Our politics and system of governance is in crisis. This was made clear this past week before and during the US Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on hate crimes in America.

The hearing was titled, “A Threat to Justice Everywhere: Stemming the Tide of Hate Crimes in America,” and was designed to examine the dramatic increase in hate crimes and to suggest a whole of government approach to deal with this problem. The expert witnesses invited to present testimony were: Kenneth Stern, Director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate; Maya Berry, Co-chair of the Hate Crimes Task Force at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights (LCCHR) and Executive Director of the Arab American Institute; and Rabbi Mark Goldfeder, Director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center. Stern and Berry were invited by the Majority (Democrats), while Goldfeder was the pick of the Republican side.

Even before the day of the hearing, the depth of the divisions plaguing American society were evident. Republicans objected that the hearings were designed to focus on hate crimes affecting all vulnerable communities in the US. What they wanted instead was a replication of the hearings that the GOP-led House had convened, ostensibly focused on antisemitism, but which strayed far afield. A few conservative American Jewish organizations were also troubled by this broader approach.

Republicans criticized Stern, who despite having been an official at the American Jewish Committee and the lead author of the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition, has since become a critic of the way this IHRA definition has been used to restrict free speech and its conflation of some legitimate criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

Berry is one of the leading researchers on hate crime data on the federal and state levels and the problems encountered in hate crime reporting. She was also the force behind the “Jabara-Heyer NO HATE Act” designed to improve federal hate crime reporting. Though highly regarded for her advocacy for all affected communities through her work with LCCHR, she was seemingly targeted by Republicans for one simple reason: She’s an Arab American who has been critical of Israeli policies and of efforts, domestically, to punish critics of those policies.

It was clear from the outset that all would not go well. Democrats made the case that their concern was the overall rise in hate crimes affecting multiple groups, while Republicans derided the entire effort as deliberately sidestepping the “real problem”—antisemitism. For her part, Berry meticulously detailed the statistics of the dramatic rise in recent years in hate crimes against each group: Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Arabs, Jews, Muslims, LGBTQ, and those with disabilities. She then outlined problems with underreporting, the difficulty in reconciling state and federal data, and made specific recommendations for improving reporting and enforcement of existing hate crime legislation.

Stern insisted that universities have an obligation to protect all students and faculty against being “bullied, harassed, intimidated, threatened, or discriminated against,” cautioned Congress against codifying a broad definition of antisemitism, noting it has not been necessary to fight hate for any community. He argued that instead of policing speech— prioritizing one view over another, resulting in an “us versus them” polarization—universities had the responsibility to protect speech and promote civil discourse by challenging students to understand diverse points of view and the people who hold these views. It is the more difficult path to pursue, but, in the end, it is the role of the university to educate not police or punish.

On the other hand, Goldfeder agreed with the Republicans that the hearing should have only focused on antisemitism, arguing that it is not only the most important challenge facing America today, but also that all other forms of hate emanate from it.

True to form, the Republicans who asked questions rejected the broad focus of the hearing, delivering inflammatory remarks against U.S. students protesting the genocide unfolding in Gaza, charging that they were being funded or encouraged by Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. Goldfeder agreed saying that the students were either directly serving these entities or were their “useful idiots.”

Others harassed Berry, demanding that she denounce Hamas and agree that statements like “intifada” or “from the river to the sea…” were calls for genocide against Jews. Berry calmly rejected this baiting, saying that she of course didn’t support Hamas as it is a “foreign terrorist organization” and she rejected all forms of violence. This, however, wasn’t enough for one Senator, who continued to badger her, causing her to respond that she was only being asked these questions because she is an Arab-American woman. She went on: “It’s regrettable that as I sit here today, I have experienced the very issue that we’re attempting to deal with today. This has been regrettably a real disappointment, but very much an indication of the danger to our democratic institutions that we’re in today.”

The audience of largely Arab and Jewish Americans, who had gathered to witness the hearing, instead of learning about the rise of hate and the crimes that might result from it, left with heightened passions. It was, as Berry noted, disappointing and an indication of how broken we have become. One side wanted to understand the problem of hate and what can be done to understand and arrest its growth, while the other side seemed more intent on pouring gasoline on the fire and watching it burn—all for political gain.

The FBI is investigating the source of suspicious packages sent to election offices in 21 states. Some election offices have been evacuated; staff are frightened.

Suspicious packages, bomb threats, death threats, harassment, assassination attempts, and violence are consequences of the politics of hate, now emanating more ferociously than ever from Trump and his sycophants.

Many explanations have been offered for why two assassination attempts have been made on Trump over the last two months. Some blame easy access to assault weapons; I’m sure that’s part of it.

But the real incitement to violence in America is hatefulness — hate speech, fearsome lies, and dangerous, paranoid rumors — the epicenter of which is Trump.

Trump blames the intensifying climate of violence on Kamala Harris and the Democrats: “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at,” he said. “Because of this Communist Left Rhetoric, the bullets are flying, and it will only get worse!” he wrote in a social media post. Trump’s campaign has circulated a list of so-called “incendiary” remarks Democrats have made against Trump and posted video clips from top Democrats calling him a “threat.”

JD Vance says “we cannot tell the American people that one candidate is a fascist and if he’s elected it is going to be the end of American democracy.”

Hello? Calling Trump a fascist and a threat to democracy is not inciting violence; it’s telling the truth. American voters need to be made aware, if they aren’t already.

Let’s be clear: The most significant cause of the upsurge in political violence — including the two attempts on Trump’s life — is Trump himself, along with his close allies Vance and Elon Musk, and other cranks and crackpots that have come along for the ride.

Trump’s proclivity for violence was evident when he urged his followers to march on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, knowing they were carrying deadly weapons.

He has urged supporters to beat up hecklers; mocked the near-fatal attack on the husband of the Democratic House speaker; suggested that a general he deemed disloyal be executed; threatened to shoot looters and undocumented migrants; warned of “potential death & destruction” if indicted in his New York criminal case; made the ludicrous claim that “Babies are being executed after birth”; and predicted a “bloodbath” if he’s not elected in November.

Trump has never taken responsibility for the consequences of his hatefulness.

He still insists he was not responsible for the attack on the Capitol. Yet since the attack, he has suggested the mob might have been correct in wanting to hang his vice president. And he has called for those arrested in connection with the attack to be released, casting them as “hostages,” “political prisoners,” and “patriots,” whom he will pardon if reelected.

His incendiary rhetoric about immigrants — calling them “vermin,” claiming they’re “poisoning the blood” of America, charging that the United States is “under invasion” from “thousands and thousands and thousands of terrorists” — is worsening the hate and violence.

His baseless claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating people’s pets continues to generate bomb threats and death threats there. Schools and government offices have been closed. After more than 33 such bomb threats, Ohio’s governor has provided state police to conduct daily sweeps of Springfield schools.

“We did not have threats” before the claims, said Springfield Mayor Rob Rue, referring to the accusations made by Trump and JD Vance. “We need peace. We need help, not hate.”

When Trump was asked last week if he denounced the bomb threats, he said, “I don’t know what happened with the bomb threats” and repeated the lie that Springfield had been “taken over by illegal migrants, and that’s a terrible thing that happened.” In fact, Haitian immigrants are in Springfield legally.

The word “hate” has become Trump’s signature utterance.

During the presidential debate, he claimed that President Biden “hates” Harris, that Harris “hates” Israel and also hates Arabs. After Taylor Swift endorsed Harris, he posted “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT” in capital letters.

Hate is the single most powerful emotion Trump elicits from his followers. Hate fuels his candidacy. Hate gives Trump’s entire MAGA movement its purpose and meaning.

Trump’s closest allies are magnifying Trump’s hate.

Vance has doubled down on the false claim that Haitians are eating pets in Springfield. He also says he’ll continue to describe Haitian residents there as “illegal aliens,” although most have been granted temporary protected legal status in the U.S. because of Haiti’s crisis.

Elon Musk posted to his 198 million followers on X, just hours after the alleged assassination attempt on Trump, that “no one is even trying” to assassinate President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris. Musk has since deleted the post and said it was intended as a joke, but millions saw it — confirming that Musk is a threat to the nation’s security.

Meanwhile, Musk’s blatant refusal to moderate hateful lies on his X platform — and his descent into reposting many of them — is also contributing to the rise of hate in America and around the world.

Musk’s X blared out lies that caused race riots in the U.K. Musk himself shared lies that the U.K. was going to open detainment camps for rioters. He claimed that the ex-first minister of Scotland, Humza Yousaf, a Muslim, “loathes white people.”

When Europe’s Digital Commissioner Thierry Breton reminded Musk of his legal obligation to stop the “amplification of harmful content,” he responded by tweeting out a meme: “Take a big step back and literally, fuck your own face!”

Before Musk bought Twitter and turned it into X, Twitter had suspended Trump from the platform “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” Musk has reinstated Trump.

Hate is a dangerous corrosive. It undermines civility, eats away social trust, dissolves bonds of community and nation.

A week ago Sunday, even before the second attempted assassination of Trump, the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire posted on X that “Anyone who murders Kamala Harris would be an American hero.”

The party deleted the post, but two days later it posted on X a lengthy follow-up referring to historical instances of violence supposedly “necessary to advance or protect freedom,” including the assassination of “past tyrants like Abraham Lincoln,” and stating that “it’s good when authoritarians” (that is, “progressives, socialists, and democrats”) are made to “feel unsafe or uncomfortable.”

Trump, Vance, Musk, New Hampshire’s Libertarian Party, and the neo-Nazis they’ve attracted to Springfield, Ohio show how infectious hate can be as its venom spreads through political bottom-feeders and the swamps of the Internet.

Those who wield hate for personal ambition are among the vilest of human beings.

How to deal with the hate that Trump and his enablers are fueling?

We must call them out for what they’re doing. We must vote against the haters now running for office, from Trump on down, and urge others to join us.

In the case of Musk, we must boycott his products and push the U.S. government to terminate all contracts with him. Musk is a threat to national security.

Most fundamentally, we must hold all purveyors of hate accountable for the consequences of their hatefulness.

Count on one thing: armed conflict lasts for decades after battles end and its effects ripple thousands of miles beyond actual battlefields. This has been true of America’s post-9/11 forever wars that, in some minimalist fashion, continue in all too many countries around the world. Yet those wars, which we ignited in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, are hardly the first to offer such lessons. Prior wars left us plenty to learn from that could have led this country to respond differently after that September day when terrorists crashed planes into the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Instead, we ignored history and, as a result, among so many other horrific things, left our weaponry — explosives, small arms, you name it — in war zones to kill and maim yet more people there for generations to come.

Case in point: We Americans tend to disregard the possibility (however modest) that weapons of war could even destroy our own lives here at home, despite how many of us own destructive weaponry. A few years ago, my military spouse and I were looking for a house for our family to settle in after over a decade of moving from military post to military post. We very nearly bought an old farmhouse owned by a combat veteran who mentioned his deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq. We felt uncertain about the structure of his house, so we arranged to return with our children to take another look after he had moved out. The moment we entered the garage with our two toddlers in tow, we noticed a semi-automatic rifle leaning against the wall, its barrel pointing up. Had we not grabbed our son by the hand, he might have run over to touch it and, had it been loaded, the unthinkable might have occurred. Anyone who has raised young children knows that a single item in an empty room, especially one as storied as a gun (in today’s age of constant school shootings and lockdowns) could be a temptation too great to resist.

