.”

It would appear that Tapper and Bash have strong views on Israel-Palestine which differ from Rep. Tlaib’s. Nevertheless, they’re obliged to air differing views without slurs or accusations. They failed to do that.

“Journalists should examine the ways their values and experiences may shape their reporting,” says the SPJ’s code. “Ethical journalism means taking responsibility for one’s work and explaining one’s decisions to the public.”

The last sentence speaks for itself.

“Stop Being Fooled by Misinformation”

“Stop being fooled by misinformation,” one CNN headline reads. “Do this instead.”

I have grave misgivings about the way mainstream media, politicians, and national security institutions want to treat misinformation (getting the facts wrong) and disinformation (deliberate deception). But it’s always helpful to teach critical reading skills. Experts in that field have insights that might prove useful to Tapper and Bash.

The CNN article covered misinformation research by the American Psychological Association (APA), which writes that “psychological factors make people susceptible” to deception. The APA warns readers about “the emotional content of misinformation,” adding: “People are more likely to believe false statements that appeal to emotions such as fear and outrage.”

That appears to be the case with Tapper and Bash, who seem to have let their emotions and prejudices overwhelm their professional judgment.

The media and political elites in this country are interconnected. They collaborate, socialize, and reinforce each other’s biases. They form, not a “conspiracy” as such, but what Gore Vidal called “a conspiracy of shared values.”

The APA also says, “People are more likely to believe misinformation if it comes from in-group sources rather than out-group ones, or if they judge the source as credible.”

The media and political elites in this country are interconnected. They collaborate, socialize, and reinforce each other’s biases. They form, not a “conspiracy” as such, but what Gore Vidal called “a conspiracy of shared values.” They form a community, comprised of people who know one another and see the world in similar ways.

The Michigan Attorney General is a mainstream Democrat and therefore part of that community. Rashida Tlaib is an outsider: left-leaning, brash, and Palestinian—something Tapper couldn’t resist bringing up when he first made his accusation.

Conclusion

Michigan’s Attorney General was guilty of demagoguery. She overrode the judgment of the county prosecutor and chose to file charges against the students, repeating a pattern of selective prosecution seen all across the country. When challenged, she brought religion into the debate—fully aware that Muslim Americans face great bias in this country.

Two prominent media figures then embraced her lie, amplified it, and repeated it even after being challenged. When confronted, they “corrected” themselves without accepting responsibility or explaining their actions. In the meantime, their lie took on a life of its own, as every “Big Lie” does. It’s still being repeated as of this writing.

That’s disinformation, and it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The disinformation campaign around Gaza, Palestine, Israel, and the protest movement has flooded this country with fake stories that range from beheaded babies to “billionaires” and “outside agitators” supplying campus demonstrators with tents and chains. You won’t hear politicians or media corporations weigh in on this disinformation campaign campaign, however, because it doesn’t come from political outsiders or overseas click farms.

It comes from them.

Addendum: What Happened

You can read more about it here and here, but here’s the gist (if you know the story you can skip to the next section): Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) criticized Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel for overruling county authorities and pressing charges against pro-Palestinian demonstrators at the University of Michigan, a decision Tlaib called “biased.”

The write-up of the interview in the Detroit Metro Times originally included this sentence:

Tlaib also criticized Nessel, who is the first Jewish person elected Attorney General of Michigan, for what she believes is a biased approach to the protest.

“Rashida should not use my religion to imply I cannot perform my job fairly as Attorney General,” Nessel tweeted in response. “It’s anti-Semitic and wrong.”

Even a cursory glance at the article reveals nothing to suggest that Tlaib mentioned Nessel’s religion. And yet, after gratuitously mentioning Tlaib’s Palestinian background, Tapper asked Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer if Tlaib’s comment was antisemitic. He doubled down when Whitmer demurred:

“Congresswoman Tlaib is suggesting that she shouldn’t be prosecuting these individuals that Nessel says broke the law, and that she’s only doing it because she’s Jewish and the protesters are not. That’s quite an accusation. Do you think it’s true?”

Steve Neavling, the reporter who interviewed Tlaib, pushed back. “Fact-check,” he tweeted. “Tlaib did not say Nessel charged pro-Palestinian protesters because she’s Jewish.” He wrote a detailed fact-check. He also addressed Tapper directly on X. “You’re spreading lies,” said Neavling.

CNN’s Dana Bash repeated the lie after Neavling’s pushback, claiming on-air that Tlaib had said “the state’s Jewish attorney general was letting her religion influence her job.” That was false.