Michigan Democrats face a critical choice next Tuesday in what polls show is a tight primary race for the US Senate. It pits Rep. Haley Stevens, one of the more hawkish and pro-corporate Democratic members in the US House of Representatives, against public health official Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a prominent progressive advocating Medicare for all, progressive taxation, and getting corporate money out of politics.

Much attention has been given to the Stevens campaign’s dependence on contributions from corporate donors and conservative political action committees (PACs), including those affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Various PACs supportive of Israel’s far-right government have donated up to $30 million to her campaign in appreciation of her strident opposition to conditioning military aid to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu amid ongoing occupation, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide.

Stevens has supported Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, voted to defund United Nations agencies helping Palestinian refugees, denounced Amnesty International and other human rights groups for documenting Israeli war crimes, and attacked the International Court of Justice for investigating Israeli violations of international law.

El-Sayed, on the other hand, opposes Israel’s actions in Gaza and the US’ provision of military aid. He has underscored the importance of conditional military aid in adherence to internationally recognized human rights standards to all nations and supports international legal institutions that consistently advocate for universal standards. He has stressed the differences between criticizing a government and attacking the religion or ethnicity of a nation’s population. For example, he also opposes US military aid to Egypt, an Arab Muslim country from which his parents came.

She could potentially use her position in the Senate, if elected, to support the Trump administration’s efforts to “dismantle” the International Criminal Court.

But Stevens’ dismissal of international humanitarian law goes well beyond Israel. She opposes any accountability for war crimes by any US ally.

Stevens was one of only a handful of Democratic members of the House to support a 2024 Republican-sponsored bill designed to punish anyone who directly or indirectly participates in the investigation or prosecution of those suspected of war crimes if they are part of a government allied with the United States.

The bill, which passed the House that June but never made it to the floor of the Senate, was rooted in the belief that the prosecution of suspected war criminals by the International Criminal Court (ICC) should be based not on the available evidence, the severity of the crimes, or what the law says, but on the geopolitical orientation of the government of those accused. While Stevens has no objections to prosecuting war criminals belonging to organizations or governments that the US government opposes, her backing of this bill would seem to indicate that she believes those supported by Washington should somehow be held unaccountable.

It’s not as if the ICC has an anti-Western bias. Since its founding in 2002, the ICC has indicted 73 people, including African warlords, Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials, and Hamas terrorist leaders. Only 2 of those 73 indicted have been affiliated with US-allied governments. However, it would appear that even that is too many for Stevens.

Indeed, Stevens’s list of those impacted by the sanctions she supported would have included some of the world’s most prominent human rights lawyers and international jurists, along with their immediate family members. Their property and other assets held in the United States would have been subjected to seizure and they would have been banned from entering the country.

Almost all of these targeted individuals have been involved in other war crimes prosecutions, including those stemming from atrocities in Rwanda, Sudan, the former Yugoslavia, Myanmar, Liberia, and elsewhere. None of them have ever shown any ideological bias against Israel or any other US ally. They simply believe that international humanitarian law should be defended regardless of political considerations—which is exactly what seems to upset Stevens.

Among those targeted by these sanctions would have been Theodor Meron—a Holocaust survivor, former Israeli Ambassador to Canada, and president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia—because he was one of the experts consulted by the ICC regarding suspected war crimes committed by Israeli leaders.

Another target would have been the prominent British human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, who has been involved in human rights cases in dozens of countries. She would be subjected to sanctions for her participation in an ICC Panel of Experts in International Law which, in addition to recommending the prosecution of three Hamas terrorist leaders, also supported the prosecution of two Israeli leaders. She is married to American actor George Clooney, a major Democratic Party fundraiser, and would have been banned from ever again living with or even visiting her husband in California.

The Biden administration, despite its own criticisms of the ICC and support for Israel in the face of large-scale war crimes in Gaza and elsewhere, issued a statement in June 2024 saying that it “strongly” opposed the bill because it “could require sanctions against court staff, judges, witnesses, and US allies and partners who provide even limited, targeted support to the court in a range of aspects of its work.”

Stevens, however, sided with Trump and her Republican House colleagues against the Democratic administration.

Indeed, the Trump administration imposed its own sanctions on the ICC in February 2025, although they were not quite as severe or comprehensive as those supported by Stevens. She could potentially use her position in the Senate, if elected, to support the Trump administration’s efforts to “dismantle” the International Criminal Court.

Stevens’s hostility to the ICC is not popular. Polls show that Americans have been broadly supportive of the ICC, with only a small minority supporting sanctions. And a poll released July 23 showed that Americans, by a nearly 2 to 1 margin, support arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was indicted by the ICC in 2024 (along with a Hamas leader) for multiple war crimes, including crimes against humanity.

This could be a big political mistake. If Michigan Democrats nominate someone so out of touch with her constituents and so supportive of Trump’s opposition to international law and human rights, many thousands of Michiganders will likely vote third party or stay at home in November, thereby risking handing this critical Senate seat to a right-wing Republican.

The words "killed," "injured," "maimed," and the like often lose a great part of their meaning when they are repeated so relentlessly.

Take, for example, a headline like: "13 Palestinians Killed in Gaza, Others Wounded." Though many of us can still feel a deep sense of sadness over such a tragedy, the news itself becomes less shocking over time.

According to figures produced by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, Israel has killed and wounded a total of over 250,000 Palestinians since the start of the genocide in 2023.

The tally is updated daily because the killing never stops.

The very least we can do is refuse to turn our backs or reduce the genocide before our eyes to numbers.

On July 23, six Palestinians were killed in Gaza. A day earlier, 13 were killed, and the day before that, nine others were killed, and so on.

It is this "and so on" that makes us lose our sense, over time, of what these tragedies actually entail. These are innocent people who are burned alive in their tents, bombed in their cars, or killed while attempting to enjoy a brief moment of respite from the scorching heat on the beach.

Among the nine killed on July 21, an entire family, including four young children, was wiped out in a single strike. As reports of Israel's daily harvest of Palestinian lives in Gaza multiply, journalists too often neglect to humanize those killed.

A photo circulating on social media showed three of those children: a boy wearing a T-shirt that read "Santa Monica Beach"; his bespectacled sister in a pink shirt, proudly holding a certificate of achievement from her school; and their youngest sister, posing gently.

These three represent every single Palestinian child killed since the start of this genocide. According to United Nations and international estimates, over 21,000 children have been killed in Gaza, with tens of thousands more maimed or buried under the rubble.

Though the daily routine of killing makes the tragedy feel less shocking for those merely hearing the numbers, it becomes infinitely more tragic for those who must bear it directly. In Gaza, not a single family has been spared the loss of loved ones, making the grief compound day after day.

There are no words to describe the collective pain of Gaza.

What makes the tragedy even more unbearable is that the entire world knows what has transpired and continues to transpire in Gaza, yet fails to do anything about it. We keep track of the numbers, we point to Israel's barbarity, we decry the failure of international institutions, and we shake our heads in despair.

Yet the outcome remains unchanged: The death toll rises, and new statistics are generated daily to remind us of the magnitude of the crisis.

A July 23 joint report by the FAO, UNICEF, and the World Food Programme found that 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza face acute food insecurity.

The report also warned that more than 74,000 children under 5 are expected to require urgent treatment for acute malnutrition over the coming year.

This report was released on the same day that Gaza health authorities updated the official death toll to over 73,311 Palestinians. That number is already higher now, as more have been killed since.

On that same day, Thameen Al-Kheetan of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) stated that "no place in Gaza can be considered safe."

That statement is true, of course, but it is also the most well-known fact in the world right now. No one is contesting it. And yet, no one acts: Israel keeps bombing, the US Congress continues assigning it more weapons, and the rest of the world tracks the death tally.

Meanwhile, Israel—which has seized control of even more territory in Gaza since the so-called ceasefire—is now constructing massive earth barriers stretching an estimated 23 kilometers across the strip.

Though it was never fair to begin with, even the original Trump Gaza plan never mentioned the building of interior borders, the theft of additional land, or the concentration of displaced Palestinians into tiny enclaves within an already small piece of land.

Israel's long-term plan is not only to maintain permanent military control over Gaza, as top Israeli officials have declared, but also to prolong its torment indefinitely.

Even as I write this article, news reports indicate that four more Palestinians have just been killed. It is unlikely the number will remain that low; the Israeli army rarely kills in small numbers.

But even these small numbers represent human beings whose grief cannot be measured in statistics, summed up in official statements, or reduced to clichéd headlines.

Nor do survivors cling to the empty promise of international law prevailing over US-backed impunity. History has made Palestinians cynical. For generations, through every massacre and land theft since the 1948 Nakba, waiting for justice has yielded nothing but hollow promises and rising body counts.

The only difference between the past and the present is that today, we all know, see, and hear exactly what is happening in Gaza and across Palestine.

The very least we can do is refuse to turn our backs or reduce the genocide before our eyes to numbers.

If we allow that to happen, we become culpable, too: Israel does the killing, using American arms, while we sit by, counting the dead and shaking our heads at the sad state of the world.

The Israeli military’s Orwellian use of artificial intelligence for surveillance, targeting, and execution of attacks against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank has been well-documented by journalists, reporters, and activists in Israel and the United States. Less known is the close collaboration between the military and police departments in the United States, which have been quietly adopting tactics pioneered by Israel in their perpetual campaigns in the Occupied Territories, including US police departments sending their officers to Israel for training.

This dynamic, combined with the US’ direct funding of the Israeli military through taxpayer dollars, creates a feedback loop in which the US is effectively funding the real-world experimentation and refinement of AI technology on Palestinian civilians by the Israeli military, which then provides models for how the police in the United States can more effectively surveil their own citizens and—especially chillingly—potentially quash dissent. Cities in Nevada, like Reno and Sparks, find themselves at the forefront of this unsettling reality, as developments on both ends of the process—data center construction that powers AI use, and the proliferation of Flock and Axon cameras used for state surveillance—are currently taking place under the sanction of our local governments.

The Generative AI systems that are being used for warfare abroad and surveillance at home require staggering amounts of data storage and energy. In Northern Nevada, data centers can occupy huge swathes of land with footprints larger than the biggest nearby cities, or nestle right into our communities where they can support local police surveillance. Apart from initial construction, they produce few jobs, poison the groundwater, and generate noise pollution that can harm physical and mental health. The Great Basin is so called because the water that enters the Basin does not drain out again—any toxins that leach from the data centers will stay there, despite promises about closed-loop wastewater-based systems. Data centers also facilitate the shadowy nature of private entities that are funded by the government—Palantir, which develops a variety of AI-based surveillance technologies utilized by the US, does not own its own data centers, but rather contracts with companies like Google to hide their exact location.

Much of the processing power generated in these centers is utilized by the Israeli military and surveillance apparatus, which is in turn funded by US aid. The US has sent Israel approximately $174 billion in aid to date, allowing Israel to continuously remain on the cutting edge of surveilling and murdering Palestinians and their other neighbors in the Middle East. Unit 8200 is one of Israel’s cyber warfare units, and it has developed a variety of target identification tools that rely on generative AI to generate lists of potential targets with little or no human intervention or decision-making. Lavender is a system that has been used to generate kill lists. The Gospel is another—one which had its guardrails with respect to target size removed in 2023. These systems rely on a variety of data sources, including facial recognition and data mining through social media and internet use. Unit 8200’s technologies closely mirror those developed by Palantir, such as ELITE—a system used in Operation Black Rose, the Department of Homeland Security surveillance project in Oregon designed to identify and arrest targets for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. These similarities should not be surprising—it’s not unusual for key players in Palantir and other private AI technology developers to have close ties with Unit 8200.