That incident haunts me still. The combat vet, who thought to remove every item from his home but a rifle, left on display for us, was at best careless, at worst provocative, and definitely weird in the most modern meaning of that word. Given the high rates of gun ownership among today’s veterans, it’s not a coincidence that he had one, nor would it have been unknown for a child (in this case mine) to be wounded or die from an accidental gunshot. Many times more kids here die that way, whether accidentally or all too often purposely, than do our police or military in combat. Boys and men especially tend to be tactile learners. Those of them in our former war zones are also the ones still most likely to fall victim to mines and unexploded ordnance left behind, just as they’re more likely to die here from accidental wounds.

Scenes not that different from the one I described have been happening in nearly 70 countries on a regular basis, only with deadlier endings. Hundreds of people each year — many of them kids — happen upon weapons or explosives left over from wars once fought in their countries and are killed, even though they may have been unaware of the risks they faced just seconds before impact. And for that, you can thank the major warmakers on this planet like the U.S. and Russia that have simply refused to learn the lessons of history.

A Deadly Glossary

Many kinds of explosives linger after battles end. Such unexploded ordnance (UXO) includes shells, grenades, mortars, rockets, air-dropped bombs, and cluster munition bomblets that didn’t explode when first used. Among the most destructive of them are those cluster munitions, which can spread over areas several football fields wide, often explode in mid-air, and are designed to set objects on fire on impact. Militaries (ours among them) have been known to leave behind significant stockpiles of such explosive ordnance when conflicts cease. Weapons experts refer to such abandoned ordnance as AXO and it’s not uncommon for militaries to have stored and then abandoned them in places like occupied schools.

Close cousins of UXO are landmines designed to explode and kill indiscriminately upon contact, piercing tanks and other vehicles, as well as what came to be known as Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), jerry-rigged homemade bombs often buried in the ground, that kill on impact. IEDs gained notoriety during the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they accounted for more than half of reported U.S. troop casualties. And both unexploded landmines and IEDs can do terrible damage years later in peacetime.

As many of us are aware, long before this century’s American-led wars on terror started, militaries had already established just such a deadly legacy through their use of unexploded ordnance and mines. In Cambodia, which the U.S. bombed heavily during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and early 1970s, about 650 square kilometers remain contaminated with cluster-munition remnants from American aerial attacks, while a still larger area contains landmines. It’s estimated, in fact, that leftover landmines and other exploding ordnance killed nearly 20,000 Cambodians in what passed for “peacetime” between 1979 and 2022, also giving that country the dubious distinction of having one of the highest number of amputees per capita on the planet. Likewise, half a century after the U.S. littered neighboring Laos with cluster bombs, making it, per capita, the most bombed country in the world, less than 10% of its affected land has been cleared.

Similarly, dud bomblets, which failed to detonate in mid-air, are estimated to have killed or maimed somewhere between 56,000 and 86,000 civilians globally since Hitler’s air force first tested them out on Spanish towns during that country’s civil war in the 1930s. Despite concerted international advocacy by governments and human rights groups beginning in the 2000s, hundreds of new cluster munition casualties are reported yearly. In 2023, the most recent year on record globally, 93% of cluster munition casualties were civilians, with 47% of those killed and injured by such remnant explosives children.

Cluster munitions are known for killing broadly on impact, so it’s not easy to get firsthand accounts of just what it’s like to witness such an attack, but a few such unflinching accounts are available to us. Take for instance, a report by Human Rights Watch researchers who interviewed survivors of a Russian cluster munitions attack in the eastern Ukrainian village of Hlynske in May 2022. As one man reported, after hearing a rocket strike near his home, “Suddenly I heard my father screaming, ‘I’ve been hit! I can’t move,’ he said. I ran back and saw that he had fallen on his knees but couldn’t move from the waist down, and there were many metal pieces in him, including one sticking out of his spine and another in his chest. He had these small metal pellets lodged in his hands and legs.”

According to the report, his father died a month later, despite surgery.

How did a noise outside that survivor’s home so quickly become shrapnel lodged in his father’s body? Maybe someone growing up in America’s poorer neighborhoods, littered with weapons of war, can relate, but I read accounts like his and realize how distant people like me normally remain from war’s violence.

After the international Cluster Munitions Convention took effect in 2010, 124 countries committed to retiring their stockpiles. But neither the U.S., Russia, nor Ukraine, among other countries, signed that document, although our government did promise to try to replace the Pentagon’s cluster munitions with variants that supposedly have lower “dud” rates. (The U.S. military has not explained how they determined that was so.)

Our involvement in the Ukraine war marked a turning point. In mid-2023, the Biden administration ordered the transfer of cluster munitions from its outdated stockpile, sidestepping federal rules limiting such transfers of weapons with high dud rates. As a result, we added to the barrage of Russian cluster-munition attacks on Ukrainian towns. New cluster-munition attacks initiated in Ukraine have created what can only be seen as a deadly kind of time bomb. If it can be said that the U.S. and Russia in any way acted together, it was in placing millions of new time bombs in Ukrainian soil in their quest to take or protect territory there, ensuring a future of mortal danger for so many Ukrainians, no matter who wins the present war.

Afghanistan, Every Step You Take

At the Costs of War Project, which I helped found at Brown University in 2010, a key goal continues to be to show how armed conflict disrupts human lives, undermining so much of what people need to do to work, travel, study, or even go to the doctor. Afghanistan is a case in point: An area roughly 10 times the size of Washington, D.C., is now thoroughly contaminated by mines and unexploded ordnance. Prior to the U.S. attack in 2001, Afghans already had to contend with explosives from the Soviet Union’s disastrous war there in the 1980s. And I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that casualties from that war’s unexploded ordnance and mines only rose after the U.S.-led invasion further unsettled the country. It’s estimated that well over half of that country’s 20,000 or so injuries and deaths between 2001 and 2018 were due to unexploded ordnance, landmines, and other explosive remnants of war like IEDs. Contaminated Afghan land includes fields commonly used for growing food and letting livestock graze, schools, roads, tourist sites, and former military bases and training ranges used by the U.S. and its NATO allies.

Worse yet, the damage isn’t only physical. It’s also psychological. As Costs of War researchers Suzanne Fiederlein and SaraJane Rzegocki have written, “The fear of being harmed by these weapons [unexploded ordnance] is magnified by knowing or seeing someone injured or killed.” In her ethnography of Afghan war widows, Anila Daulatzai offered a gripping illustration of how loss, death, and psychological terror ripple outward to a family and community after a young boy dies in a bomb blast on his way to school and his parents turn to heroin to cope.

When I read such accounts, what stands out to me is how long such unexploded ordnance makes the terror of war linger after the wars themselves are in the history books. Think about what life, stressful as it might be in times of peace, would be like if every step you took might be your last because of unseen threats lurking under the ground. That would include threats like certain bomblets, attractive with their bell-like appearance, which your young child might pick up, thinking they’re toys.

The U.S. Arming of Ukraine (“We Start When It All Ends”)

And we still haven’t learned. Today, with 26,000 square kilometers (an area roughly the size of my home state of Maryland) contaminated by mines and unexploded ordnance, Ukraine is the most mined country in the world. I recently spoke with a founding director of the Ukrainian Association for Humanitarian Demining (UAHD), an umbrella organization based in Kyiv and responsible for information-sharing on mines and other unexploded ordnance, as well as future demining, and humanitarian aid based on such an ongoing nightmare.

From our conversation, what stood out to me was how people’s ordinary lives have come to a halt because of this war. For example, much has been written about how interruptions in the Ukrainian grain supply impacted food prices and famine globally, but we pay less attention to how and why. As the UAHD representative told me, “For two years, most Ukrainian farmers in occupied territory have had to halt their work because of mines and unexploded ordnance. This past Thursday, the Ukrainian government issued their first payment so that one day, these farms might be able to keep doing their work.” If the history of Laos is any marker and if the Ukraine war ever ends, just the cleanup will prove a long slog.

When I asked how civilian lives in Ukraine were affected by cluster munitions, the response from the UAHD representative was brief: “I don’t know, because war zones are off-limits to us right now. Once the fighting finally ends, we can survey the land and talk to people living there. We start when it all ends.” My interlocutor’s comments reminded me of a superb recent novel on modern warfare, Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees. It focuses on a beekeeper who stays behind in his eastern Ukrainian farming village after his neighbors have evacuated to escape the fighting. The novel conveys the poverty and physical danger war brings with it, as well as how isolated from one another civilians in war zones grow, not least because of the dangers of just moving around along once-quiet fields and roads. For instance, the one gift that a Ukrainian soldier offers the beekeeper in passing is a grenade for his own protection, which he ultimately uses to destroy his bees, nearly hurting himself in the process. His other brush with near-death occurs when a traumatized Ukrainian veteran threatens him with an axe during a flashback to combat. War, in other words, returns home, again and again.

Like the beekeeper, we all need to pay attention to what’s left in the wake of our government’s exploits. We need to ask ourselves what future generations may have to deal with thanks to what our leaders do today in the name of expediency. That’s true when it comes to those horrifying cluster munitions and essentially every other militarized response governments concoct to grapple with complex problems.

In this context, let me suggest that there are two messages readers should take away from this piece: It couldn’t be more important to bear witness to what’s being done to destroy our world and, when the fighting ends, it’s also vital to pay attention to what has been left behind.

During the recent presidential debate, former president Trump claimed that Haitian migrants living in Springfield, Ohio were stealing pets from their neighbors—cats and dogs—and eating them. This completely fabricated story originated from nether regions of the far-right. Then the lies were mainstreamed by Trump’s running mate, JD Vance. After the debate, Vance continued to advance the lies, even though repeated investigations by officials on the ground found nothing, not even missing geese.

Vance and Trump have doubled down on their accusations, with predictable results—bomb threats to schools in Springfield, personal threats against officials who have told the truth about the fabricated claims.

Such ugly utterances are not primarily designed to be believed. Vance himself suggests that the lies are of value because they attract attention to an issue he and Trump want to highlight, the alleged mortal danger that immigrants present to “real” Americans. This is an old tactic for Trump. Many Trumpists who loudly applauded his 2016 promise at rallies that Mexico would pay for the wall also said to interviewers they did not believe they would. Wild applause without belief. Such reiterated pronouncements, rather, activate and intensify racial resentments already installed in certain white audiences. The dog and cat legend—as Vance now calls it—both activates and intensifies visceral hatreds in the audience installed in the soft tissues of life through years of insistence and repetition. And it places immigration at the center of debate, rather than allowing sufficient light to be shed on other issues such as inequality, climate, and gender. So, belief is not the key issue here, as students of fascist rhetoric have discovered. And factual correction is not enough to erase the pegs upon which racial, gender, and immigration hatred hang.

We note this incident, not only because it is so odious and typical of the campaign the Trump-Vance ticket runs, but also because Vance himself embraces the ideas of far-right academics, hailing from such places—to name a few—as Princeton, Notre Dame, Hillsdale College, Harvard University, and the Claremont Institute. Some of these academics have pedigrees connecting them to students of Leo Strauss and Harry Jaffa. Some are affiliated with the Heritage Foundation. Some are legal theorists of “natural law.” Many have overlapping affiliations. Names such as Robbie George, Adrian Vermeule, Charles Kestler, John Eastman, and Hadley Arkes are more familiar to insiders to the world of legal and political theory than they are to the more general public.

As Haitian-American children in Springfield face bomb threats, as new reports of women dying after being refused care for suffering incomplete abortions or miscarriages, as the death threats against election officials multiply, as Trump promises to jail his opponents and to introduce mass detention camps, has not academic support for Trumpist ideas descended into gaslighting?

We are familiar with these people ourselves, because we too are political theorists. Of course, ideological differences have long been in play among various schools of political theory in the American academy. And there has regularly been crossover between the rarified heights of the academy and the world of public intellectuals. But rarely have pronouncements of those considered to be conservative academic thinkers departed so far from the norms and ideals of a democratic society.

Recently, we traveled to Philadelphia to attend the American Political Science Association annual meeting. While there, we discovered that a series of panels were being sponsored by the Claremont Institute. Since many Claremont fellows have openly embraced Trump’s politics, we were surprised to see their panels listed, because we recalled that in the wake of the insurrection of January 6, Claremont had withdrawn from the convention in the wake of protests against them. Now it is timely again, not to oust such participants from the program but to actively expose and protest the damage they do to democracy.

Think, for instance, of Patrick Deneen, a non-Straussian figure. Perhaps the single most prominent political theorist to embrace the idea of the establishment of a new post-democratic “regime,” to use the term favored by Straussians, Deneen’s book from 2018, "Why Liberalism Failed" asserted that the more liberalism succeeds as a practical political agenda, the more it fails to achieve the goals of a better and freer life for those governed by it. In that book, Deneen didn’t embrace a positive political agenda.

But then Deneen accepted an invitation by Victor Orban, the authoritarian ruler of Hungary. He now embraces a version of “illiberal democracy” akin to what Orban has established there. Deneen’s most recent book, "Regime Change," has become a must read for intellectual members of the far right in the MAGA universe. There, under the cover of “populism” that seems to eschew the need for democratic institutions of representation, he presents a vision of what might be called “degraded Straussianism,” that is, an authoritarianism in the form of a radical right Platonism embracing secret rule by philosophers.

We mention Deneen because he has been cited repeatedly in reports on the intellectual influences on JD Vance. Vance has shown himself to be a misogynist and a fervent anti-abortion Catholic (like Deneen). Vance’s attacks on women who are not mothers supports his deeper argument against sexual and gender equality, in favor of a patriarchal order, and a general return to an older social order.

Vance’s attack on women is consistent with the underlying substance of Deneen’s argument: The liberal logic of progress results in a “disintegration of how we live. . . Ideals and ends of integration must confront and defeat liberal disintegration." This is how to return to the common good.

His recommendations to achieve that common good are anything but common. What is needed, Deneen suggests, is a return to “traditional culture,” though he does not discuss the violence and degradations that will be needed to force women, gays, Blacks, transgender people, and other minorities to accept such a return. Perhaps that part is to be left to Trump? He even recognizes that such an argument may sound bad to many, bound as it is to a tradition of racism. But he suggests that such a charge provides a liberal excuse to besmirch the good values associated with the binding force of tradition. He writes, “Today, the very power of the accusation is now extended to accusations of those who defend such institutions as family defined as a man and a woman; the desirability of children born in conjugal marriage; orthodox biblical religious beliefs; and against those who seek limitations on sexual licentiousness, such as pornography.”

And so it goes. Deneen defends the idea of a tightly woven, exclusionary nation, opposing it to globalism and cosmopolitanism. He, like so many other Trump academic legitimizers, endorses nationalism as a form of civic religion. He attacks toleration as leading to a general intolerance, that intolerance further leading to a more generalized relativism corrosive of the common good, producing a practical totalitarianism based upon what he identifies as the most fundamental separation of all: “. . . the so-called separation of church and state.” In short, for Deneen as for Vance, Christianity is the vilified source of what is best, and what is best is a nationalism that binds everyone in a hierarchy, with his version of Christianity at the top. The only democracy Deneen in the end supports is what he calls a “democracy of prayer.”

Why bring all that up now? Well, as the presidential campaign enters its final phase the racist attacks, the misogynist rhetoric of insult and hate, the homophobic and transgender-hating advocacy of repressive policies, the aggressive embrace of a particular, exclusive form of Christian faith, the threats of arrest made against political opponents, and the threats of violence by supportive MAGA mobs--all on the part of the Trump/Vance campaign--have reached new levels of intensity and fervor. Democracy itself is threatened. Professors who have embraced Trump in the past, calling him a populist, can no longer credibly do so without also condoning the violence that Trump and Vance constantly incite.

Where does this leave those intellectuals who contributed to the Project 2025 playbook? What about theorists who have embraced doctrines propagated by the fellows of the Claremont Institute? Where does this leave political theorists such as Patrick Deneen? To our knowledge, none has so far condemned either Trump or Vance for their dangerous, destructive statements, let alone ask themselves how their political cover sustains that violence. As Haitian-American children in Springfield face bomb threats, as new reports of women dying after being refused care for suffering incomplete abortions or miscarriages, as the death threats against election officials multiply, as Trump promises to jail his opponents and to introduce mass detention camps, has not academic support for Trumpist ideas descended into gaslighting? When, if ever, will these reputedly serious and sober thinkers join other conservative Republicans and reject the politics of hate and violence?

Unfortunately, we aren’t too hopeful that the radical academic right will respond to such a call. They seem, in a metaphor employed by a fascist predecessor, to be prepared to ride the tiger. Of course, we know how that story ends.

I think of American political narratives as being like wayward car horns—unpleasant cacophonous noise blasting so discordantly that you still hear it after it stops. The repetition conveys a noxious habit—blaming victims and absolving the powerful. Thus, America crumbles and implodes, not from capitalist greed and institutional inequity, but from immigrant invasions.

Last week I wrote about the truly obscene and utterly weird climate narrative, often pouring from the keyboards of progressive writers—doomers have become the new deniers we are told. We have an extinction event, a potential checkout line for human evolution, and the target of our ire—the ones who fail to keep the wolf from the door are, uh.....people who have lost hope?

We live in a culture that grinds hope to smithereens, that pours its heart and soul into war, military hardware, expanded policing and fossil fuel extraction, while turning a blind eye to every form of suffering—discouragement is our national product. We have a depressed, checked out, poor population—in the tens of millions—that has aptly given up on voting. I worked for decades as an outreach mental health worker with very poor clients. Futility is the flip side of the American dream. My clients never felt that they had a shred of agency—they knew damn well that voting would never improve their lives. Our system is founded on the suffering of disempowered masses. Our "deaths of despair" parallel the phenomenon of climate doomerism.

In the climate narrative that now envelops us, it may be that all hope is false hope.

America “the paranoid,” has a time honored habit of directing its faux righteousness in tangential fashion. Most of us have never met a real live climate doomer, but even a casual excursion to the YouTube "doomisphere" reveals that the few self -identified doomers selling their wares on social media (to a tiny handful of subscribers) offer, perhaps, the most nuanced, detailed and intelligent climate narrative available. Doomers follow the science to a fork in the road where scientists often refuse to go. Scientists tell us that it is not too late—we (whoever we are) merely have to immediately and drastically reduce fossil fuel use and be at so called "net zero" in the next decade and a half. The doomers disabuse us of fantasies of net zero. "Hello," they call out—"capitalists have no intention of slowing down the orgy of fossil fuel consumption, and the public has been declawed with tales about renewable replacements."

In some bizarre, twisted media hallucination, the doomers have come to be the proxy targets for capitalism's death wish. We are shooting the messenger, and giving the perpetrator a free pass. This brings to mind the all-time greatest act of mass murder ever perpetrated upon the human race—the tetraethyl lead apocalypse of the 20th century. You might think of WWII or the Nazi Holocaust when you think of the all-time epic mass murder—tip your hat to the public relations brilliance of capitalism. You probably barely know about the bloody deeds of leaded gasoline—acts of boundless destruction that make Hitler and Pol Pot into evil children by comparison.

Leaded gasoline unleashed an episode of unabated horror upon the entire biosphere, with no government protections for half a century. Apart from the body count—in the tens of millions conservatively, along with the cognitive destruction of children (for lead is a devastating neurotoxin)—the lead epidemic perpetrated by the fossil fuel industry also set loose an ongoing narrative assault upon inner city people. In the U.S. the pundits and politicians blame the victims as a matter of choreographed practice. The leaded gasoline mass murder event resolved into a national narrative with mass hatred directed at our poorest citizens.

When the lead dust had settled, we had the prison industrial complex, the dismantling of safety nets, the explosion of neoliberal ideology and such tomes as "The Bell Curve" promoting a new vision of eugenics.

Inner cities had been catacombed with highways designed to separate urban Black neighborhoods from white suburbs. In these communities lead gas fumes attacked the developing brains of Black children, and contributed to enormous spikes in violent crime. The urban crime wave inspired racist political narratives and kick started the careers of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Lead exposure lowers IQ, reduces self-control and drives impulsive behavior. In America, neurological injuries from lead combined with available fire arms, poverty and lack of opportunity. These factors, in concert, drove murder rates through the roof. The U.S. murder rate reached a pinnacle in 1980 with 10.4 murders per 100,000 people—just in time for the election of Ronald "trickle down" Reagan. With the phasing out of leaded gasoline, murder rates incrementally dropped and now commonly register at a little more than half of the peak established just prior to the election of Ronald "I doubled the prison population" Reagan in 1980. Of course, even without lead poisoning from auto fumes, we are still the most violent developed nation on earth. This piece is not about American military values and the second amendment.

The prison industrial complex may seem to have little to do with climate doomers, and, indeed, the casual scapegoating of a few discouraged people who tell us that we have little hope of avoiding societal collapse may seem trivial when set beside the brutality and racism of the U.S. carceral state. But we have at least a vague parallel that is worth contemplating—in the U.S., media and politicians have a habit of pointing fingers at innocent victims.

Newspaper pundits and politicians, in the 80’s and 90’s, bloviated about "super predators." They systematically directed hatred toward the victims of tetraethyl lead. The leaded gasoline mass murder event, we now understand, was only a warm up act (pardon the pun) for the ultimate fossil fuel industry crime—the total erasure of the biosphere. And who should the public hold accountable for the probable and looming genocide of all living things? Doomers! People who tell us that the corporate empire and the elected bots that feed at donor troughs are so intent on slaughtering us that we likely cannot do anything to stop them. Once again, we find pundits intent on tangential targets to blame. People who feel hopeless have nothing to do with the source of the problem. They are, like those destroyed by leaded gas fumes, victims of a process they had no part in creating.

Here is an interview of my favorite doomer—Elliot Jacobson who tells us that hope is our enemy, hope drives our collective delusions. Jacobson references a Harvard study that suggested that activism and hope have an inverse relationship. You may not resonate with Jacobson's darkness or analysis but he projects an air of integrity that is quite rare in climate discourse.

In the climate narrative that now envelops us, it may be that all hope is false hope. I believe that any activist movement ought to proceed from the starting point that success is unlikely and catastrophe can only be reduced. Critically, capitalism must be named —there is no credible climate story that fails to trace our unwinnable predicament to the headwater of the market economy.

By the way, whatever happened to the perpetrators of the leaded gasoline mass murder event? You probably know the names of the two most culpable GM leaders who refused to use grain alcohol to make their gasoline provide a smooth ride. Grain alcohol would have worked as well as tetraethyl lead and would not have murdered countless millions and destroyed the minds of children. But GM had a patent on tetraethyl lead, and grain alcohol belonged to the public domain. In other words, GM executives knowingly committed mass murder for profit and hired credentialed academic whores to confuse the public with bullshit research. Leaded gasoline butchered millions and inspired the invention of pseudoscience (which now sustains our climate catastrophe), but the story gets even worse.

Our system is founded on the suffering of disempowered masses. Our "deaths of despair" parallel the phenomenon of climate doomerism.

You have all heard of one of the world's great cancer research and treatment centers, The Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Alfred Sloan and Charles Kettering were the leaders of GM who presided over the bloodiest extermination event of the twentieth century. For that, we honor them with eternal recognition and fame. That is how capitalism works.