We unwittingly fund all of this, and so it becomes our duty to resist it on every level possible.

For those who follow the Epstein files, it’s important to note that Jeffrey Epstein was deeply involved in Israeli intelligence—and therefore can be connected to the burgeoning projects of surveillance in the US—representing the fusion of private interests and military operations. As sinister as these systems are, it’s essential to recognize that they are fundamentally faulty: Palantir also developed the Maven Smart System, which was used to target the school in Iran where 120 children and 37 adults were bombed to death based on faulty, out-of-date information. The lack of human decision-making contributes to violence on false premises.

Now we are witnessing the disturbing yet unsurprising development of surveillance technology developed in Israel with US aid money returning to US cities. Flock Cameras and the systems that support them are an increasingly notorious example. Flock claims that its own cameras function only as Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs), but they allow police departments to connect a wide range of camera systems to a central database. Police cameras, as well as privately owned cameras, can be connected to these databases, which are typically then shared across police departments nationwide. This is already making Americans less safe, as was demonstrated when a journalist in Georgia discovered that an unauthorized Flock employee was viewing the cameras within a Jewish community center. Faulty target identification is also coming home to roost in the US, as evidenced by the false charge against Chrisanna Elser in Colorado. Elser was charged with stealing a package on the basis of a false identification by ALPR cameras. While the case was eventually dropped, this precedent will inevitably lead to more individuals being wrongly targeted for crimes they did not commit.

These systems are all supported by data centers. Data centers built in our hometowns are already bringing the surveillance technology of war to our public spaces and private lives. We unwittingly fund all of this, and so it becomes our duty to resist it on every level possible: tax resistance, blocking data centers from being built in our communities, and resisting the reckless use of AI by government and private entities. The struggle for Palestinian rights, dignity, and livelihood is inextricably connected with the preservation of our freedoms in the US.

There is reason to celebrate Medicare and Medicaid turning 61 years old. Both highly successful programs were signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on July 30, 1965 as a cornerstone of his Great Society agenda. But this year, our celebration is tempered by grave concern over the future of both programs under the Trump regime.

Let’s compare the words of the two presidents:

LBJ:

No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine. No longer will illness crush and destroy the savings that they have so carefully put away over a lifetime. No longer will young families see their own incomes, and their own hopes, eaten away simply because they are carrying out their deep moral obligations to their parents.

Donald Trump:

It’s not possible for us to take care of… Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.

The comparison speaks volumes. One is a leader who understood that the federal government has a crucial role in the protecting the health and well-being of our most vulnerable citizens—including the poor, disabled, and the elderly. The other is a president who claims to support Medicare and then says that the federal government can’t afford it because of his illegal war in Iran. So much for supporting Medicare.

But this goes deeper than Trump’s rhetoric. The Medicare program, like Social Security, is at a pivotal point in its history. The Part A hospital) trust fund must be fortified so that it doesn’t run dry in the 2030s. (There are reasonable solutions that Congress could enact without hurting seniors.) So far, though, we have heard no constructive ideas from Trump.

More urgently, though, the Trump administration is actively undermining the "traditional Medicare" program that LBJ signed into law. The administration has begun a pilot program to use AI bots to determine whether traditional Medicare patients will be covered for procedures their doctors have ordered. This appears to be an attempt to cut costs by erecting obstacles to medically necessary care—with decisions made by bots instead of human beings.

It could be the first step in a scheme to corrupt traditional Medicare and make it more like the privatized Medicare Advantage program run by for-profit insurers, which is a glorified HMO (with frequent denials of care, limited provider networks, and surprise out-of-pocket costs for beneficiaries). Unfortunately, thanks to deceptive but pervasive advertising, Medicare Advantage has now captured more than 51% of the market, leaving traditional Medicare with a shrinking share of enrollees.

The problem is that Medicare Advantage (MA) puts profits over patients. Participating insurance companies have been overbilling the federal government by billions of dollars a year. Ironically, this privatized program was supposed to save taxpayers money. Instead, Medicare Advantage plans cost the government an average of 14% more per patient than traditional Medicare. That translates into an additional $76 billion in federal spending this year alone.

The bottom line: Medicare Advantage puts taxpayers’ money into the hands of large insurance companies while failing to deliver superior or more cost-effective care. It is fair to say that this is not what LBJ had in mind when he created the public Medicare program. (Medicare Advantage arrived—in nascent form—in 1997, after considerable pressure from the insurance industry.)

When we talk about the financial shortfall facing the Medicare program, we must look at Medicare Advantage as an aggravating factor. Reining-in MA would go a long way toward restoring the overall program to fiscal health—along with other commonsense reforms. Unfortunately, the Trump administration has been inconsistent on this issue, initially floating strict curbs on MA overpayments but ultimately rewarding insurance companies with higher payouts.

Traditional Medicare is far from perfect. It should have caps on patients’ out-of-pocket medical costs. It should cover vision, dental, and hearing care. (President Joe Biden attempted to expand coverage in the ill-fated Build Back Better Act.) These are improvements that we have long urged Congress and the White House to enact.

Medicare also faces compound financial challenges—including the overall rise in healthcare costs and soaring prescription drug prices. The Biden administration and Democrats in Congress took a major step in the right direction with the Inflation Reduction Act, which empowered Medicare to negotiate drug prices with Big Pharma. This process is expected to save the government more than $230 billion by 2031.

For the most part, the Trump administration has adhered to the law and continued negotiating with drugmakers—but it also expanded the list of cancer drugs that won’t be eligible for negotiations. The president has largely relied on smoke and mirrors to make it appear that the administration is "tough on Big Pharma," using gimmicks like TrumpRx. Meanwhile, in a move that will make medications less affordable for seniors, the Trump administration has just announced it is ending Biden-era subsidies in the Medicare Part D prescription drug program.

Of course, it’s also Medicaid’s 61st anniversary. The damage that Trump and the Republicans have done to Medicare’s sister program would take up another entire article. Suffice it to say that more than 3 million Americans have already lost health coverage since Trump and the GOP enacted their Big, Ugly Bill, which slashed nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid. (This also hurts older people dually enrolled in both Medicare and Medicaid.) It was correctly labeled the biggest cut in healthcare in US history—to pay for tax cuts largely benefiting the wealthy.

The political right has always been wary of the New Deal and Great Society legacy programs that lifted people out of poverty and provided older and lower-income Americans with basic retirement and health security. Some on the right have outright committed themselves to dismantling these programs, despite their distinguished histories. Trump and his allies in Congress have not so much dismantled these programs yet as chipped away at them under the guise of fighting "fraud and abuse." If this movement continues unabated, we may be left with the crumbling foundations of programs that were built to last, for the good of the American people.

Note: I wrote this poem as a way of reflecting on and grappling with this country's 250th anniversary and the time of existential crisis we are in, both as a nation and a species. It is a poem of rage but also of love and aspiration. It is an offering and a declaration about this country's history, our present moment, and our potential. I offer this poem-essay as part of what I hope will become a new declaration of independence and interdependence.

One

On your two hundred and fiftieth birthday, let us speak openly.

Oh, say something nice, you say.

Don’t rain on this flash-bang parade.

Some things nice:

You contain multitudes of fine, decent people.

Folks who will pick you up when you’re broken down.

Who’ll rescue you from a flood or a fire.

Who’ll give you a buck or the shirt off their back.

They’ll welcome you into their homes, share their food.

They’ll help you raise a barn or put out a fire.

Friendly, good-hearted folk.

Then there’s this land, our land, erupting in soul-stirring beauty.

Towering mountain crags thrusting into horizon-splitting skies.

Canyons painted in sediments of red, orange, sienna, and crimson.

Ancient ridges hued in purple and blue, sloping and slouching into infinity.

Oceans of grain prairies, their amber waves swaying.

A resplendent and bountiful terrain fruiting more than enough for everyone.

Come to America, its vast cornucopias will seed and feed you.

Give us your tired, your poor, and we will raise them from the floor.

Two

You told us to stand up, take off our hats, put our little right hands on our chests, and “pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America… one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

You commanded us to love the flag, the God, the country.

Broad stripes, bright stars, and perilous fights.

You insisted we are free and brave, uniquely blessed with happiness and liberty.

Bombs bursting in air from dawn’s early light to twilight’s last gleaming.

We are the best, the greatest, the most exceptional, you said.

We are blessed and fortunate to be Americans, you said.

Nobody is like us. Everybody wants to be like us.

Three

You speak of freedom. Of liberty.

Are we free yet?

Are we free of wars, of racism, of sexism, and homophobia?

Are we freed by your bombs bursting across the world’s airs?

Does that star-spangled flag wave proudly for all your global slaying?

Did America become free and brave by decimating Vietnam?

Did we become liberated by eviscerating Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran?

Have your unrivaled invasions and coups set us free?

Or maybe liberty arrived back in 1776 like you keep reminding us,

When we were free at last, thank god almighty, from kings and colonizers,

All those liberating muskets, canons, and armies powered by genocide and slavery.

America, your gold and your flag are soaked in centuries of blood.

In 1852, Frederick Douglass asked, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” He answered: “a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”

Four

America, how many victims will you claim in your fraudulent name?

How many victims does it take to purchase our “freedom”?

Did your endless wars buy freedom for all of us?

This truth is self-evident: Not all freedoms are created equal.

Our freedoms are separate and unequal.

Our ballots and dollars germinated by bullets and bombs.

We are free to speak, shout, howl, or wail into the wind.

We are free to buy whatever we can afford.

We are free to vote at the polls and with your dollars.

Billionaires and millionaires are free to buy the votes.

Dollars are people, too, they say.

Those dollars have purchased our democracy and sold it

down the river flowing with ancestral bones and tears.

Five

The "America" I love is the land of dissenters, resisters, and persisters

The nation I love is in a perilous fight for justice and equality.

The America I love is the country of Martin Luther King, Jr., country of Malcolm X, of Shirley Chisolm, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Jesse Jackson; country of farmworkers marching, of Chicano rights and Brown Power; nation of women’s liberation and rights and rising power; of queer rights and queer love and queer existence; I love the land of Black Power, Black Joy, and Black resilience; country of the American Indian Movement, Indigenous rights and justice; land of all the unnamed nurses, teachers, farmers, janitors, garbage workers, tenants’ rights activists, all the unnamed soldiers for peace who never fired a bullet, all the unnamed marchers and masses of protesters, all the unnamed, unaccounted lovers and tenders of beauty, all the stewards and shepherds of this land, our land.

I love all the unnamed, unaccounted souls who are brave enough to care for other souls.

America, this misnamed and misguided land, contains multitudes of soulful, spirited love in spite of itself.

Six

On your 250th birthday, it is long past time

For a new declaration of independence and interdependence.

A declaration of love and mutual care and respect over hatred, fear, and division.

Maybe it begins, simply:

We declare our steadfast and fierce independence

From racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, imperialism, colonialism, settler colonialism, neoliberalism, and endlessly voracious and avaricious capitalism.