You might wonder what sort of massive, multi-trillion dollar reparations have been given to the millions of victims of GM’s crimes, but you probably intuitively know. The survivors and descendants of those whose minds became collateral damage to profits got nothing. They are still being fed to the carceral state. That is how capitalism works.

One small request—can we stop blaming our environmental predicament on doomers? Rather, we need to listen to them carefully.

Why should anyone give a damn about a labor union’s presidential endorsement? A few reasons. Philosophically, since a good union is a democratic organization, an endorsement allows a politician to claim the legitimate support of a large group of hardworking Americans, that most treasured of groups. Politically, a good union’s endorsement also comes with money for the candidate and a team of union members to make calls and knock on doors, a valuable asset for any campaign. And practically, an endorsement allows a union to shore up support for its own priorities by cozying up to a future elected leader. A union backs a politician, the politician fights for the union’s needs, and the mutually beneficial cycle carries on.

The Teamsters’ non-endorsement of any candidate for U.S. president this week is notable in that it fails on every last one of those metrics.

In fairness, it’s not like every big union in America is some paragon of political virtue. Many or most big unions have a distinctly undemocratic endorsement process, dictated by a small group of leaders in a room rather than by an honest vote of the membership. (This can cause internal uproars, as we saw in 2020 when a number of union locals that supported Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) railed publicly against their parent unions’ endorsements of U.S. President Joe Biden.) Credit the Teamsters for, at least, releasing some “member polling” data showing that Biden was the candidate supported by most Teamsters this summer, but that Trump had taken a lead after Vice President Kamala Harris entered the race. This fig leaf of democratic legitimacy is undermined by the fact that there was no methodology released—one number came from “Town Hall Straw Polls,” and another from an “Electronic Member Poll” that some members griped they hadn’t heard about. The American Prospect reported that the eight rank-and-file Teamster members who attended Kamala Harris’ sit down meeting with the union subsequently said they supported her—though the General Board proceeded to vote 14-3 for no endorsement.

A true union leader, who understands the stakes of this election, must stand up and tell his members: “Hey, if Trump is elected, unions, the working class, women, and your immigrant brothers and sisters are going to be fucked in the following ways.”

In reality, there is every indication that Teamsters president Sean O’Brien just… kinda likes former President Donald Trump. He posed for pictures with Trump in the lobby of Teamsters headquarters, unnecessarily. He had a private meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. He had the union donate $45,000 to the Republican National Committee, alongside a donation to the Democrats. And, to cap it off, he gave a prime time speech at the Republican National Convention, mixing pro-worker slogans with ingratiating compliments to a smiling Trump. In doing so, O’Brien made himself into a useful patsy for the false and dangerous attempt by the Republicans to brand themselves as some kind of “working class” party.

O’Brien’s long flirtation with Trump has been marked by notable levels of insincerity. The Teamsters leader will say: I’m open to both sides! We’re having a fair and transparent process! This seems believable, as long as you are a child who has never encountered the American political system in action before. Want to have all candidates come to your union’s HQ to take questions? Great! You do not need to also pose for a publicity photo that they can use in their specious fascist propaganda. Want to maintain open lines of communication with both parties? Sure. That is vastly different from giving a prime time speech at a party’s convention, which is a television event that expressly exists to help get one candidate elected. Acting as if it is possible to speak at the RNC while maintaining independence is a bit like sitting in a car with the windows rolled up as your friends smoke a pound of weed, and claiming that you yourself are drug free. Have you noticed where you are, man?

Want to work with both sides of the aisle on your union’s political priorities? That’s fine. That’s great. Judge politicians not on their party label, but on what they actually do for workers. So here is a summary of the two sides in the upcoming election: One side gave you $36 billion to save your pensions. The other side was against that. One side put the most pro-union general counsel ever at the head of the NLRB. The other side will fire her, and then appoint a bunch of right-wing judges who will rule the NLRB unconstitutional. One side will try to pass the PRO Act to improve America’s labor laws. The other side will oppose the PRO Act and support every last legal and regulatory measure to drain your union of its power and make it harder to organize new workers.

Hmm. Hmm. Choices, choices.

The most plausible theory of the Teamsters’ weird endorsement fiasco is this: The union’s membership has a lot of Trump supporters, plus O’Brien himself is a bit of the macho-esque type of guy who might think Trump is sort of cool, plus—before Biden dropped out of the race—it looked like Trump was going to win. This combination of factors may have been enticing enough to convince O’Brien that he could pave the way for a plausible case to endorse Trump, which would then allow him to accrue power as the lone major union leader that Trump liked when he went back to the White House. O’Brien could then use his uniquely positive relationship with Trump to shield the Teamsters from the bad things the Republicans would do, and make himself labor’s biggest political player at the same time.

Let us count the flaws in this plan. First, Biden dropping out has reset the entire race, making the Democrats the betting favorite once again. But by the time that happened, O’Brien had already pissed off the Democrats so much with his RNC speech and general refusal to endorse that they froze him out of the DNC, instead putting a group of Teamsters members on stage to drive home the point that the Democrats saved their pensions. As soon as the Teamsters International announced they would not endorse anyone this week, Teamsters locals, councils, and caucuses across the nation began quickly announcing their own endorsements of the Harris-Walz ticket. Those endorsements piled up so fast that the Harris campaign was able to blast out their own press release saying that they add up to a total of 1 million Teamsters—the vast majority of the union’s total membership. (The Trump campaign issued its own press release bragging about the non-endorsement, thereby completing the full spectrum of political uselessness.)

Now, Sean O’Brien has pissed off the Democratic Party. He has pissed off the Harris campaign. He has pissed off the rest of the labor movement, and his union allies. He has pissed off the most politically astute segment of his own membership. He looks weak, since his own locals staged a backlash against him. O’Brien’s actions have led to an internal opposition campaign to his reelection. If the Democrats win, he will have to try to rebuild all of these bridges that have been burned. And—the cherry on top—if the Republicans win, organized labor will be fucked anyhow! Being Trump’s buddy is not going to save you from the end of the NLRB and a return to pre-New Deal hostility to all forms of union power.

Smoothly done, sir. Canny maneuvering.

I do not want to end on such a snide note. Let’s imagine that O’Brien did this all in good faith—that he truly felt that his members did not support one side or the other. It would be a positive step for union democracy if every major union had a set internal processes to solicit all members to vote on presidential endorsements every four years, and followed their will. But such a democratic process does not erase the need for leadership. A true union leader, who understands the stakes of this election, must stand up and tell his members: “Hey, if Trump is elected, unions, the working class, women, and your immigrant brothers and sisters are going to be fucked in the following ways.” The Teamsters’ process obviously did not play out like that. Perhaps we can all do better four years from now. Assuming the whole democracy thing still exists.

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

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

That’s what all those seminars and cocktail parties and protests in New York over the next week will ultimately be about—the desperate attempt to keep this rift in our geological history from getting any bigger than it must.

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

In every era, it’s increases in carbon dioxide that drive the increases and decreases in temperature. “Carbon dioxide is really that master dial,” Jess Tierney, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona and co-author of the study, said. And so the study makes clear that the mercury could go very high indeed as humans pour carbon into the sky. We won’t burn enough coal and oil and gas to reach the very highest temperatures seen in the geological record—that required periods of incredible volcanism—but we may well double the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and this study implies that the fast and slow feedbacks from that could eventually drive temperatures as much as 8°C higher, which is more than most current estimates. Over shorter time frames the numbers are just as dramatic

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

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

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

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

Much much much faster than, say, during the worst extinction event we know about, at the end of the Permian about 250 million years ago, when the endless eruption of the so-called Siberian traps drove the temperature 10°C higher and killed off 95% of the species on the planet. But that catastrophe took 50,000 years—our 3°C increase—driven by the collective volcano of our powerplants, factories, furnaces and Fords—will be measured in decades.

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

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

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

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

Bangladesh was still reeling from political turmoil, which felled Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government on August 5, when a flood disaster struck out of the blue, upending the lives of 6 million Bangladeshis. Half a million people were left to their own devices, beyond the reach of first responders. Worst of all, 2 million children were exposed to the aftermath of flooding. Dhaka had not seen a deluge like this in the past three decades. Yet the country is no stranger to disasters. Just in May this year, it was battered by Storm Remal, devastating millions. In 2023, it was Cyclone Mocha that visited its wrath on two neighboring states: Bangladesh and Myanmar.

The speed and severity of flash floods is equally quick to inflame geopolitical tensions, as Dhaka accused neighboring India aggravating the situation by opening the floodgates of a dam in a neighboring state. India denied the charge and blamed erratic monsoons for swelling the transboundary Gomati River that overflowed its banks. Bangladesh and India share 54 transboundary rivers, including the Ganges and Yamuna. As an upstream country, India is viewed with suspicion by downstream Bangladesh. All downstream nations suspect their upstream neighbors in the event of such calamities. For its part, India blames upstream China for major diversions on transboundary rivers. Similar accusations are heard among 11 riparian nations on the Nile. All this shows how climate change shapes geopolitics.

Each time a developing nation is struck by an epic calamity, it takes 10-20 years to fully recover from the impact. Disasters worsen the preexisting vulnerabilities of those affected, hindering their recovery. Viewing these impacts, Bangladesh estimates that 20 million of its citizens will become “climate refugees” in the next 25 years, while 30 million are set to lose everything from climate change. It wants Western nations to recognize climate refugees as they do victims of “political repression.” Rajendra Pachauri, a former chairperson of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), echoes Dhaka’s call for what he describes as “managed migration.” Unmanaged migration, however, continues. There are already 13 million Bangladeshis settled in Europe, North America, and the Middle East.

How ironic it is that 200 world leaders at the climate summit (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan this November, will be fighting tooth and nail to commit the least possible amount to the $100 billion global climate fund, which is basically a cleanup cost of climate change.

The ferocity of monsoons is forcing millions from their native habitats. Monsoons smash riverbanks, deluging countries on a monumental scale. Although shorter in duration, monsoons pack crushing punches. In 2022, southeastern Pakistan had received triple the amount of monthly rain in just one day. Monsoons are being fueled by the ever-warmer oceans that burst “atmospheric rivers.” The Bay of Bengal, where monsoons rise, and the Indian Ocean, which is the world’s fastest-warming ocean, are literally blazing. Asia’s sea surface temperature is warming more than three times faster than the global average. The continent’s land surface temperature has already surpassed the maximum threshold of 1.5°C to which the world agreed in Paris in 2015. Asia’s highest surface temperature in 2023 was recorded as 1.92°C above the 1961-1990 level (not the preindustrial level).

Asian countries such as Bangladesh, which have made the least contribution to carbonizing the atmosphere, are the most affected. In 2013, IPCC, in its fifth assessment report, predicted “less frequent but more intense” extreme weather events around the globe. Mother Nature, somehow, seems far ahead of the United Nations. As the case of Bangladesh shows, storms that are making landfalls around the world, are as frequent as they are intense. Weeks after the U.N.’s fifth assessment report came out, the Philippines endured typhoon Haiyan that killed 10,000 Filipinos, unleashing its fury on 13 million, 5 million of them children. Economic losses were valued at $15 billion (5% of the Philippine economy in 2013). Haiyan was then declared the strongest-ever superstorm in meteorological annals. Now scientists are thinking about adding a sixth hurricane category as Category 5 hurricanes are becoming passe.

Yet the world is far from equipped to tame climatic disasters. Haiyan, for instance, packed wind gusts of up to 235 miles per hour, a wind velocity that is almost twice the speed of the yet-to-be-invented Category 6 hurricane. Manila deployed 18,177 military troops, 844 vehicles, 44 seagoing vessels, and 31 aircraft to deal with the problem, and it still wasn’t enough. It had to call in military reinforcements from Australia, Britain, China, Japan, and the United States. The Philippines never faced a national adversary with a fraction of Haiyan’s lethality.

The United States committed the largest of all military resources to support the Philippines. It commissioned the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington with 80 aircraft and 5,000 troops aboard, in addition to four additional naval ships. Britain sent the Illustrious aircraft carrier stocked with transport planes and medical personnel. Japan sent a naval force of 1,000 troops, which was Tokyo’s largest-ever disaster-relief deployment, with three navy ships led by the Ise, Japan’s largest warship. Yet Haiyan kept all these naval deployments from entering the “disaster zone” for three days until November 11. By then, it had already made history as the Philippine deadliest storm.

Seven years later, in 2020, Australia had the lengthiest season of climate-driven wildfires, the intensity of which the The New York Times described in a breathtaking headline as “an atomic bomb.” For the first time in its history, Australia issued a “compulsory call-out” of its Defense Force Reserve Brigades, and deployed thousands of soldiers, sailors, and airmen to battle the raging fires and help evacuations. Yet the Australian military alone was no match for the blazes. Seventy countries, including Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, and the United States, offered assistance. The economic cost of fires was put at $103 billion. Worst of all, 1 billion animals were burned to death in this climate-fueled inferno.

The Asia-Pacific is set to see the economic tab of climatic disasters double to $1.4 trillion a year (which is 4.2% of regional GDP). By the middle of the 21st century, the global toll of climate-driven calamities will reach $38 trillion a year. How ironic it is that 200 world leaders at the climate summit (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan this November, will be fighting tooth and nail to commit the least possible amount to the $100 billion global climate fund, which is basically a cleanup cost of climate change. Yet they have no remorse in having future generations pay $38 trillion a year as a penalty for climate breakdown. The cost of all wars, including world wars, fought in the 20th century is not nearly as much as this amount.

It is, however, heartening that the climate envoy John Podesta has announced U.S. support for Azerbaijan’s initiative of the New Collective Quantified Goal on climate finance. In a U.S.-China Working Group meeting in Beijing in September, Podesta urged China to support this initiative. Both will cohost a summit of world leaders assembled at COP29 to urge more aggressive cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. In all of this, climate change is defining itself in geopolitics.

It would be a great pity if the NDP squanders this promising moment to revive left-wing populism in Canada.

The current upheaval in U.S. politics, with the dramatic and unexpected rise of the Kamala Harris/Tim Walz Democratic ticket, may suddenly be opening possibilities here in Canada that have long appeared out of reach.

After decades of the business elite successfully imposing its agenda — tax cuts, smaller government, an empowered private sector — Harris and Walz are energizing a large swath of U.S. voters with a very different left-populist pitch for strong government programs, pro-labour policies, and tax hikes on the rich.

Such a pro-worker agenda, which grew out of FDR’s New Deal and prevailed in the early postwar decades, has largely disappeared in recent years as business priorities — supported by the media, academia, and conservative think tanks — have come to dominate politics to an extraordinary extent.

As a result, even left-leaning political parties have been afraid to get too far offside the business agenda, for fear of looking like they don’t understand economic realities and would be irresponsible in managing the economy.

Accordingly, Democrats in the U.S. and the NDP in Canada have reluctantly gone along with much of the business agenda — even though it’s produced a society top-heavy with billionaires, with little for working people.

But now that we’re witnessing a revival of leftish populism from Harris and particularly Walz, we can plainly see what has long been obvious but unsaid: that a New Deal-inspired agenda offers more for working people.

That explains the joyous looks on the faces of Harris and Walz as they push for policies — like a $6,000 tax credit for newborns — that would greatly improve the lives of millions of Americans.

President Joe Biden also championed pro-worker policies but had no ability to sell them. Harris and Walz are brat as salespeople.

All this stirring south of the border creates possibilities for Canada.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh signalled his intention to distinguish his party from the Liberals by breaking the Liberal-NDP supply-and-confidence deal earlier this month.

But he missed a big opportunity to do more — to move the party towards the kind of left-populist agenda pioneered by early Canadian progressives like the late Tommy Douglas, celebrated as the father of medicare in Canada.

Instead, Singh used the Liberal-NDP breakup to signal that he’s backing away from the Trudeau government’s unpopular carbon tax.

That was a foolish move, which will only bolster the credibility of Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s aggressive (and misguided) campaign against the carbon tax.

Singh could have differentiated himself from the Liberals much more effectively by insisting he’d only continue to support them if they introduced a wealth tax — a truly game-changing, populist measure with the potential to raise $32 billion a year to rebuild social programs.

The NDP actually supports an annual net wealth tax, which has been part of its official platform since 2019. But you might not know that, since the party rarely mentions it (probably out of fear they might look like irresponsible economic managers).

However, the tax, which would impact only the very wealthy, is consistently popular with Canadians, with polls showing support above 80 per cent.

Business strongly opposes a wealth tax, so championing it would put the NDP in a fight against business, the Liberals and the Conservatives — as a truly populist, pro-worker party — instead of letting Poilievre, posing as a friend of the working class, steal much of that vote.

A wealth tax is also nicely in line with Kamala Harris’ support for a “billionaire minimum tax” that would impose a 25 per cent minimum tax on total income exceeding $100 million (including unrealized gains).

Instead of crushing one of Ottawa’s few measures to tackle climate change, the NDP would be far more inspiring if it pushed to extract wealth from some of the most overprivileged people on earth.

Mike DeWine, the mild-mannered avuncular Republican governor of Ohio, told ABC News that the claim made by GOP vice presidential candidate JD Vance about Haitians eating pets was “a piece of garbage.” He also criticized Vance for saying that the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were “illegal aliens,” when in fact they are living there legally.

You would think that DeWine might finally have had his fill of the garbage lies, enough so that he’d break with the liars, but you would be wrong.

The headline on his New York Times guest essay Friday (“I’m the Republican Governor of Ohio. Here is the Truth about Springfield”) raises hopes, until we read the fine print.

You would think that DeWine might finally have had his fill of the garbage lies, enough so that he'd break with the liars, but you would be wrong.

DeWine gushes about how much he and his wife adore Springfield and its people, and how these wonderful, hard-working immigrants from Haiti are helping to rebuild a town that was fading away economically. DeWine comes across as a caring, honest, God-fearing man who by all rights should absolutely detest anyone who so willfully lied about the town he grew up in and these hard-working immigrants who are revitalizing it.

But just when you think he’s about to break with the liars he expresses his support for them, explaining how they are just making a tactical error: “As a supporter of former President Donald Trump and Senator JD Vance, I am saddened by how they and others continue to repeat claims that lack evidence and disparage the legal migrants living in Springfield. This rhetoric hurts the city and its people, and it hurts those who have spent their lives there…. [T]heir verbal attacks against these Haitians – who are legally in the United States – dilute and cloud what should be a winning argument about the border.”

Is there any lie that Trump/Vance could tell that might turn DeWine into a former supporter?

The Ohio governor, who ran nine points ahead of Vance in their 2022 statewide elections, may soon be tested by the orange emperor-in-exile, who always demands fealty. To be sure, Trump’s political tacticians will tell him to ignore the critique, but Trump may decide that DeWine needs an attitude adjustment. In Trump’s warped brain a strong leader brooks no criticism without firing back even harder. If Trump acts like Trump, DeWine might have “piece of garbage” lies headed his way.

As far as I know, no other current Republican officeholder above the city level in Springfield has dared to offer such a scathing critique of the shameless lies about the Haitians. The last time we heard such criticisms from Republican leaders was after January 6th, and all those who had harsh words for Trump then either have left office, recanted, or gone silent. Today, lying about Haitians seems like a small price to pay to stay in Trump’s good graces. It’s one thing for Dick and Liz Chaney to take him on, but it’s quite another for any Republican who plans to hold office while Trump still commands his base.

For those hoping for a Trump defeat, it would be best for Trump to be Trump and mercilessly rip into DeWine, forcing the governor either to fall to his knees in supplication or walk away. But even if attacked, does DeWine have the guts to walk away from the shameless liars?

The jury is out. So far Springfield’s most famous citizen has shown that he has enough gumption to critique the “piece of garbage” lies about his hometown, but nowhere near enough to take on the liars who spew them.

That seems to count for heroism in today’s cowered Republican party.

We haven’t of late had much in the way of political “consensus” here in the United States. But we do today have one consensus of sorts — on our tax system of all things. Most everyone considers how we go about taxing ourselves to be, at best, distinctly suboptimal.

How do we change that? Where do we start? Who’s really hurting under our current tax system? Our tax “consensus” — on fundamental questions like these — breaks down immediately.

Take, for instance, the question of who’s really hurting under our current tax rules. Our contemporary political right sees America’s rich as our tax system’s biggest victims. America’s top 1 percenters, as one conservative analyst recently declared, “actually contribute more than their fair share.”

Most of our rich, with some noble exceptions, share this perspective. Indeed, observes the Henley & Partners consultancy CEO Juerg Steffen, our wealthy’s unhappiness with the U.S. tax system — and their uncertainty about the system’s future — has been generating “an unprecedented surge in affluent Americans seeking alternative residence and citizenship options.”

American progressives, by contrast, see in our current tax system an operation that essentially privileges the already privileged.

The United States, explains an Americans for Tax Reform analysis of new Congressional Budget Office data, is now sitting on its “most lopsided distribution of income” since government statisticians first started tracking that distribution. Most of this surge in inequality, the ATF goes on to note, reflects “the bonanza of capital gains” that our highest-income households have long enjoyed.

Our tax code currently taxes this bonanza of capital gains — the profits the wealthy make when they sell their appreciated stocks, bonds, and other financial assets — at a much lower rate than the highest tax levies on wage and salary income.

But the preferential treatment capital gains receive, progressive analysts stress, goes even deeper. The capital gain windfalls that our richest register don’t just face conveniently low tax rates. These windfalls are regularly facing no taxes at all.

How do our super rich pull that trick off? Chuck Marr and Samantha Jacoby from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities walk us through the magic in a rundown they released earlier this month. The wealthiest among us, they detail, don’t sell their appreciated assets. They borrow against them.

This borrowing lets the rich maintain their luxurious lifestyles and avoid having to pay the — modest — tax they would have to pay if they went and sold their assets that have soared in value. Their assets, meanwhile, continue to increase in value, and that increase will typically far exceed whatever costs the borrowing against these assets might have engendered.

What happens when these rich pass on to the great beyond? Their capital gains remain untaxed. The particular magic here goes by the label of “stepped-up basis.” The heirs to the wealth our dear-departed wealthiest leave behind face no tax on the billions in unrealized capital gains their rich benefactors had accumulated over the years. The reason: Our tax code values inherited assets at their fair market value at the moment of inheritance. Any capital gains over the assets’ original cost simply — for tax purposes — disappear.

How’s that for magic!

This bag of tax tricks doesn’t work at all for the one major appreciating asset that average Americans hold: our homes. We pay every year property taxes on the homes we own. If the value of our homes rises, we pay more in taxes. And if we go on to sell our homes, we pay a tax on any gain we realize.

The privileges our richest enjoy at tax time extend neatly to the generous annual compensation that our top corporate executives pocket. Major corporate CEOs, the Economic Policy Institute has just reported, last year realized $22.1 million in compensation, 290 times the pay that went to typical U.S. workers.