We declare our loving, passionate, unwavering commitment to a society based on care, mutual aid, and interdependence.

We declare that all living beings have those inalienable rights you spoke of so long ago—every living thing.

We have the right to freedom and liberation.

We have the right to housing, food, water, education, and healthcare.

We have the right to a decent and dignified existence in a world defined by humanity and mutual respect.

We declare our steadfast and unapologetic love for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

We have the right to not be replaced, displaced, or eradicated by deified digitized beasts and virtual machines.

We declare the right to be and love whomever we damn well please.

We declare the right to love and care for and tend the Earth, this planet that makes us and everything possible.

At last, we declare, simply:

We will love and care for one another.

We will put love and care before everything else.

We will empower joy and beauty across this land, our land.

We will build a society based on love, care, and respect for all living beings.

We will not stop loving. And love will win. And you, America, will love it.

Sixty one years ago, July 30, 1965, Congress enacted Medicare to provide health insurance for people ages 65 and older and the disabled regardless of income or medical history. At the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri, former President Harry S. Truman and his wife, former First Lady Bess Truman, became the first recipients of the new Medicare health insurance program. President Lyndon Johnson and the US Congress enacted Medicare under Title XVIII of the Social Security Act.

Medicare was a momentous act because it provided new health insurance for people ages 65 and older and the disabled regardless of income or medical history. In the years since, Medicare has become living proof that public, universal health insurance is superior to private insurance in every way. Medicare is more efficient than private health insurance and is administered at a cost of 3-4%, as opposed to private, for-profit health insurance, which has administrative costs above 15%.

Following the successful 1965 grassroots campaign to enact Medicare, many also believed that the dream of a full national, single-payer health insurance system that included all age groups, “Medicare for All,” was right around the corner. Unfortunately decades later, Medicare still has not been expanded. Most of the changes have been contractions with higher out-of-pocket costs for beneficiaries and repeated attempts at privatization by Big Pharma, Big health insurance industry companies-oligarchs-profiteers, and their champions in the White House and Congress.

Big insurance and Big Pharma continue opposing legislation for the new, improved Medicare for All because these resistant, self-serving industries have the most to lose if their huge profits are redirected to direct patient care for all. Individual and corporate predators regard democracy, government, and community as obstacles to their greed and avarice, always placing profits over individual patients, families, and public health. It’s no wonder so many beholden members of Congress want to protect the interests of Big Insurance and Big Pharma, industries that spent $371 million on lobbying in 2017 alone.

The Big Health Insurance-Big Pharma-Congressional Profiteering Complex

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, framed by former Trump administration staffers and secretly endorsed by President Donald Trump himself, proposes changes in Medicare benefits that could destroy Medicare as we know it. Instead, we must fight back and expand Medicare. Although health insurance affordability for the majority of US citizens still remains elusive, President Trump’s health insurance plan still wants to shift many more dollars into private, Wall Street insurance industry hands. The takeover of public health insurance, as with Medicare Advantage plans and others, by private Wall Street entities continues apace as Republicans and Trump propose to increase taxes and give it to the private profit insurance industry—the basic source of our profound administrative waste, along with the costly administrative burdens they place on the delivery system that requires large profits. Profiteering continues unabated as private insurance sells us services we don’t need or want, such as deductibles and other cost sharing and maintenance of narrow networks, requiring prior authorization with increased administrative costs, excessive ongoing paperwork, and documentation requirements, all while avoiding paying for surprise bills and other denied benefits.

No greater disconnect exists between the public good and private interests than in the voracious US system of for-profit Big Insurance and Big Pharma.

Dealing with Covid-19 could have been more lifesaving if Medicare for All had been in place. A New York Times editorial, "Health Care for Some is a Recipe for Disaster," stresses the importance of covering everyone. Even before Covid-19 was known to humans, Northeastern University professor of public health, Wendy Parmet, presciently warned that the push to exclude immigrants from access to healthcare services would be both dangerous and quixotic. “None of us can be self-sufficient in the face of a widespread epidemic,” she wrote in 2018. “That is just as true for noncitizen immigrants as everyone.” In any pandemic, self-sufficiency can be self-deluding; everyone’s health, citizens, immigrants, etc. alike is only as good as our most vulnerable neighbor’s.

Truly a recipe for disaster, vested interests reject the science of public health epidemiology by asserting that only a slow, incremental approach to health insurance reform is possible or acceptable. So, what are we willing to settle for, should we just settle for what we can get? Lower the expectations, turn down the public heat, and keep waiting?. Gradualism, baby steps, extending health insurance coverage to some, but not all, is the mantra of the day; "Medicare for Some," but not "Medicare for All," is fawned over by politicians, profiteers, and advocacy groups alike while reducing communities resources to deal with dangerous epidemics and other health problems.

Virtually all the risky gradual reforms being touted would reinforce a dysfunctional health insurance system with as many standards of insurance as there are dollars to purchase them. It would further lock us into an obsolete private insurance-based model that holds everyone's health hostage to profiteering HMOs and unaccountable big insurance companies for years to come. For these proponents of political expediency, the question remains: Who will be left behind while we wait? Every year many unnecessary deaths are linked to lack of health insurance coverage. Pandemics can quickly increase these numbers.

Big Insurance and Big Pharma dominate our government, and public health takes a back seat to the need for private profit. Many government leaders from both political parties share the same "profits over public health" ideology, even though the Covid-19 pandemic clearly showed how our economic system failed to serve our citizens by allowing these groups to privatize, sabotage, fragment, and cripple our health, public health, and other social services. Many of the changes in traditional Medicare have been contractions with higher out-of-pocket costs for beneficiaries and repeated attempts at privatization by Big Pharma, and Big Health insurance. No greater disconnect exists between the public good and private interests than in the voracious US system of for-profit Big Insurance and Big Pharma and their inherent tendency to invent new needs, disregard all boundaries, and turn everything into an object for sale and big profit.

Medicare for All 2026 Meets Eight High Standards

Medicare for All Act (M4A)-2026 is best solution because it meets eight basic standards:

1. Health insurance coverage should be stable and permanent throughout life. M4A-2026 would be a single program—permanent throughout life.
2. Employer-sponsored insurance can create problems such as job lock, which many conservatives and progressives believe should be terminated. M4A-2026 would end employer-sponsored insurance, and, for most, M4A-2026 would be better.
3. Medicaid carries the stigma of being a welfare program which results in legislative underfunding and neglect. M4A-2026 would fully terminate the Medicaid program and move everyone into a universal, comprehensive, and equitable program.
4. We need a program that is affordable for each individual and for society as a whole. M4A-2026 would achieve all goals of financing reform without significantly increasing spending.
5. Patients should have free choice of their professionals and healthcare institutions. M4A-2026 allows choices within the entire healthcare system.
6. The privatization of public programs such as Medicare through Medicare Advantage and Medicaid through private managed care programs have proven to provide poor value for the taxpayer (obscured by cherry-picking and lemon dropping) and should be eliminated. M4A-2026 would eliminate them.
7. Fragmentation results in dysfunctional financing of healthcare; M4A-2026 would bring an end to it.
8. M4A-2026 is specifically designed to greatly reduce fragmentation and its associated costs; health insurance industry profiteering is ended.

Summary

To continue our 61 years of progress, it’s time to upgrade Medicare by establishing a 21st century improved “Medicare for All” health insurance system that covers all age groups, cradle to grave. Newborns will leave the hospital with their new Medicare card, and drop it off years later at life’s end. Two comprehensive M4A bills now filed in Congress, H.R. 3069 and S.1506, propose to insure or cover all medically necessary services. Patients have their choice of physicians, mental health professionals, other healthcare professionals, hospitals, and clinics.

M4A insured health services include:

1. Primary care
2. Medically approved diet and nutrition services
3. Inpatient care
4. Outpatient care
5. Emergency care
6. Prescription drugs
7. Long-term care and palliative care
8. Mental health services
9. Dentistry
10. Eye care
11. Substance abuse treatment

Because our government, instead of private profit health insurance companies, serves us as the health insurance financing authority, co-pays and deductibles paid at health professionals' offices are ended because payment for health insurance is fully prepaid directly into Medicare, much like Social Security, and covered at first dollar amounts. This means the obsolete 80%-20% payment split between private health insurance companies and Medicare is eliminated, with Medicare for All covering 100%.

The major reason private health insurers are more expensive than government health programs in the US is due to profiteering and administrative costs. Those extra taxpayer funds going to private insurers include costs such as advertising and marketing of their plans, costs of contracting for restrictive provider networks, administering prior authorization requirements, complex systems of processing claims including denial of benefits, simple administrative costs of operating large corporate entities, and distributing generous profits to their executives and passive high profiteering by Wall Street investors.

The Medicare for All Act-2026, now filed in Congress, would much better fill our healthcare financing needs without wasting hundreds of billions of dollars on superfluous administrative costs and end immense profiteering by private insurers and Big Pharma. The USA is a country where health insurance for medical and mental healthcare is a function of socioeconomic status. Everyone knows that this inhumane system should have been corrected long ago.

Please tell your legislators that it’s time to end inadequate and dangerous health insurance programs. Insist on real health insurance reform essential for individuals and families. American history is filled with examples of fundamental, democratic change brought about by successful mass action and public pressure against the counseling of the go-slow, vested-interest crowd. No more waiting! Ask your legislators to fully support Medicare For All 2026 now: H.R. 3069 and S. 1506

Sixty-one years ago, President Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare and Medicaid into law, while former President and long-time national health insurance champion Harry Truman watched. What Johnson and Truman understood was that the fight for guaranteed healthcare for everyone has been a generations-long struggle. The creation of Medicare and Medicaid was a key victory in that struggle. Importantly, though, Medicare and Medicaid are—to paraphrase what President Franklin Roosevelt said about the signing of Social Security into law—“a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is by no means complete.”

After President Truman was unable to achieve his goal of guaranteed healthcare for all Americans, healthcare advocates decided to move incrementally. They began by pushing to cover seniors. Older Americans have the highest medical costs, the hardest time affording private health insurance, and need care the most often. The signing of Medicare achieved this important milestone, alongside the creation of Medicaid to cover healthcare for low-income Americans.

In 1972, Medicare was expanded to cover people with disabilities. But that is where progress stopped. It is well past time that we expand Medicare to cover children and everyone in between. We must also improve Medicare to cover such vital services as hearing, vision, dental and, perhaps most importantly, long-term care. And we must, in this age of abhorrent income and wealth inequality, require the wealthiest to contribute more while eliminating all premiums, co-payments, co-insurance, and deductibles.

Currently, we are at a crossroads. While America’s current healthcare system is painfully vulnerable to Republican attacks, there is an opportunity to create a better future where all Americans can rely on guaranteed healthcare.

With Republicans doing everything they can to disrupt and dismantle the current healthcare system, it is the perfect time to fight for a more durable and universal alternative.

Shamefully, Republicans are chipping away at both Medicare and Medicaid. The attacks take many forms. They include the effort to confuse Americans with the inferior, propagandistically named “Medicare Advantage;” the Trump administration giving AI the power to overrule doctors and block care for Medicare patients; the $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act in the so-called Big Beautiful Bill (beautiful for billionaires, ugly for everyone else) passed by Republicans; and new Republican rules for Medicaid that would force cancer patients to get back to work and would cause millions of Americans to lose their healthcare coverage. Though Republican politicians would deny it, their hostility to Medicare and Medicaid is overwhelming.