Over three-quarters of this CEO compensation came in stock-related pay, as either options to buy stock at a future date at a below-market price or as awards of stock that come free after a “vesting” period. Both options and vested stock awards arrive awash with nifty tax workarounds that can have top execs paying taxes on their lush compensation at lower tax rates than their workers.

The good news amid all this tax dodging by our richest? In 2025, we have a real shot at taking the rich people-friendly magic out of our current federal tax code.

What makes 2025 so special? By the year’s end, most of the tax giveaways to the rich that Donald Trump signed into law in 2017 will expire. That reality will have rich people-friendly lawmakers entering next year absolutely desperate to renew those giveaways before that expiration takes place.

If Donald Trump wins election this November and arrives back in office with congressional majorities willing to follow his lead, our richest will gain that renewal. In 2026, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy calculates, that renewal would save our richest 1 percent — taxpayers with incomes over $914,900 — 46 times more than average taxpayers making between $55,100 and $94,100.

If Election Day this November produces a different outcome, on the other hand, the lobbyist armies of our richest could be facing the sorts of legislative defeats America’s rich haven’t seen since Franklin Roosevelt sat in the White House — but only if those of us who seek a more equal America get our act together and organize to create a tax code that coddles our many, not our richest few.

The just-announced Fair Share America coalition is aiming to lead that organizing effort, and some 300 state and national organizations have already signed on. These groups range from top research centers and America’s largest union, the National Education Association, to tax justice advocacy groups in states ranging from New Jersey and Pennsylvania to Michigan and Montana.

By January, Fair Share America is aiming to run at least a thousand organizations strong.

The activist who’ll be leading the Fair Share America, Kristen Crowell, brings an encouraging record of organizing success. In 2022, she led the Massachusetts grassroots effort that won a 4 percent surtax on taxable income over $1 million. That surtax, here in 2024, has already generated over a billion dollars in new revenue for public education and transportation.

Let the battle begin!

With a divided Congress and an election fast approaching, congressional Democrats have little opportunity to enact any landmark legislation, but they need not sit on their hands. Congressional committees have the power to conduct hearings, investigations, and issue subpoenas. As the majority party in the Senate, Democrats should be using this authority to aggressively critique corporations that harm the public’s health and pocketbooks.

Public hearings bring issues to the forefront of conversation and create an opportunity to leverage successes electorally. Ideally, committee chairs would regularly harness this power to hold industries or specific bad actors accountable. In practice, it’s more of a mixed bag, representing a massive missed opportunity politically.

Nowhere is this clearer than the lack of hearings on oil and gas industry malfeasance and pollution. In May, the FTC accused ex-Pioneer CEO Scott Sheffield of a price fixing scheme with OPEC. A week later, Trump initiated an outrageous quid pro quo with industry executives when he requested $1 billion in campaign contributions in exchange for a rollback of environmental regulations. In March, a Stanford study found that methane leaks account for 3 percent of gas produced in the U.S., three times greater than the EPA’s 1 percent estimation. The result? A cost of at least $9.3 billion in climate damage per year.

If asking nicely isn’t inducing cooperation, perhaps a subpoena and the specter of jail time will.

Surely the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources has something to say about collusion and bribery in the energy sector, right? Obviously the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Work investigated the causes of excess methane emissions? Sadly, no. It’s hardly surprising for the Energy and Natural Resources committee—Senator Joe Manchin (I-WV) is the chair. Rather than hold the oil industry to account, Sen. Manchin would rather grill Interior Secretary Deb Haaland over the administration's plan to reduce oil and gas leases on federal lands.

Delaware Senator Tom Carper’s leadership of the Environment and Public Works committee is less explicable. To be fair, the committee has conducted oversight in the past: they brought in the CEO of Norfolk Southern to testify in the wake of the East Palestine derailment in March 2023. But there have been no hearings of that sort since, despite ample opportunity to do so.

One month after the study on methane emissions was released and widely covered in the press, the committee held a hearing “Examining the State of Air Quality Monitoring Technology.” This was a great opportunity to probe why the EPA estimates of methane emissions were drastically lower than actual emmisions and question whether companies took proper precautions to prevent leaks. Instead, methane was mentioned only once during the two hour hearing.

While these committees sat idly by, the Budget and Finance committees actually took steps to address Trump’s quid pro quo. In May, the committees jointly sent letters to industry leaders, including Chevron and ExxonMobil, requesting materials from the event, information about campaign donations, and copies of draft policy proposals. It was a good first step. But what happens when asking nicely doesn’t work?

Surely the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources has something to say about collusion and bribery in the energy sector, right?

Nearly four months after their first letters, having received “insufficient” responses with “inaccurate claims,” Senate Democrats followed up with … more letters. “Inaccurate claims” is merely a polite way of saying “lying” and, last I checked, lying to Congress is against the law. If oil and gas executives did not cooperate the first time, and are willing to lie in their statements to Congress, there’s no reason to believe they’ll do anything different two months out from an election that their partner-in-crime may win.

Democrats need to hold them accountable before it's too late, and the only way to do so is with subpoenas, both for the documents they’re seeking and appearances of the executives in front of Congress. Polling from More Perfect Union and Data For Progress showed that voters want Big Oil to face consequences for their role in pollution and high gas prices, but don’t think the government is taking action. Hearings that interrogate oil executives would signal to the public that Democrats in Congress aren’t letting oil companies off the hook and raise awareness of Trump’s promise to let oil interests run roughshod over Americans.

Thankfully, some Senate Democrats understand the importance of aggressively conducting oversight. In July, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions’ (HELP) issued a subpoena to hospital executive Ralph de la Torre. As The American Prosepct previously reported, Torre is accused of woefully undersupplying his hospital chain while extracting millions to finance his extravagant lifestyle that features multiple yachts and private jets. Torre is defying the subpoena, but the HELP committee is not simply giving up—or asking again nicely. Committee Chair Bernie Sanders issued a statement stating that the HELP committee “will not accept” Torre’s efforts to skirt the subpoena. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey called for Torre to be held in contempt of Congress, which could lead to jail time, if he fails to appear.

Senate Democrats overseeing the oil and gas industry would be wise to learn from the HELP committee’s examples. Americans are fed up with corporate abuses across the economy, and they need to see their representatives in Congress cracking down on bad actors. Letters requesting information are good, but rolling over when executives refuse to comply is unacceptable. If asking nicely isn’t inducing cooperation, perhaps a subpoena and the specter of jail time will.

New waves of workers are standing up and demanding fair treatment on the job — from the fast food workers of the Fight for $15 to the workers at companies like Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, and Volkswagen that are fighting for a union and a fair contract.

But as these workers have made significant gains, they’ve simultaneously run into huge barriers: our broken democratic systems. That’s why one of the most important priorities for advancing worker power is democracy reform.

In particular, that means reforming the anti-democratic filibuster in the U.S. Senate and ending partisan and racial gerrymandering, which have made state legislatures unresponsive to worker needs.

Take the Fight for $15. Over the last decade, the brave workers driving this inspiring campaign have won wage increases in half the states and scores of cities. As a result, about half of our workforce will soon be covered by a $15 minimum wage — one of the highest among industrialized countries. But the other half languishes with one of the lowest minimum wages in the developed world. The federal minimum wage remains frozen at a paltry $7.25.

Despite the fact that more than 80 percent of Democratic, independent, and Republican voters want to raise the minimum wage, no Republican-led legislature has passed a genuine increase in decades. Many have not only blocked state wage increases, but also passed punitive “preemption” laws to prevent cities from stepping in to ensure fair wages. Not coincidentally, many of these are among the most gerrymandered.

At the federal level, there’s a similar dynamic: Republicans in the Senate have used the anti-democratic filibuster for years to block increases in the federal minimum wage despite strong voter support.

Workers fighting to form a union face similar roadblocks. Employees who demand a fair shake routinely face retaliation from their employers — and those who defy the odds and win a union election often endure years of stonewalling as corporations refuse to negotiate a contract. Others, such as app-based workers at Uber and Doordash, have been denied the right to unionize at all.

The PRO Act would remove these roadblocks and modernize our broken labor laws to give workers a real opportunity to join a union and negotiate with their employers over fair pay and benefits, protection against extreme heat, how AI is deployed in their workplaces, and more.

But while 70 percent of voters, including a majority of Republicans, back the PRO Act, the threat of a Republican filibuster in the Senate prevents it from advancing.

Fortunately, there’s new and long overdue momentum for addressing these anti-democratic roadblocks.

Senator Chuck Schumer announced recently that if they win this year, Democrats plan to prioritize key democracy reforms, including reforming the filibuster to empower a simple majority of the Senate to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and John Lewis Voting Rights Act. These crucial voting rights bills include new limits on racial and partisan gerrymandering — the practices that have made many state legislatures so unresponsive to worker needs.

But safeguarding fair elections is only the first step. The next step must be removing the filibuster — which has a long and ugly history of being used to deny people of color basic rights in our nation — as an obstacle to restoring protections for workers. In an echo of Jim Crow, senators today are using the threat of a filibuster to protect a broken labor law system that denies all workers, and especially workers of color, a fair chance to join a union and earn a decent minimum wage.

The rights of workers to earn a living wage and have a voice in their workplaces are fundamental for our democracy. The key next steps for making those rights real is to restore our democracy by ending both gerrymandering and the filibuster.

The war in Ukraine has been going on for 2.5 years with no end on sight. Not only that, but we are now close to a nuclear war, according to the Norwegian scholar Glenn Diesen who predicted in November 2021 that “war was becoming increasingly unavoidable” as NATO was escalating tensions with Russia by strengthening its ties with Ukraine. Indeed, as Diesen argues in the interview that follows, NATO provoked Russia and sabotaged all peace negotiations, using Ukraine as a proxy to a geopolitical chessboard. Diesen is professor of political science at the University of South-Eastern Norway and author of scores of academic articles and books, including, most recently, The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order (2024).

C. J. Polychroniou: On February 22, 2022, in a move that few had anticipated, Russia invaded Ukraine by launching a simultaneous ground and air attack on several fronts. The war hasn’t gone at all as Moscow had intended and it rages on as neither side is seriously considering an end to the fighting. Yet, the invasion is in many ways a continuation of a territorial conflict between Russia and Ukraine that goes back to 2014. What lies behind the Russia-Ukraine conflict? How did we arrive at this dangerous juncture that is now dragging NATO into the conflict?

Glenn Diesen: I predicted the war in an article in November 2021, in which I argued war was becoming “unavoidable” as NATO continued to escalate while rejecting any peaceful settlement. This should have been evident to everyone if we had an honest discussion about what had been happening.

NATO was always part of this conflict, and it did not start as a territorial conflict. The conflict began with the Western-backed coup in Ukraine in February 2014, which was seen as a precursor to NATO expansion and the eventual eviction of Russia from its Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol. As the New York Times has confirmed, on the first day after the coup, the new Ukrainian government hand-picked by Washington established a partnership with the CIA and MI6 for a covert war against Russia. It is important to remember that Russia had not laid any claims to Crimea before seizing it in the referendum in March 2014. This is not a commentary on legality or legitimacy, merely the fact that Russia’s actions were a reaction to the coup.

We are very close to a nuclear war, and we are deluding ourselves by suggesting we are merely helping Ukraine defend itself.

A proxy war broke out in which NATO backed the government it installed in Kiev and Russia backed the Donbas rebels who refused to recognize the legitimacy of the coup and resisted the de-russification and purge of the language, political opposition, culture, and the church. The Minsk-2 peace agreement of 2015 laid the foundation for resolving the conflict, but this was merely treated as a deception to buy time and build a large Ukrainian army as confirmed by the Germans, French and authorities in Kiev. After 7 years of Ukraine refusing to implement the Minsk agreement and NATO’s refusing to give Russia any security guarantees for NATO’s military infrastructure that moved into Ukraine—Russia invaded in February 2022.

It is correct that the war has not gone as Moscow expected. Russia thought it could impose a peace but was taken by surprise when the U.S. and U.K. preferred war. When Russia sent in its military, the small size and conduct of the invading forces indicated that the purpose was merely to pressure Ukraine to accept a peace agreement on Russian terms. Ukraine and Russia were close to an agreement in Istanbul, although it was sabotaged by the U.S. and U.K. as they saw an opportunity to fight Russia with Ukrainians.

The nature of the war changed fundamentally as it became a war of attrition. Russia withdrew to more defensible front lines, began mobilizing its troops and sourcing the required weapons for a long-term war to defeat the NATO-built army in Ukraine. After 2.5 years of war, this has become a territorial conflict that makes it impossible to resolve in a manner that would be acceptable to all sides. As NATO refuses to accept losing its decade-long proxy war in Ukraine, it must continue to escalate and thus get more directly involved in the war. We are now at the brink of a direct NATO-Russia War.

Did NATO provoke Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? Even if so, didn’t Moscow have any other options other than to resort to the use of military force?

NATO provoked the invasion and sabotaged all paths to peace. The NATO countries affirmed on several occasions that the UN-approved Minsk agreement was the only path to a peaceful resolution of the conflict in Ukraine, yet then admitted that it was merely a ruse to militarize Ukraine. This convinced the Russians that NATO was pursuing a military solution to the conflict in Ukraine that would also involve an invasion of Crimea. As argued by a top advisor to former French president Sarkozy, the U.S.-Ukrainian strategic agreement of November 2021 convinced Russia it had to attack or be attacked.

Russia considered NATO in Ukraine to be an existential threat, and NATO refused to give Russia any security guarantees to mitigate these security concerns. The former U.S. ambassador to NATO, Kurt Volker, argued during the Biden-Putin discussions that no agreements should be made with Russia as “success is confrontation.” This war is a great tragedy as it has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainians and Russians, made Europe weaker and more dependent, and taken the world to the brink of nuclear war. By failing to admit NATO’s central role in provoking this war, we also prevent ourselves from recognizing possible political solutions.

Russia and Ukraine were close to war-ending agreements in April of 2022, but apparently certain western leaders convinced Ukrainian president Zelensky to back down from such a deal. Is Ukraine a US pawn on a geo-political chessboard?

Zelensky confirmed on the first day after the Russian invasion that Moscow had contacted Kiev to discuss a peace agreement based on restoring Ukraine’s neutrality. On the third day after the invasion, Russia and Ukraine agreed to start negotiations. Yet, the American spokesperson suggested the US could not support such negotiations. When the negotiations nonetheless began, Boris Johnson was sent to Kiev to sabotage them. Johnson later wrote an op-ed warning against a bad peace. The Ukrainian negotiators and the Israeli and Turkish mediators all confirmed that Russia was willing to pull back its troops and compromise on almost everything if Ukraine would restore its neutrality to end NATO expansionism. The mediators also confirmed that the US and UK saw an opportunity to bleed Russia and thus weaken a strategic rival by fighting with Ukrainians. The US and UK told Ukraine they would not support a peace agreement based on neutrality, but NATO would supply all the weapons Ukraine would need if Ukraine pulled out of the negotiations and chose war instead. Interviews with American and British leaders made it clear that the only acceptable outcome for the war was regime change in Moscow, while other political leaders began to speak about breaking up Russia into many smaller countries.

Yes, I believe that Ukraine is a pawn on the geopolitical chessboard. Why do we not listen to all the American political and military leaders who describe this as a good war and an opportunity to weaken Russia without using American soldiers?

What does Russia want from Ukraine?

Russia demands peace based on the Istanbul+ formula. The Istanbul agreement of early 2022 involved Russia retreating from the territory it seized since February 2022 in return for Ukraine restoring its neutrality. However, after 2.5 years of fighting, the war has also evolved into a territorial conflict. Russia therefore demands that Ukraine also recognizes Russian sovereignty over the territories it annexed.

Russia will not accept a ceasefire that merely freezes the front lines, because this could become another Minsk agreement that merely buys time for NATO to re-arm Ukraine to fight Russia another day. Moscow therefore demands a political settlement to the conflict based on neutrality and territorial concessions. In the absence of such an agreement and continued threats by NATO to expand after the war is over, Russia will likely also annex Kharkov, Dnipro, Nikolaev, and Odessa to prevent these historical Russian regions from falling under the control of NATO.

Ukraine has become increasingly a de facto NATO member. What are the chances that Russia might introduce tactical nuclear weapons in the battlefield to achieve its aims?

Russia permits the use of nuclear weapons in response to a nuclear attack or if its existence is threatened. NATO becoming directly involved in the war is considered an existential threat by Russia, and Russia has warned that NATO would become directly involved by supplying long-range precision missiles. Such missiles will need to be operated by American and British soldiers and navigated by their satellites, thus this represents a NATO attack on Russia. We are very close to a nuclear war, and we are deluding ourselves by suggesting we are merely helping Ukraine defend itself.

Can you briefly discuss the implications for world order if the West defeats Russia? And what would the international system look like if Russia wins the war in Ukraine?

The West would like to defeat Russia to restore a unipolar order. As many military and political leaders in the US argue, once Russia has been defeated then the US can focus its resources on defeating China. It is worth remarking that few Western political leaders have clearly defined what “victory” over the world’s largest nuclear power would look like. Russia considers this war to be an existential threat to its survival, and I am therefore convinced that Russia would launch a nuclear attack long before NATO troops get to march through Crimea.

A Russian victory will leave Ukraine a dysfunctional state with much less territory, while NATO will have lost much of its credibility as this was bet on a victory. The war has intensified a transition to a multipolar world, and this likely increase at a much higher pace if NATO loses the war in Ukraine.

NATO expansion that cancelled inclusive pan-European security agreements with Russia was the main manifestation of America’s hegemonic ambitions after the Cold War, thus the entire world order will be greatly influenced by the outcome of this war. This also explains why NATO will be prepared to attack Russia with long-range precision missiles and risk a nuclear exchange.

During the 2025 tax debate, policymakers have the opportunity to remake the tax code so that it is fairer, works for low- and moderate-income people and families, and advances racial equity.

A key priority should be expanding the Child Tax Credit to benefit the roughly 19 million children shut out from receiving the full credit simply because their families have low incomes. Lawmakers should, at a minimum, reinstate the successful 2021 American Rescue Plan expansion of the Child Tax Credit, including making the full credit available to children in families with low incomes and increasing the maximum amount of the credit to $3,600 for children aged five and younger and $3,000 for children aged 6 to 17, among other changes.

When the expanded credit expired, the number of children experiencing poverty rose substantially, demonstrating that child poverty is created—and can be alleviated —through policy choices.

There has been intensive congressional interest in the Child Tax Credit this year, including the House-passed bipartisan Wyden-Smith expansion, and proposals from congressional Child Tax Credit champions that build on the Rescue Plan.

Under current law, three major design flaws in the Child Tax Credit deny its full benefit to millions of children in low-income families:

• It phases in slowly at $0.15 per dollar of earnings, regardless of the number of children in a family;
• It starts phasing in only after a family has $2,500 in earnings; and
• It caps the credit amount that families with lower incomes can receive as a refund to $1,700 per child (for 2024), less than the $2,000 maximum for children in families with higher incomes. (The 2017 tax law set the limit on the credit refund amount, which is sometimes referred to as a “refundability cap.”)

The credit is also unavailable to 17-year-olds, who typically are still in high school.

An estimated 1 in 4 children—or roughly 19 million children—got less than the full $2,000-per-child credit or no credit in 2022 because their families’ incomes were too low. (See chart for examples of families at different income levels.) This includes nearly half of Black children, 4 in 10 Native American children, more than 1 in 3 Latino children, and about 1 in 3 children living in rural areas. Their families are overrepresented in low-paying work due to past and present hiring discrimination, inequities in educational and housing opportunities, and other sources of inequality. About 1 in 6 white children, more than 1 in 7 Asian children, and all children in Puerto Rico are also left out of the full credit.

When Congress temporarily expanded the Child Tax Credit in 2021, child poverty plummeted; the credit expansion reduced the number of children living below the poverty line by more than a third. While all racial and ethnic groups saw large reductions in poverty, the percentage point reduction in child poverty was largest for Black, Latino, and Native American children. In passing the American Rescue Plan, Congress extended the Child Tax Credit to all children living in families with low or no income for the first time, and increased the $2,000-per-child credit to $3,600 per child aged 5 and younger, and $3,000 per child aged 6 to 17 (making 17-year-olds eligible for the first time), among other changes.

When the expanded credit expired, the number of children experiencing poverty rose substantially, demonstrating that child poverty is created—and can be alleviated —through policy choices. A 2019 National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine report on reducing child poverty found that “income poverty itself causes negative child outcomes.” A large number of studies have found evidence that additional income can improve children’s outcomes in the short and long term.

If the Rescue Plan version of the Child Tax Credit were in place for 2024, roughly 2.6 million fewer children would live in families with incomes below the poverty line. (See Table 1 at this link for estimates by state.) This includes 959,000 Latino children, 755,000 white children, 654,000 Black children, 79,000 Native American children, and 71,000 Asian children.

Congress should, at a minimum, reinstate the Rescue Plan expansion of the Child Tax Credit.

We’ve seen strong interest in the Child Tax Credit over the last year. Bipartisan tax legislation, which was negotiated by House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.) and Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), included a modest, but still important, expansion and passed the House with a large majority in January 2024. That proposal would have increased the Child Tax Credit for an estimated 16 million children in the first year, and lifted some 500,000 children above the poverty line when fully in effect.

Separately, two congressional proposals, Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Michael Bennet’s (D-Colo.) Working Families Tax Relief Act and Rep. Rosa DeLauro’s (D-Conn.) American Family Act, build on the success of the Rescue Plan’s expanded Child Tax Credit. They make the full credit available to children in families with low incomes, propose larger maximum credit amounts than the Rescue Plan (by adjusting the Rescue Plan maximum credit amounts for inflation), and make additional changes to the credit. Though details differ, both proposals would lift more children above the poverty line over time than reinstating the 2021 Rescue Plan credit due to their larger maximum credit values and other changes. For example, according to a Columbia University analysis, had the American Family Act been in place for 2023 the credit expansion would have lifted an additional 3.6 million children out of poverty compared to current law.

Policymakers in both parties should make expanding the Child Tax Credit a priority in the 2025 tax debate. At minimum they should reinstate the Rescue Plan changes, which would provide an income boost to more than 60 million children in total, including the 19 million children in families with the lowest incomes. (See Table 2 at this link for estimates by state.) Expanding the Child Tax Credit is a proven solution for lifting millions of children above the poverty line and helping to ensure that all children have the resources they need to thrive.

If you’re looking for someone to blame for the gun violence that has left our schools, streets, and communities soaked in blood, don’t point just at the National Rifle Association and their lackeys in the Republican Party. Raise another finger, ideally your middle one, toward a Supreme Court that has enabled the unceasing rise of gun-related carnage in all its ever-more-obscene forms.