Meanwhile, Democrats are working to expand and improve Medicare and Medicaid. They have taken concrete steps to lower prescription drug prices. The Inflation Reduction Act, which gives Medicare the power to negotiate for lower prices, was signed into law by a Democratic president, Joe Biden. Democrats are fighting to provide those same savings to those with commercial insurance and lower prices in other ways as well. Importantly, a growing number of Democrats are supporting and fighting for improved and expanded Medicare for All.

It may seem daunting and overwhelming to think about achieving improved and expanded Medicare for All in the current political environment, but it is within sight. Indeed, I have written a book-length road map to achieving improved and expanded Medicare for All, which will be released this September. It is called The Road to Medicare for All: A Call to Action (Routledge Press, forthcoming, 2026).

What would improved and expanded Medicare for All mean? It would mean this: no premiums, co-pays, co-insurance, or deductibles. It would mean comprehensive healthcare coverage for everyone in America, automatically. It would mean going to the doctor of your choice, without worrying whether your provider is in your insurer’s network. The vision of improved Medicare for All would include all services being covered automatically, including dental, vision, and hearing coverage. Medicare should also be expanded to cover long-term care, both at home and in nursing homes.

This November’s election will determine the future of Medicare and Medicaid. Will Republicans make Medicare and Medicaid work even worse for Americans? Will even more hospitals and nursing homes close? Or will Democrats be able to fight back and not only defend Medicare and Medicaid from Republican attacks, but enact a bold vision of improved and expanded Medicare for All?

With Republicans doing everything they can to disrupt and dismantle the current healthcare system, it is the perfect time to fight for a more durable and universal alternative: improved and expanded Medicare for All. Instead of a precarious and shaky patchwork system where a disruption to your healthcare is one job loss or plan change away, it is time to fight for a world where healthcare is truly a right, not a privilege.

On the eve of Medicare/Medicaid’s 61st birthday, the Trumpublican administration took its next swipe at those millions of American seniors who rely on their Medicare benefits to survive. The announcement of cuts to the Biden administration’s Medicare drug subsidies was made on Tuesday, July 27th, 2026, allegedly because the insurance companies don’t need the subsidies anymore. But guess what? The health insurance companies that market, sell, and profit from the Medicare-Part D drug plans won’t be the ones paying the difference. Patients, their families, and all those cool GoFundMes will pay the higher Part D premiums, any at the pharmacy counter differences, or they will ration doses or go without. You doubt that? I sure don’t.

Just a few days ago, I chatted with some younger folks I know who are employed and getting their health benefits from their employers. Both are with major employers; both have major health insurance carriers. And both have health issues that need to be checked out and treated appropriately before those issues become worse and even more costly. Why don’t these working professionals with insurance go to the doctor—or even have a primary care doctor? They fear the out-of-pocket costs. Deductibles. Co-pays. Co-insurance. Then to the lab, the radiologist, and maybe the pharmacy. All the same costs might be in play again for more cash out-of-pocket. Why pay premiums at all? Why stay at a job they cannot stand for years on end to keep the benefits they rarely if ever use?

The answer to my questions is the basis for the incredible profit margins enjoyed—dearly and completely enjoyed—by the private health insurance industry. Selling a product everyone buys through work or earns through decades of loyal service yet never uses is really a sweet business arrangement. Medicare may seem like a completely different kind of coverage because it has been and could be again—but as the Trumpublicans work to make Medicare even more privatized via Medicare Advantage plans, supplemental plans, and outright cuts to coverage like these drug subsidies, Medicare beneficiaries will make the same ill-advised and often risky decisions as those clinging to their employer-based coverage before they reach the Medicare age of eligibility (or two years after they are determined disabled at younger ages). It was never the insurance companies that needed subsidies or expansion of benefits. It was always all of us who needed less private insurance and more coverage—all of us.

The Trumpublicans already had help from their congressional minions in cutting Medicaid access for millions of families—children, babies, mothers, dads. Medicaid work requirements cost more to follow through admin efforts than the coverage did, but Trumpublican minions want those lazy, poor people milking the system on Medicaid to be punished. This was never about program integrity or catching the minimal fraud with Medicaid or Medicare that is done (fraud is mostly done by providers, not patients or beneficiaries). The cuts to Medicaid came with the “Big, beautiful bill,” H.R.1, last year, and the Medicare cuts are rolling along in the background. When open enrollment is looming large in late fall and early winter, the Trumpublicans must announce changes with enough time for the insurance companies to adjust or raise premiums, of course. How do the rest of us adjust? The patients and families? Take another job to pay? Keep working until we are 80 or more?

The only reason not to move confidently to full health coverage for us all is that the profits are so dear with the status quo. We are better than this.

Social Security Works, Progressive Democrats of America, Healthcare-NOW!, and many other groups have great ways to get involved for all of us too. Do it today before the fight grows even more dire—we can secure our health access, but it will take all of us.

So, get over to your elected officials offices on July 30, 2026. Celebrate with nurses, doctors, friends, and neighbors. In Colorado, we’re going to tell Republican Rep. Gabe Evans to reverse the damage and protect his constituents or we plan to “Give Gabe the Boot” in November. Add yourself to the growing chorus of Americans calling for a celebration of Medicare and Medicaid programs and expansions of that gorgeous insurance pool to include all of us. Because if all of us cover all of us then all of us spend less and our employers do too. Another amazing chance to secure healthcare justice rests with electing Sam Forstag in Montana’s 1st Congressional District.

The only reason not to move confidently to full health coverage for us all is that the profits are so dear with the status quo. We are better than this. We proved it 61 years ago, and we will prove ourselves ready to advance when we stop allowing so much greed to control Trumpublicans in DC and demand our own self-preservation to be honored.

The recent, record-breaking outbreak of Cyclospora infections linked to lettuce consumption has left Americans wondering what food is safe to eat.

What brands of lettuce are safe and which aren’t are important questions. But even more important might be why such outbreaks happen in the first place—and how our government has made them increasingly likely.

Nobody wants explosive diarrhea—and yet the way our federal government has left us unprotected is enough to make one sick.

The chief culprit in the cyclosporiasis debacle is our centralized, monopoly-based food system. The outbreak has been linked to Taylor Fresh Foods, which supplies many restaurants. Many brands of bagged lettuce and salad are also Taylor products—whether consumers realize it or not.

Last year the administration weakened the nation’s already thin food safety monitoring service, FoodNet, by making it optional to track numerous types of infections—including cyclosporiasis.

In fact, according to Farm Action, “Just four companies—Taylor Fresh Foods, Cultrale-Safra, Itochu, and Bonduelle—control 54% of the US fresh-cut salad market.” Similarly, only a handful of corporations control meat, dairy, grains, and beverages. Another handful controls food distribution.

This means that the industry practices giving rise to contaminated foods happen on a very large scale—and those foods are then distributed all over the country. That a single outbreak in one company can potentially impact the entire nation is a grave weakness in the food system.

Monopolies like Taylor Farms use the profits they generate from dominating our food supplies to lobby the federal government for weaker oversight. According to Wired, the company has contributed millions of dollars to conservative political committees, including a super PAC called MAGA Inc.

It has also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to directly lobby against food safety regulations. News even emerged recently of representatives from Taylor Farms calling the White House to try to delay a recall of their lettuce.

The Trump administration has been more than happy to comply with Big Food’s wishes to reap billions in profits with little oversight.

Last year the administration weakened the nation’s already thin food safety monitoring service, FoodNet, by making it optional to track numerous types of infections—including cyclosporiasis. “We’re really gutting one of the cornerstones of food safety,” epidemiologist Elaine Scallan Walter warned The New York Times last September.

Mega monopolies aren’t just bad for our gut. They also contribute to higher prices and reduced access to fresh foods.

Their sheer size gives them what Civil Eats called “enormous power to make decisions about what food is produced how, where, and by whom, and who gets to eat it.” Big Food companies have repeatedly been found guilty of illegal price fixing. They routinely package the same foods under different labels to give the impression of diversity and competition.

Small farms are one important solution. Their supply chains are localized, making it easier to track and stop infections before they spread on a national scale. Independent farmers are selling out of lettuce at farmers markets as people seek out clean greens.

Yet instead of promoting and aiding small farmers—as he promised to do when running for president in 2024—President Donald Trump has cut back support for training new farmers, who might be competitors to companies like Taylor Farms.

His administration also cut a program that matched small producers with food banks—feeding hungry people while financially stabilizing independent farmers—along with a disaster aid program for minority farmers. The funding losses have left small farmers reeling.

What will help prevent future outbreaks is restoring and expanding regulatory agencies tracking infectious outbreaks. And breaking up food monopolies while sustaining and strengthening small farms.

The question is: Will the federal government have the guts to do what it takes to protect the American people’s guts?

On July 23, the House of Representatives voted 214-208 to direct President Donald Trump to remove US forces from hostilities with Iran unless Congress authorizes them. Hours later, the Senate rejected a motion to bring a separate war powers resolution out of committee, 47-49.

The Senate did not authorize the war. It did not even vote on the resolution itself. It blocked the measure before senators had to answer the central question: Should the United States continue fighting a war Congress has never approved?

The war continued anyway.

That is the dangerous precedent now taking shape in Washington. The president can begin or expand military operations, and Congress is left trying to stop them after the bombs have fallen and retaliation has begun. If opponents cannot clear committees, procedural votes, narrow majorities, and a likely presidential veto, inertia does the work of authorization. No lawmaker has to cast a clear vote for the war, but troops and civilians must still live with the consequences.

The burden must fall on those who want the war to continue. They should have to explain, publicly and repeatedly, why more Americans and Iranians must die and what political outcome those deaths are supposed to achieve.

The conflict began on February 28, when the United States and Israel attacked Iran. Trump has since expanded direct US involvement without obtaining a congressional mandate. By July 22, the war had killed 18 US service members and injured hundreds more. The Pentagon put its cost at $37.5 billion, a figure that includes some anticipated expenses through September 30. A July Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 79% of Americans expected the conflict to drag on, while only 37% approved of the US strikes.

Iranian civilians have paid a far heavier price. The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency reported that by April 10, 1,701 civilians, including at least 254 children, had been killed since the war began. Iran’s Health Ministry said another 50 civilians were killed and 500 wounded during the renewed US strikes in July. An anti-war politics worthy of the name cannot ask Americans to care about their own soldiers while treating Iranian deaths as background noise.

For working-class families, the war is not an argument about executive theory. It arrives as an extended deployment, a flag-draped coffin, a long recovery from injury, higher fuel prices, and another demand that public money be redirected toward a conflict with no visible conclusion. The officials who refuse to define the mission do not bear those costs equally.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who introduced the House resolution, said the war has “no clear mission, no strategy, no end goal.” The administration has moved among overlapping justifications: preventing a nuclear-armed Iran, retaliating for attacks, protecting US forces, and keeping commercial shipping open, as well as degrading Tehran’s regional military capabilities. Each objective can be used to justify another strike. None provides a measurable definition of victory or a credible route out.

Republican leaders argue that limiting Trump during active hostilities would weaken the United States and endanger deployed forces. The White House says the president needs flexibility to repel Iranian attacks and protect American personnel. It also argues that the House’s concurrent resolution lacks the force of law and warns that the measure could create “operational paralysis.”

A president must be able to protect troops from an immediate attack. That narrow defensive authority cannot become a blank check to define and prolong an entire war without Congress. Otherwise, each deployment creates the danger later invoked to expand it: US forces enter the conflict, Iran attacks them, and protecting them becomes the rationale for another round of strikes.

Sending troops into an open-ended conflict without a public mandate is not support. It is political abandonment.

Veterans have made that point more clearly than many lawmakers. After an earlier House war powers vote, Common Defense, a grassroots organization of veterans and military families, said that “veterans understand the costs of war better than most Americans” and called congressional action essential to giving the public a voice. Supporting troops requires more than praising their sacrifice after they die. It requires telling them what the mission is, what limits govern it, what success looks like, and when it ends.

The House vote showed that opposition to unauthorized war is not entirely partisan. All 210 Democrats present joined Republicans Thomas Massie (Ky.), Warren Davidson (Ohio), Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.), and Tom Barrett (Mich.). In the Senate, Republican Susan Collins (Maine) supported bringing the resolution forward, while Democratic Sen. John Fetterman (Pa.) voted with Republicans to block it.

But the larger story is institutional, not personal. Senators avoided a direct vote on whether to authorize or end the war. Procedural language cannot erase political responsibility. A senator who prevents Congress from considering restraint helps preserve the conditions under which the war continues.

The House resolution alone cannot stop the fighting. That makes Congress’ power over military funding the next real test. The White House has requested an $87.6 billion supplemental package, saying most of it would address urgent needs related to Operation Epic Fury. The request includes $67.1 billion for the Pentagon, with $21 billion of that amount designated for munitions. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that about one-third of the entire package is driven by Iran war costs; the rest funds other administration priorities.

Lawmakers cannot credibly call a war unauthorized while financing its continuation without meaningful limits. Any new funding should prohibit offensive operations against Iran after a brief period for immediate force protection unless Congress passes a specific authorization. That authorization should define the enemy, mission, geographic scope, reporting requirements, and expiration date. Renewal should require another affirmative vote.

The burden must fall on those who want the war to continue. They should have to explain, publicly and repeatedly, why more Americans and Iranians must die and what political outcome those deaths are supposed to achieve.

Congressional authorization is not bureaucratic interference. It is the democratic process through which elected officials must tell the public why troops are being sent into danger. Trump owns the decision to wage and escalate this war. But lawmakers who block restraint, keep the money flowing, and refuse to demand a defined mission are not neutral observers. They are helping sustain a war they have never been willing to own.

Congress has not authorized Trump’s Iran war. Until lawmakers either define and limit the mission or stop paying for it, troops and civilians will remain trapped between a president claiming the power to continue and a legislature unwilling to take responsibility for ending it.

Marco Rubio's State Department has just issued a frightening 99-page report accusing many prominent liberal and progressive organizations and individuals of being agents of Cuban government intelligence.

The report claims that the liberal groups and individuals it names "have been involved in a disproportionate share of the total left-wing political activity in the United States over the past decade, organizing hundreds of protests and street actions, from anti-ICE clashes in Minnesota to the 'No Kings' demonstrations across the nation... At the same time, many of the network’s nodes have become fused with the Cuban influence infrastructure... modern Cuba plays a key role in supporting major foreign terror networks. At the same time, the regime continues to operate an extensive hard intelligence network in the United States, with significant penetration into sensitive civilian and military institutions on American territory."

Among those named in the report as de facto or de jure Cuban agents are Mayors Zohran Mandami and Karen Bass; Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.); Ben & Jerry's founder Ben Cohen; liberal journalist Karen Goodman; the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA); The National Lawyers Guild; and organizers of Black Lives Matters, anti-ICE, and No Kings demonstrations.

Cuba, with a population of 10.9 million people which can barely keep electricity running or provide basic nutrition presents a danger of conquering the US?

The Report describes DSA as "a mass membership organization operating openly in American electoral politics, with chapters across the country, a growing bench of elected officials, and real influence inside the Democratic Party coalition. The DSA has built a national infrastructure dedicated to moving extreme-left politics from the margins into the mainstream—and with it, a deep and abiding devotion to the Cuban regime."

It describes the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) as "one of the most persistently relevant—and insidious—organizations in Cuba’s US network. The association of extreme-left lawyers and radical street activists has played a key role in a disproportionate share of the far-left terror and violence that has plagued the United States from the 1960s up to today. Throughout its history, it has maintained intimate ties to Cuba and other communist regimes and has explicitly sought to advance the causes of the international far left, including by working to defend and facilitate terrorism and extremist violence."

It describe he NLG's mission as "manipulating and undermining the law to keep far-left terrorists and other violent 'revolutionaries' on the streets. Through its Mass Defense and Legal Observer programs, the NLG trains and deploys so-called 'legal observers'—easily recognizable in their distinctive neon-green hats or helmets at many of today’s notable left-wing demonstrations—to radical protests and 'direct actions.' In this capacity, Guild lawyers serve as an on-demand jailbreak force, capable of providing immediate support for arrested rioters and militants, mobilizing a network of bail funds and allied NGOs to secure their quick release... Today, the NLG is actively involved in radical anti-ICE street actions."

At a meeting last week about "far-left" extremism with 60 foreign government officials, Secretary of State Marco Rubio proclaimed, "The Cuban regime's sprawling intelligence and ideological networks helped build the far-left in our country and in our hemisphere... It remains inextricably linked to far-left groups and movements across and beyond the West."

The State Department Report concludes, "These various threads can only be understood through the prism of the Cuban regime’s ideological foundation, imbued by its founder with the singular goal of conquering the neighboring United States."

REALLY??? Cuba, with a population of 10.9 million people which can barely keep electricity running or provide basic nutrition presents a danger of conquering the US?

I must admit that, while Rubio has spent much of his political career fighting the Cuban regime, I find it almost unbelievable that even he would lend his name to such a report filled with lies and threats against American citizens. Is it part of a campaign to gain support for a US invasion to overthrow the Cuban government and attack all opponents as "communist agents"?

In response, ten US Congresspeople issued a statement denouncing the report as "an attack on Americans' constitutional rights to free speech and assembly. We denounce this administration's irresponsible attacks against civil society organizations, activists, journalists, labor leaders, Members of Congress, elected officials, and private individuals based on their advocacy for peaceful foreign policy and social justice at home."

"We stand firmly against this report and other efforts by the Trump administration to weaponize the federal government against dissent, which is a patriotic tradition."

In the final days before Congress's summer recess, House Republicans advanced Donald Trump-backed voting restrictions by embedding them in legislation intended to prohibit members of Congress from trading stocks. The legislative tactic reveals the nature of a broader project: using formal legal channels to alter the balance the Constitution establishes among voters, the states, Congress, and institutions of oversight.

American democracy is not a fixed ideal; it is a delicate mechanism sustained by election laws and institutional constraints. For that reason, what Trump and his allies are pursuing under the banner of "election integrity" is not merely a revision of a few administrative procedures. Their proposed legislation would require proof of citizenship when registering to vote and photo identification at the ballot box and, alongside other proposals, would shift power away from voters and toward partisan institutions. That is the central contradiction: using the law as an instrument for hollowing out the spirit of the Constitution. From this perspective, Trump's project is less an effort to reform the electoral system than an attempt to hold it hostage from within its own legal machinery.

The first element of this project is an effort to revive the structural defect in the Electoral Count Act and the role of the vice president by reopening the very ambiguity that turned the transfer of power in 2021 into a national crisis. After January 6, lawmakers from both parties acknowledged that the Electoral Count Act of 1887 was unclear about the vice president's role and the process for objecting to state electoral votes. The Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 clarified that the vice president's role is purely ceremonial and that the office carries no authority to reject a state's electoral votes. It also raised the threshold for filing an objection from one member of the House and one senator to one-fifth of the members of each chamber.

Trump's political logic draws from the same interpretation that, in 2020, sought to grant the vice president or Congress a role extending beyond the counting of electoral votes. Weakening the 2022 reforms, or interpreting them expansively, would revive the notion that partisan officials may decide the validity of an election result after the votes have been cast—the same ambiguity that brought the peaceful transfer of power to the brink of collapse in 2021.

Allowing a candidate to rewrite the rules of the game in order to shield himself from defeat is not election reform.

The second element is the weaponization of the "independent state legislature theory," an interpretation under which state legislatures would be largely insulated from review by state courts and state constitutions when regulating federal elections. In Moore v. Harper, the Supreme Court rejected the maximalist version of this theory by a 6-3 vote, affirming that state legislatures do not operate outside the legal framework of their own states.

The theory nevertheless remains attractive to Trump's project because it could detach the making of election rules—and, under crisis conditions, the selection of electors—from state-level systems of checks and balances and place that authority in the hands of aligned legislatures. When some of those legislatures do not accurately reflect the popular vote because of gerrymandering, removing gubernatorial and judicial oversight does not strengthen federalism. It concentrates power in a partisan institution.

The third element is the weakening of the Voting Rights Act under the guise of "integrity" through restrictions on voting. Strict identification requirements, voter-roll purges, and limits on absentee voting are justified as safeguards against fraud, but their burden falls more heavily on people with less access to official documents and administrative resources. This raises concerns under the 15th Amendment's prohibition on racial discrimination in voting and the 24th Amendment's ban on imposing a financial cost on the right to vote.

A disparate impact, by itself, is not sufficient to establish a violation. Yet Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibits practices that, under the totality of the circumstances, result in the denial or abridgment of voting rights on the basis of race, color, or membership in a language minority. Eliminating voting mechanisms on which low-income communities and minorities depend therefore cannot be justified simply by repeating allegations of fraud—particularly when Trump's sweeping claims of fraud in the 2020 election were not supported by credible evidence. The phrase "Jim Crow 2.0" refers precisely to this reproduction of voter disenfranchisement through modern administrative tools.

The fourth element is federalism in the abstract and the Republican contradiction over states' rights. For decades, the party has placed "states' rights" at the center of its political discourse and has denounced nationwide standards proposed by Democrats, such as the Freedom to Vote Act, as exercises in federal centralization. Yet Trump's project now calls on the federal government to impose stringent restrictions on voter registration and voting while simultaneously granting greater authority to aligned state legislatures.

The Constitution assigns shared roles to the states and Congress in the administration of federal elections. The Elections Clause in Article I gives the states primary authority, while also allowing Congress to alter election regulations. The problem lies in the selective use of this division of power: defending state autonomy when it obstructs the expansion of voting rights, and invoking federal authority when it entrenches restrictions favored by Republicans. This is no longer coherent federalism. It is an instrument for concentrating electoral power.

In the American legal system, elections are not merely political contests; they are legal processes that guarantee the legitimacy of government. The measures Trump presents as electoral cleanup or election integrity—from restricting access to the ballot to expanding the authority of state legislatures and weakening the safeguards adopted after January 6—all move in the same direction: transferring power away from voters and institutions of oversight and toward partisan actors who may determine both the rules and the validity of the result.