The key decision came in 2008, when a 5-4 majority led by the late Justice Antonin Scalia ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own firearms. Prior to Heller, the combined weight of academic scholarship and legal precedent had construed the Second Amendment as protecting civilian gun ownership only in connection with long-antiquated state militias. This view was long seen as reflecting the spirit of the actual debates held during the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

Scalia and the other members of the conservative Heller majority purported to base their radical reinterpretation of the Second Amendment on their “originalist” understanding of the Founding Fathers’ intentions. But their novel conclusion essentially ignored the first 13 words of the Second Amendment regarding the necessity of preserving the militias.

This amounted to a distortion of American history. State militias played a critical role in the American Revolution, and before that, in maintaining order in the 13 colonies. As the Second Amendment historian Noah Shusterman has written:

The men writing the Bill of Rights wanted every citizen to be in the militia, and they wanted everyone in the militia to be armed. If someone was prohibited from participating in the militia, the leaders of the founders’ generation would not have wanted them to have access to weapons… Read the debates about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and the militia’s importance leaps off the page. Alexander Hamilton, writing in the Federalist Papers, called a well-regulated militia “the most natural defense of a free country.” His anti-Federalist critics agreed with the need for a citizens’ militia, writing that “a well-regulated militia, composed of the Yeomanry of the country, have ever been considered as the bulwark of a free people.”

Few errors of constitutional interpretation have had such deadly real-world consequences as Heller. Justice John Paul Stevens, who authored the principal dissent in Heller, later condemned the ruling as “the worst self-inflicted wound in the court’s history.”

Since Heller, both guns and gun deaths have surged in tandem in what the American Enlightenment Project calls the “Heller Inflection.” In 2008, there were 305 million guns in circulation and 31,500 reported gun deaths; there are now 470 million guns in circulation and over 45,000 reported gun deaths per year. Mass shootings, defined as events involving four or more victims, have grown as well—from 272 in 2014 to 653 last year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

But as bad as Heller was, it still recognized that certain gun control measures remained “presumptively lawful.” In the words of Scalia:

Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.

In 2010, in McDonald v. Chicago, the court extended Heller’s Second Amendment analysis to cover state and local governments in addition to federal enclaves. But in 2022, with Clarence Thomas’ 6-3 majority opinion in New York Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the court cast aside the limiting language of Heller about presumptively lawful gun-control restrictions.

Bruen struck down New York’s firearm permit system that had been on the books since 1909. To reach that result, the court rejected the traditional methods of judicial scrutiny used to determine the constitutionality of state and federal statutes that required judges to balance the governmental interests advanced by legislation against the competing rights of individuals. In place of interest balancing, Thomas and his cohorts substituted a specious “history and tradition” test based on the justices’ highly selective and subjective reading of history and their sense of tradition.

In fact, gun-control regulations like the New York permit system have been commonplace in the United States from colonial times to the present. The founders supported a variety of strict measures, including the registration of guns issued to militia members and prohibitions against carrying firearms in public. By the early 1900s, nearly every state had enacted laws requiring firearm licenses and banning concealed carry.

As a result of Bruen, however, that history has effectively been neutered. Judges now must regard gun-control measures as presumptively invalid. To overcome the presumption, the government must prove that even the most commonsense laws are firmly rooted, either explicitly or by analogy, in the “nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

Together with Heller and McDonald, Bruen has led to a surge in Second Amendment challenges to gun laws since 2008. Pre-Heller, the lower federal courts decided an average of 26 gun cases per year; they now hear nearly 700 per year. The challengers are also winning a higher percentage of cases compared to the pre-Heller era, especially in cases decided by Donald Trump-appointed judges appointed. “Trump judges are close to casting 50% of their votes in favor of gun rights, when the average for other Republicans is 28%,” one study has found.

Last term, the Supreme Court surprised many by upholding a federal law that bars anyone subject to a domestic-violence restraining order from possessing a gun. However, it did so without signaling that it is prepared to modify the hard Second Amendment lines drawn in Heller and Bruen. As long as the court is controlled by right-wing activists beholden to the gun lobby and the Republican Party, those lines and their horrendous consequences are here to stay.

Israel’s massive cyber-attack on Lebanon on 17 and 18 September, with the near-simultaneous explosion of 3,000-4,000 pagers and walkie-talkies, has killed a few dozen Hezbollah members and many civilians, including some children and health workers, has blinded and maimed hundreds of people and wounded many thousands. Hezbollah’s leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, in a long speech on 19 September, frankly admitted that the attacks had delivered a severe and unprecedented blow to the radical movement, but he said that the movement would recover from it.

From an intelligence and technical point of view, the booby-trapping of the pagers was a sophisticated espionage operation carried out by the Israeli Mossad. There is an international trail in this complex operation and, so far, even the company that produced those pagers and those who manipulated them have not been identified. In view of the impact of this extensive form of cyber terrorism on the current Israeli war and its repercussions in the region and beyond and what it means for cyber security in the future, this incident must be properly investigated to see which firms and which countries were involved in this heinous act.

Many international legal experts and academics have stressed the illegal nature of such indiscriminate action and have described it as another Israeli war crime. Luigi Daniele, a senior lecturer at Nottingham Trent University and an expert in international humanitarian law, says that these acts constitute at least two war crimes. “The first is intentionally directing attacks against individual civilians not taking a direct part in the hostilities, for all the unlawful targets, so basically, diplomats or merely political affiliates of Hezbollah with no combat function.” The second is “intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects or widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment which would be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated.”

Yet, some pro-Israeli commentators have bizarrely praised it as an example of Israel’s technical expertise and its intelligence dominance of the region. Writing in Haaretz, Yossi Melman called it a “genius move” and praised it as “a brilliant and innovative operation, showing that for imaginative spy craft planners the sky is really the limit.” However, he criticises its “early implementation”, rather than waiting for the start of a war on Hezbollah. Axios cited a former Israeli official who said Israeli intelligence services had originally planned to use the modified pagers as a “surprise opening blow in an all-out war to try to cripple Hezbollah”, but three U.S. officials told Axios that they used them prematurely because they believed that their secret might have been discovered by the group.

Although so far, the United States has supported Israel at great cost to its reputation and its relations with Middle Eastern and Muslim countries as a whole, there are indications that most Americans, including young Jewish Americans have turned against Israel’s far-right government.

Clearly, the massive pager attack on Lebanon was meant to coincide with the start of a major Israeli invasion of Lebanon and it might still lead to a regional war. Israeli aircraft have already started bombing parts of Lebanon. Even from before the 7th October attack, Netanyahu spoke about a new Middle East. In a speech at the UN General Assembly in New York, Netanyahu showed a map of Israel which had incorporated both Gaza and the West Bank.

Speaking two days after the Hamas attack on Israel, Netanyahu vowed to change the Middle East: “What Hamas will experience will be difficult and terrible … we are going to change the Middle East.” The day after the Hamas attack, Israeli forces shelled Lebanon, killing three Hezbollah members, to which Hezbollah responded by firing a salvo of rockets into northern Israel, marking a significant expansion of the conflict. These border attacks have continued ever since, displacing some 60,000 Israelis from their homes in Northern Israel and a larger number of Lebanese from southern Lebanon.

Israel’s technical prowess and the expansion of the war to Lebanon may be a sign of Israel’s military superiority, but in the long-run they may prove to be counter-productive and even foolish. Praising them is similar to praising Hitler’s aggressive wars as signs of German military strength. The German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 marked the beginning of World War II with dire consequences for Europe, for the world, and especially for Germany. Yet, from a military point of view, it was a great achievement. It started with the Gleiwitz incident, which was a false flag attack on a radio station in Gleiwitz (then Germany and now Gliwice, Poland) staged by Nazi Germany as a casus belli for the invasion of Poland.

One of the aims of the invasion was to divide Polish territory at the end of the operation and seize large parts of it, something that the Israelis have done before in the case of Lebanon. The 1978 South Lebanon conflict (codenamed Operation Litani) began when Israeli forces invaded southern Lebanon up to the Litani River in March 1978. The conflict resulted in the deaths of as many as 2,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, and 20 Israelis, and the internal displacement of nearly 250,000 people in Lebanon. In response to the Israeli invasion, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolutions 425 and 426, calling on Israel to withdraw its forces from Lebanon, which eventually she was forced to do.

Again, on 6 June 1982, Israeli forces under the command of Ariel Sharon invaded Lebanon on the false excuse of the attempted assassination of an Israeli diplomat in London by the PLO, despite the fact that the perpetrators belonged to Abu Nidal Organisation, which was an enemy of the PLO. Israel’s objectives were to expel the PLO members who had fled to Lebanon following the Nakba, and install a pro-Israeli Christian government led by President Bachir Gemayel.

Israeli forces carried out massive bombardment of Beirut and Sidon, killing between 20,000 and 30,000 people and displacing hundreds of thousands of the Lebanese. Those savage attacks ended with the Sabra and Shatila Massacre when between 16–18 September 1982 several thousand unarmed Palestinians were massacred by Israeli-backed right-wing Lebanese militias, while Israeli forces provided lighting for the massacre. In February 1983, an independent commission chaired by Irish diplomat Sean MacBride, assistant to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, concluded that the IDF, as the then occupying power over Sabra and Shatila, bore the main responsibility for the militia’s massacre.

The Shi’is who formed the majority in the south bore the brunt of Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. This is how Hezbollah was born to force the Israeli forces to leave Lebanon, which they eventually achieved in the year 2000. The Israelis have a habit of describing all those who rise against their occupation as terrorists, whether the PLO and later the Hezbollah in Lebanon or Hamas which came to power in Gaza as the result of a democratic election, encouraged by President Bush mainly in order to weaken the PLO.

If Israeli forces are foolish enough to invade Lebanon again and try to occupy a part of it near their border they will face the same outcome. Despite massive and unquestioning US support, the Israelis constitute a tiny minority in the Middle East. The genocide in Gaza has alienated and infuriated many people, even many of Israel’s former friends. Far from achieving an Israeli-Arab front against Iran, many Arab countries that Netanyahu counted on, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have established relations with Iran. Egyptian and Iranian leaders have spoken of the possibility of renewing diplomatic relations. Turkey which has friendly relations with Iran has turned against Israel and has called Netanyahu’s government a terrorist regime.

Although so far, the United States has supported Israel at great cost to its reputation and its relations with Middle Eastern and Muslim countries as a whole, there are indications that most Americans, including young Jewish Americans have turned against Israel’s far-right government.

Netanyahu has not concealed his ultimate desire to expand the scope of the war and get the United States involved in a war against Iran. Such a war will not be in the interest of the region and the United States. Even if Israel manages to crush Hezbollah and weaken Iran, he will not be able to get rid of some seven million Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and in Israel. In this day and age, the world will not allow another massive genocide and ethnic cleansing similar to the one Israel carried out in 1948. The only solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict is the end of the occupation and apartheid and the establishment of a truly democratic state for both the Palestinians and Jews.

The world’s highest judicial authority, the International Court of Justice, has described Israel’s massacres in Gaza as “plausible genocide”, and had ordered Israel to stop the war. It has also clearly declared the occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights as illegal and had ordered Israel to end the occupation as soon as possible. On 18th September, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution demanding that Israel “brings to an end without delay its unlawful presence” in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The voting result was as follows: In favour: 124, Against: 14, Abstain: 43. This shows that the international community as a whole regards Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories as illegal and views its system as an apartheid regime. Israel should stop digging and should abide by international law.

As was done in the case of the apartheid South Africa, the international community must form a truth and reconciliation commission, to punish those who have been directly involved in the genocide and to form a unity government under United Nations supervision, until the two communities learn to live in peace together. Any other alternative will be a mirage and will lead to greater tragedies in the future.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cutting Off the Arms Supply

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Can Be Done?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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