Opposition to this project should not be reduced to Democratic fears of losing elections. Defending the states' role in determining the method by which electors are chosen, judicial review, the lawful authority of Congress, and the equal voting rights of citizens means defending the balance that prevents the Constitution from becoming an administrative document placed at the service of one individual. Allowing a candidate to rewrite the rules of the game in order to shield himself from defeat is not election reform. It is the very danger the architects of the American republic sought to contain by dispersing power and constructing a system of mutual checks.

Throughout history, malicious regimes have risen to power and, thinking they are superior, have targeted groups of people they have decided are a threat to their economy, their society, or their race. These governments then proceed to disenfranchise and eliminate those they decree as inferior, the “out-groups.” This is eugenics, the discredited beliefs and practices that claim to improve the genetic quality of a specific group by eliminating the propagation of the “out-groups.” This has been accomplished in the past by forced sterilization, inhumane institutionalization, or outright euthanasia. In reality, the practice of eugenics is about preserving the power of the dominant group or government, not genetics.

The United States has a dark history of eugenics targeting people of color and those with disabilities. Though it may be less glaringly obvious today, eugenic thought and policies have been empowered by the MAGA movement. In 2024 the Trump administration defined “out-groups” both nationally and internationally, with massive funding cuts to social programs, healthcare, and research directed at reducing health disparities—efforts that they call “woke.” As ever, these actions will have the deadliest effects on their designated “out-groups”: immigrants, the elderly, the poor, those with disabilities, people with mental illness, retirees, and Black and brown people. These are all groups that the administration and MAGA Republicans see as using the social services they want to eliminate, or as not being important to the economic growth of the US. The end result is the eugenic cleansing of US citizens defined by the regime as being useless, needy, and inferior.

How did they do this? In the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” Republicans succeeded in undermining social programs such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). This greatly affects the health of those they disfavor, such as those who experience poverty and struggle for adequate healthcare and nutrition. These actions also directly harm people with disabilities, who are more likely to live in poverty and to require food assistance. Additionally, people with mental health conditions, as well as people who are unhoused, are being targeted by administration policies aimed at institutionalizing them. Institutionalization has a dark history in the US and is just one step from state-mediated sterilization and elimination.

To further assure poor health for the “out-groups” the administration, in league with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his HHS cronies, has methodically weakened the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Vital disease monitoring programs have been halted, lifesaving research has been crushed, vaccine uptake has been attacked, and fact-based science and medical practices have been exchanged for conspiracy theories and the promotion of unproven supplements. All of these actions will most severely damage the health of the most vulnerable, the “out-groups.”

The administration, right-wing politicians, and the MAGA movement seem to have taken it upon themselves to eugenically cleanse the Earth of poor, non-white people.

And it doesn’t stop in the United States. Immediately after the inauguration, the Trump administration began with severe cuts to foreign aid through the elimination of US Agency for International Development (USAID) and other destructive policies. It has been predicted that this will ultimately end in the deaths of millions across the globe. It is already happening.

This is eugenics—many of the millions who die, or become permanently disabled, will be children, who will be eliminated before they can reproduce. And the greatest effects of the withdrawal of aid are directed against Black and brown people, the “out-group” who, according to the crude language of the US president, live in “shit-hole” countries—as if these countries and the human beings who live there are worthless and expendable, a burden to the US and the world.

The administration, right-wing politicians, and the MAGA movement seem to have taken it upon themselves to eugenically cleanse the Earth of poor, non-white people. Apparently, they believe they have the power and the right to reduce the world’s population by promoting terrible suffering through fatal diseases and starvation in places far out of their view.

Let’s say it outright—this is state-sponsored eugenics and it is happening in the America which was “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The actions of the current administration have disgraced those principles. Even hard-core MAGA followers should be opposed to the behavior of their chosen leaders, who are resorting to eugenics, using the infliction of terrible suffering, pain, diseases, and starvation for political power, economic gain, and supremacy. And MAGA followers should remember you are not immune; a small change in status will bring you into the crosshairs of state-sponsored eugenics. We should all be alarmed.

For generations, the United States has been a global advocate for freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. Today, however, the world is calling on the United States to uphold those same principles at home.

Last month, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), representing over 200 million workers through 340 national affiliates in 169 countries, ranked the United States among countries with “systemic violations of worker rights.” The ITUC’s Global Rights Index assesses over 150 countries based on 97 indicators drawn from international standards and jurisprudence.

Given the measurable increase in violations since last year, the United States was also placed on the report’s “Watchlist,” alongside Guinea-Bissau, Israel, Liberia, Moldova, the Philippines, and Zimbabwe.

The inclusion of the United States on the ITUC’s Watchlist is based on the pattern of backsliding of fundamental rights over the past year and serves as a troubling indicator of the country’s current state of affairs. The report notes that, in the United States:

• More than 1 million federal workers have lost their right to collective bargaining.
• The National Labor Relations Board has been left unable to fulfill its essential role of protecting workers’ rights.
• Tens of thousands of immigrant union members have been stripped of their status and rights through the unlawful termination of various forms of rights-based protections and programs.
• Immigration enforcement is being used as a tool to suppress the exercise of freedom of expression, assembly, and association by detaining or revoking the visas of workers who take action or express views contrary to that of the government.

These actions by the Trump administration are intended to undermine workers’ rights to join a union, bargain collectively, and speak freely, but their impacts extend far beyond the workplace.

When workers exercise their rights at work, they are not only better equipped to advocate for better working conditions, they are also better able to engage democratically in their communities. It is often through a union at work that people first vote and run in elections. Currently, there are 564 union and household members who are endorsed to run for office in the midterm elections in the United States, a number that is expected to rise as the elections draw close later this year.

The actions taken by the Trump administration therefore not only threaten working conditions across the country but also debilitate people’s ability to civically engage. As a result, communities will be less prepared to resist other issues they face like corruption, abusive use of technology, and corporate greed.

The weakening of rights in the United States set a dangerous precedent for the world. Governments, employers, and investors across the world are observing and some will feel encouraged to follow.

The good news is that this story is not over.

Across the United States, workers continue to organize. They continue to win union recognition, negotiate better conditions, and build power across industries and communities. Their determination reminds the world that democracy is not sustained by institutions alone, it depends on people who are prepared to defend it every day.

When American workers fight back for their rights, they strengthen democracy not only at home, but around the world.

Long before global environmental summits sensationalized terms like sustainability and ecological restoration, a young teenager in an almost forgotten corner of the world stood on a barren, sun-baked sandbar with just 20 bamboo seedlings in his hands.

He was oblivious to the future his hands would sow, a future that would etch his name in textbooks around the world. Today, observances like World Nature Conservation Day exist to remind us how crucial such grassroots action is.

In 1997, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) declared July 28 as the World Nature Conservation Day. Since then, it has evolved into a global movement, galvanizing governments, institutions, civil society, and individuals to advance collective action for environmental stewardship.

This World Nature Conservation Day, the story of this boy who came to be known as the "Forest Man of India" stands as a testament to the power of individual environmental stewardship.

Jadav 'Molai' Payeng

A wall carving of Jadav Payeng is displayed at Goalpara college. (Photo by Medhi Jyoti / CC BY-SA 4.0)

Popularly known as "The Forest Man of India," Payeng earned this title through years of dedication and his childhood passion for change. Change is something that many hope for, but few have the perseverance and groundwork to realize.

Starting with just 20 bamboo seedlings on a sandbar of the river Brahmaputra, he has continued to nurture the plants to this day. Despite the odds, he stood firm with limited resources and determination to keep planting, never giving up on his mission.

This article traces the evolution of his extraordinary journey, examining not only the scale of his environmental contribution but also the quiet determination that sustained it.

The Genesis: How it Started

The origin of the Molai Forest dates back to 1979. Jadav Payeng, who was then employed as a labourer under a development project of the social forestry division, was assigned the stewardship of a 200-hectare patch of land in Arunachapori (an island). The project, which was intended to last for five years, ended in three.

Payeng, who had nowhere else to go, decided to keep planting trees and taking care of the flora he had already planted. In the same year, he found many dead snakes that had died from excessive heat after floods washed them onto the treeless sandbar. It was then that he planted 20 bamboo saplings on the sandbar.

The tale of Jadav Payeng shows that an environmental transformation does not always begin with huge policy changes or major funding. At times, it starts with a single individual who plants a seed and cultivates a dream which never fades away.

It was not just that he took care of the saplings; he also planted additional trees on his own, aiming to convert the area into a forest. What Jadav Payeng has created is arguably the world’s largest man-made forest.

Marked by the recurring devastation of floods on the island of Majuli, Payeng’s childhood was profoundly shaped by the disaster that forced his parents to abandon their native village. Reflecting on his childhood, he recalls that his village provided everything—from thatch to cane needed to sustain a comfortable life in their elevated dwellings, colloquially known as “Chang Ghar.”

Molai Kathoni (Molai Forest)

The Brahmaputra River is shown. (Photo by Dipayan Choudhury / CC BY-SA 4.0)

Molai Kathoni, or the Molai Forest, is the sprawling forest reserve created by Jadav Payeng, named after him as a token of appreciation for his decades of hard work. Now this wonderful forest houses more than 100 varieties of native flora, including hydrophytic, medicinal and aromatic, orchid, fruit-bearing, and timber trees.

The story of Molai Kathoni gained widespread attention in 2008, when a herd of elephants migrated into the forest reserve from the north bank of the Brahmaputra River, moving further south. This unique and flourishing patch of greenery soon caught the eye of the media, who aptly dubbed it “Molai Kathoni,” meaning “Molai’s woods.”

Payeng’s initial efforts evolved into a self-sustaining forest from bamboo to various trees. The net area covered by this forest is a staggering 1,360 acres and shelters threatened species such as Asian elephants, Bengal tigers, and one-horned rhinoceroses. A herd of around 100 elephants regularly visits the forest every year and generally stays for around six months.

In addition, Molai Kathoni provides shelter to 250 families living in about 10 to 12 huts in different groups. Notable flora species from his forest include Arjun (Terminalia arjuna), Pride of India (Lagerstroemia speciosa), Silk trees (Albizia procera), and Cotton trees (Bombax ceiba). Bamboo alone spans over 300 hectares.

Initially, in order to irrigate the large stretch of saplings, Payeng constructed bamboo structures above the saplings and put earthen pots with very small holes in them for drip irrigation. Water was allowed to seep out gradually over several days, nourishing the delicate saplings as he went about other chores.

To transform the infertile sandbar into nutrient-rich soil, Payeng physically transported red ants, earthworms, and organic biomass from his village to the island. The insects served as biological plows, altering the soil's composition and preparing the ground for deciduous trees.

Payeng’s Recognitions

For over three decades, his creation largely remained in the dark, away from public recognition and media sensationalization. When his story finally emerged, the world stood in awe of a man who, despite not having completed his secondary education, had ignited a quiet revolution painted in countless shades of green.

Jadav Payeng went on to win the third-highest civilian award of India: "The Padma Shri" in 2015. He was awarded the "Commonwealth Point of Light" award by the government of the United Kingdom. Payeng was named the "Forest Man of India" by Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2012. In 2025, the Jyoti Prasad Trust instituted the "Jadav Payeng International Award" in his honor.

The innovative solutions he developed, utilizing coconut tree planting to control soil erosion in Majuli, have garnered recognition for helping fight climate change. His inspirational story transcended borders, inspiring a children’s book, Jadav and the Tree Place. Moreover, his story has been integrated into school curricula across the United States and beyond as a compelling lesson in ecology.

Despite international acclaim, numerous awards, and appearances in award-winning documentaries (such as William D. McMaster's Forest Man), Payeng lives a remarkably simple life. He continues to wake up before dawn, taking a boat across the river to care for his forest and earn his living from the sale of milk from his livestock.

Creating a Better World

Payeng's contribution is not just about creating a green forest. The trees that Payeng planted act as carbon sinks, absorbing carbon dioxide while enhancing ecosystem health by supporting biodiversity, regulating water cycles, and sustaining diverse habitats.

Now his focus is on spreading his forest to another sandbar of the Brahmaputra and completely turning Majuli Island into a tropical paradise. In an interview with The Better India, he said that education systems should mandate every child to plant two trees. Payeng reiterated the need to integrate planting trees in school curricula in a TED talk he was invited to in 2015.

The tale of Jadav Payeng shows that an environmental transformation does not always begin with huge policy changes or major funding. At times, it starts with a single individual who plants a seed and cultivates a dream which never fades away.

For those seeking inspiration amid the mayhem of the climate crisis, the Molai island forest is a living testimony to what one dedicated soul can achieve.

As we celebrate World Nature Conservation Day, Payeng’s towering forest whispers a powerful message: Healing our planet doesn’t require an army; it can begin with one person planting the first seed.

Yes, it’s happening and by “it” I distinctly mean climate change. No question about it, this planet is simply getting hotter (and hotter, and hotter yet). Only recently, an international team of scientists reported that greenhouse gas emissions are at an all-time high globally. And if you happened to be one of the estimated 109 million Americans living in certain parts of the Midwestern, Mid-Atlantic, or Northeastern United States recently, then you undoubtedly experienced your sky turning a grim grey (or weird orange) with smoke from those Canadian wildfires that once weren’t but now are a regular summer experience along, of course, with startling heat.

And you might not even have noticed, for instance, that Europe was blasted by heat early, hard, and in a record-setting fashion this summer with its hottest June in history. (It wasn’t a good time to take the London subway, that’s for sure!). Meanwhile, even before those Canadian fires hit, much of the Midwestern and Eastern United States experienced a record-setting heatwave (with more to come). And oh, yes, then there was that report on Legionnaire’s disease breaking out in my hometown, New York City, possibly also linked in some fashion to climate change.

And yet, explain it as you will, surging climate hell (and it does now seem to be happening ever faster), including a possible “super” El Niño weather cycle in the year to come, seldom proves to be a truly headline-making story for long, not in this country, not in the age of President Donald J. Trump. In fact, he’s distinctly into what’s coming to be known as “climate hushing.” Unfortunately, “hush” isn’t really a word that can be used effectively in any context when it comes to him, since he’s not truly quiet about anything on this planet of ours—or, these days, do I mean his?

Under the circumstances (and, yes, I’m already sweating!), consider it strange that an American president should be so visibly set on doing anything he can to ignore—oh, sorry, that’s certainly understating the situation—I guess I mean, anything he can to actively promote the further overheating of this planet of... well, I might once have said “ours” but not in the age of You Know Exactly Whom.

Neither many of the Democrats, nor Donald Trump and his—and these days it is distinctly his—party seem ready to face the world that we’re truly in as the November 2026 elections approach.

And hey, let me not simply dump all the bad karma on him, not when Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine almost four-and-a-half years ago, launching a war that still shows not the slightest sign of ending and war, of course, turns out to pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in a genuinely remarkable fashion. Not when Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu can’t stop blasting the Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon. Not when the US Air Force almost daily continues to bomb what it considers its enemy in Somalia (something you can only hope to keep track of if you read Dave DeCamp at Antiwar.com). Not when Donald Trump (yes, him again!) just can’t stop blasting Iran (and the Iranians continue to respond by blasting their neighbors and US military bases in those countries).

And honestly, that’s just to start down a list—or do I mean to start into deep chaos?—on this distinctly crazed planet of ours. It’s generally growing ever harder to find any version of good news relating to the (yes, again!) distinctly (over)heating world we’re now living in. Under the circumstances, give China some credit. Admittedly, that country still pours more fossil fuels into the atmosphere than any other place on Earth, but in its imperial rise, it’s also taken something remarkably close to full-scale control over making (and selling globally) just about anything from solar panels to wind-turbine equipment that might effectively produce green energy or capture carbon. In fact, give China’s leadership full credit for realizing that the overheating of this planet could prove to be an imperial money-making proposition of the first order.

And yes, give President Trump credit as well. After all, in the end, he’s certain to lend imperial decline new meaning in a distinctly new age for Planet Earth. Can there be any question, in fact, that he’s intent on putting this country (and this planet, too) on the downhill slope of history, while offering China free rein (or do I mean reign?) to control the green energy market globally into what could be a distant (and, given the way things are going, distinctly devastating) future. Hey, hard as it might be to believe, he’s actually spending our taxpayer dollars to get energy companies to agree to cancel (yes, cancel!) planned offshore wind projects, so as not to offer any aid to what he’s labeled a “green scam.” And you really can’t do China a bigger favor (and the rest of us greater harm) than that, can you?

Setting Fire to Our Future

Of course, all of this would truly be funny if it weren’t so deadly serious. After all, to add to the climate mayhem, as The New York Times reported recently, the president appointed “a critic of mainstream climate science to oversee the federal government’s flagship report on how climate change affects the United States.” And why not, given that (as he’s stated more than once) climate change is a first-class “hoax” and “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”? As for predictions about what climate change will do to this planet of ours (no less what it’s already doing), he summed them up this way at the United Nations late last year: “They were made by stupid people that have cost their countries fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success. If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.”

Meanwhile, in the world of Donald Trump, even the Democrats seem to be in a distinctly climate-hushing mood as the November elections approach. You would think that putting the finger on him for potentially setting fire to our future would be a politically effective approach in any election season. No such luck, though, explain it as you will.

In fact, neither many of the Democrats, nor Donald Trump and his—and these days it is distinctly his—party seem ready to face the world that we’re truly in as the November 2026 elections approach. After all, as part of his campaign season, the president has reached not into the future (god forbid!) but into the American past of my childhood years by starting to call liberal Democrats “communists.” Yes, commies! At Independence Day celebrations on July 4, for instance, he said: “Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world, only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America. We’re not going to let it happen.”

In fact, as The Washington Post recently reported, “From January to June, [right-wing influencers and Republicans] used the words ‘communism’ or ‘communist’ in an average of about 626 posts per week, up from around 439 per week during the same stretch last year—a 43% increase.”

In sum, how truly apocalyptic of both him and so many of the rest of us. Or perhaps it’s simply all too human of us not to want to take in the truly bad news on this planet of... well, I was going to say “ours,” but if it ever was, it really isn’t anymore, is it? And you can certainly give Donald Trump and, of course, those who decided to vote for him a second (or do I mean third?) time around significant credit for running this planet into... well, yes, the ground.

I mean, the very fact that Donald Trump was elected to run the increasingly (dis)United States of America (into the ground) a second time should still be a stunning reality on this increasingly strange planet of ours. Once upon a time, you simply couldn’t have made this up, could you (and if you had, who would possibly have believed you)?

I’m already sweating!

We talk regularly about Big Oil, but it would probably make more sense to at least occasionally refer to it as Big Gas—many of the same players are involved, of course, and the two are often found in the same places, but it’s been clear for some time that oil is not a growth industry. The rapid rise of electric vehicles in most of the world undercuts projections of future use—we’re at or near the top of the plateau now, and by 2030 or so the amount of oil we use should be going down.

That’s why the hydrocarbon industry’s growth story has been largely about natural gas. It’s used for many things—heating, cooking—but above all for generating electricity, and it’s on that ground that the fossil fuel industry has set out to build its market, stressing constantly that it is clean and cheap. Two important new reports in recent days make it clear how false those claims really are.

The first comes from a Center for Climate Integrity team led by Rebecca Leber and Rebecca John. Leber has a long record covering the industry—her 2020 report in Mother Jones about the industry paying Instagram influencers to plug natural gas was an early landmark in our understanding of pay-for-play social media, as well as the lengths the industry would go to in order to tell its fibs. (“#cookingwithgas makes food taste better,” says Camille, an LA-based foodie who poses artfully with her spatula, to her 16,700 followers.”)

But as they document in the new report, which should be read in full, this is a very old story. It turns out that the natural gas industry has been playing the PR game for a very long time. As far back as the 1950s, gas had a bad image: it was known to contribute to respiratory problems when burned indoors (more on that later!), and to local air pollution. And as scientists first started analyzing the greenhouse effect in the 1970s, most of the concern was about carbon dioxide, but there was a growing realization that methane—which is essentially what natural gas is—was the smaller but still important sibling greenhouse gas. And so the industry began doing what it did best, which is lying, or, to use the technical term, “public relations.” They constructed a whole mythology around natural gas, turning it into the fossil fuel equivalent of the “other white meat”:

In the late 1980s, the gas industry and major oil companies started to brand gas as a “bridge fuel”—a clean-burning transition fuel to a renewable energy future. In reality, they planned a long-term future for natural gas, while simultaneously undermining renewables, obstructing the destination to which gas’ “bridge” was supposed to lead. Over the next 20 years, the industry effectively solidified the bridge fuel myth by co-opting the science and oversight originally intended to keep carbon and methane emissions in check.

Working together in a growing coalition that included the oil majors and ultimately several major environmental groups, the industry managed to temper concerns about methane using strategies crafted by the same firms that for decades undermined the scientific consensus about the harms of tobacco. AGA and allied groups aggressively challenged the science around methane through industry-funded studies and the creation of the objective-sounding Gas Research Institute.

But their approach was multidimensional. While muddying the waters on the industry’s methane problem, the gas industry was careful not to deny the issue of climate change outright, instead focusing attention on carbon dioxide. It paired this with relentlessly promoting the concept of gas as clean—certainly cleaner than coal or oil—and positioning gas as a bridge fuel and climate solution. In the process, the gas industry solidified partnerships with EPA with the explicit goal of fending off regulations in favor of voluntary emissions management, while also recruiting environmental organizations that would lend legitimacy to their arguments.

I want to highlight the effectiveness of this strategy with a story about… me. In 1988, before this campaign took off, I was writing The End of Nature, sometimes called the first book for a general audience on climate change. And in it I wrote:

A common suggestion is to replace much of the coal and oil we burn with natural gas, since it produces only about half as much carbon dioxide. But it natural gas—methane—escapes into the atmosphere before it burns, it traps solar radiation more efficiently than CO2… As a result, switching to natural gas may have no effect on the greenhouse effect. It might even make it worse.

So give me credit for knowing this crucial science when I was 27.

But not really, because I think I more or less forgot it over the next two decades, as the gas industry rearranged the terms of the debate, and turned it into the lesser of two climate evils, the “bridge” to a future of cleaner energy. This argument was bought wholesale by politicians, especially Democratic ones—if you go read Barack Obama’s State of the Union addresses, most of them include a paragraph praising the fracking revolution as both an economic boon and a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; we were replacing coal with something cleaner. The Sierra Club’s leader, Carl Pope, barnstormed around the country with one of the fracking industry’s chief spokespeople, promoting this “solution” to the climate crisis.

And so it seemed novel to me when two Cornell scientists, Bob Howarth and Tony Ingraffea, about 15 years ago, began publishing data showing that leak rates from fracking meant that natural gas was no cleaner than coal—the argument that had been there all along. I wrote some early pieces on their work for The New York Review of Books, and then published a long piece in The Nation that made the same point I’d made more than a quarter-century earlier:

Our combined emissions of methane and carbon dioxide have gone steadily and sharply up during the Obama years. We closed coal plants and opened methane leaks, and the result is that things have gotten worse.

I’ve made up for my forgetfulness, I think, by helping lead battles against fracking, and against the buildout of liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals; those of you who have been long subscribers to this newsletter got to participate in that latter fight, which we won in the Biden years and then lost in the Trump risorgimento. But if the PR campaign flummoxed me, imagine how well it worked on people who weren’t paying much attention at all (which included virtually everyone in political life, especially Democrats who saw natural gas as a way to have their green cake and reccycle it too). Many thanks to Leber, John, and their whole team for laying the story out in all its gory detail.

The other claim about natural gas is that it’s cheap—this is the formulation that “leaders” like New York Gov. Kathy Hochul are currently relying on as they link fracked gas and affordability as an excuse to cut back on moving towards renewables, and that data center developers are using to justify a buildout of natural gas generation.

But a report out this morning from the good folks at Oil Change International puts paid to all that. It makes clear that the industry is running out of the really cheap stuff—the fracked gas from the Permian and Appalachian shales that it’s been pumping for the last two decades. Many of those wells are playing out fast, and now it’s going to need to turn to the more “geologically complex” Haynesville shale of east Texas and Louisiana, and that will drive up costs—especially since more and more of the gas is, at least theoretically, going to be exported to Asia as the industry builds out massive shipping terminals along the Gulf of Mexico:

If industry succeeds in locking in unprecedented demand for US gas by expanding exports and domestic consumption, US supply may be pushed to its limits. Gas supply can only meet such high levels of demand if prices rise to cover the higher production costs of marginal gas supplies. This connects rising dependence on gas to rising energy costs. US consumers and those in LNG-importing countries must push policymakers to reduce dependence on fossil fuels and accelerate the transition to reliable, affordable renewable energy

The numbers are fairly startling:

Between 2026 and 2040, the average wholesale price of gas could be 80% higher than during the past decade of US LNG exports, a decade when energy price volatility was already causing hardship in the US and LNG-importing countries. Prices could double relative to the 2020 to 2025 average by the late 2030s.

In other words, those politicians locking us in to natural gas are guaranteeing that our kids will spend much of their lives paying far more for energy than they should—and far more than people in the rest of the world will be spending. Because politicians in those countries are starting to wake up. A big piece in the Times yesterday described the ways that many governments are now trying to “unshackle” themselves from natural gas, after watching the supply dry up with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. In the Philippines, for example:

The country’s largest solar project began delivering its first megawatts of power in March. That came two weeks after the outbreak of the Iran War, which pushed up energy prices and knocked out 20% of the global LNG supply.

“That was fortunate timing. It was like fate,” said Emmanuel Rubio, the chief executive of Meralco PowerGen, the utility-backed power generation company that operates and invests in Terra Solar and gas- and coal-fired power plants in the Philippines.

For a country that imports nearly all of its fossil fuels, the solar project has proved that “we can actually be, to a certain extent, self-reliant,” he added.

The collection of lies around natural gas are collapsing in other ways, too. Another new study, this one from an Ohio team, went back to those fears around gas and indoor air pollution that dated all the way back to the 1950s, and what it found was truly startling. As Gary Fuller summarizes, replacing a gas stove with an electric burner—say, an induction cooktop, available online for $60—reduces childhood asthma dramatically. And when I say dramatically, I mean: better than the best medicine:

Ohio’s publicly owned MetroHealth began the study in December 2024 but funding was terminated early by the incoming Trump administration. It had been designed to investigate if replacing gas cooking improved asthma for 1,200 people living near Cleveland, Ohio.

Prof Ash Sehgal of Case Western Reserve University, the project’s leader, said: “We had completed the project at fewer than 100 households. As a result, over 1,100 households were unable to benefit. We also had to lay off about 20 project staff.”

The team finished the stove replacements that were underway and closed the project, but to the researchers’ surprise, the benefits could be clearly detected even in the scaled-down study of 72 homes.

Sehgal said: “We were surprised when we analysed the results and found a very large effect size. The improvements in asthma symptoms following stove change were similar to–or even greater than–those reported in clinical trials of commonly used asthma medications.”

Angela Bland, a 38-year-old resident of Akron, Ohio, said: “I didn’t realize my gas stove was the issue until I used the electric stove. I now need my inhaler way less often.”

If you want more on this study, check out Sammy Roth’s Climate Colored Goggles newsletter. He interviewed Segal too: “Our improvement was about twice as much as you typically see with medical treatment of asthma,” the researcher said. It truly is remarkable to think how much good we could do simply by dousing the campfire that most people have in their kitchen.

Anyway, to summarize: The natural gas industry is destroying the climate, and destroying people’s lungs, and it’s trying to lock us into this expensive practice for decades to come.

Any effort to slow it down is met with massive resistance. In Colorado, for instance, some towns have tried to prevent gas hookups in new buildings, requiring them to go all-electric. The industry has responded by organizing on behalf of a constitutional amendment called the “Right to Natural Gas,” which will go on the November ballot. As Maya McDaniel writes:

The proposed amendment states that “producers and utilities have the right to sell natural gas to homes and businesses.” That could force changes to building codes that encourage electric heating and cooking, undoing progress toward electrification.

“Really, it’s just a cynical attempt to lock fossil fuel industry profits into the state constitution,” said Kelly Nordini, CEO of Conservation Colorado, an environmental nonprofit. “That’s bad for people’s pocketbooks, for clean air, for clean water; it has no provisions for public health or safety.”

Really, the first lucky break for natural gas came back in the 19th century, when it acquired that moniker, to differentiate it from “manufactured” or “town” gas, made by burning coal in the absence of air, and then piped through municipalities for street lighting and other tasks. These gasworks shut down as big deposits of naturally occurring gas were discovered, hence the name.

I’ve taken to calling it ‘fracked gas’ in recent years, since that industry term for the new methods of liberating the fuel from tight rocks makes it sound almost as disgusting as it is. “Fossil gas” works too, or perhaps “asthma gas.” But our job is to make it a dirty word of some kind. The future depends on it.

During a military raid on the small town of Tell, southwest of Nablus, a moment of direct defiance shattered the illusion of total Palestinian submission.

Faced with relentless military incursions, land confiscation, and settler harassment and violence, local villagers and farmers refused to retreat.

In the confrontation that followed, a single Palestinian disarmed an Israeli soldier and opened fire on the invading forces near the illegal Havat Gilad settlement outpost, killing two soldiers and wounding three others.

What followed was the predictable, unyielding fury of the occupation: Israeli forces and state-backed armed settlers immediately launched a series of raids across Tell and neighboring communities, killing four Palestinians, setting fire to homes, and converting residential buildings into field interrogation centers.

The rebellion did not start where standard military analysts expected it to—it ignited in a small farming town among people who decided that fighting back was the only response left to quiet, gradual annihilation.

In a swift collective punishment campaign, Israeli occupation troops detained over 70 Palestinians—including more than 40 in Tell alone—while expanding military incursions into Jenin, Tubas, Tulkarm, Ramallah, Hebron (Al-Khalil), Bethlehem, and Jericho.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz promptly ordered a "wide-scale military operation," while United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese unequivocally condemned the combined army-settler assaults as "pogroms against defenseless civilians," reiterating calls for an immediate arms embargo and trade sanctions against Israel.

Yet to understand the spark in Tell, one must understand the explosive pressure cooker that the occupied West Bank has become.

Netanyahu’s Primitive Calculus

Netanyahu’s immediate response to the incident in Tell was not a departure from policy, but the activation of an old, entrenched doctrine: Every act of Palestinian resistance—no matter how localized—must be weaponized to accelerate the state-sponsored theft of Palestinian land.

For decades, Israel’s security apparatus has used local resistance as cover to achieve long-standing demographic and territorial ambitions. Under the current far-right coalition, this strategy has reached unprecedented levels of speed and brutality.

The Scale of Destruction

Since October 2023, while global media attention focused primarily on the horrors in Gaza, Israel systematically expanded its offensive across the occupied West Bank:

• Over 1,090 Palestinians—including at least 239 children—have been killed by Israeli forces and state-backed armed settlers.
• Over 6,800 Palestinians have been injured by live ammunition, shrapnel, and physical assaults, with settler attacks alone accounting for a surging majority of recent civilian injuries.
• More than 10,000 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced due to home demolitions, violent settler rampages, and severe access restrictions. Entire Bedouin and rural communities across the South Hebron Hills and the Jordan Valley have been systematically depopulated and cleansed.
• Over 11,000 Palestinians have been swept into detention through military night raids, held under arbitrary administrative detention without charge or trial.
• Under Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich—who was granted official authority over civilian affairs in the West Bank—the Israeli government declared tens of thousands of dunams of Palestinian territory as "state land," marking the largest continuous land grabs since the Oslo Accords. Concurrently, dozens of illegal settler outposts were retroactively legalized, and thousands of new settlement housing units were advanced.

Strategic Purpose Behind the Escalation

Israel’s systematic campaign in the West Bank serves three distinct political and military objectives for Netanyahu and his cabinet:

1. Preempting a Second Front: Israel recognized that if the West Bank rose up in full-scale, organized rebellion while its military was locked in a grueling, unending genocidal campaign in Gaza, containing both entities would prove virtually impossible. Having failed to crush the Palestinian resistance in Gaza despite its overwhelming military force, Israel applied heavy-handed, preemptive violence in the West Bank to terrorize the population into total submission.
2. Shielding Netanyahu Through Far-Right Leverage: To survive the internal political fallout of October 7 and his military's failure to achieve its stated war aims, Netanyahu needed to keep his coalition intact. He granted far-right ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir absolute freedom to execute their ideological agenda: expanding illegal settlements, annexing Area C, arming settler militias, and repeatedly invading and altering the status quo at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem.
3. Masking Failure with Offensive Posturing: Desperate to avoid appearing as a helpless leader trapped in a multi-front war of attrition, Netanyahu used military raids, aerial drone strikes, and armored incursions into West Bank refugee camps (from Jenin and Tulkarm to Nablus) to project an image of strength and control to his right-wing domestic constituency.

Settler Terror and the Bankruptcy of the PA

This campaign of state-sponsored expansion was smoothed by two major factors on the ground:

1. Unchecked Settler Paramilitarism: Armed by Itamar Ben-Gvir’s National Security Ministry, violent settler gangs have been fully integrated into state-sanctioned paramilitaries. Settlers launch routine, organized pogroms against Palestinian villages—burning homes, destroying olive groves, stealing livestock, and firing live ammunition at civilians—with the direct protection and active participation of the Israeli military.
2. The Subjugation and Inaction of the PA: The Palestinian Authority (PA) has completely abandoned its fundamental duty to protect its people. Rather than formulating a national defense strategy or providing at least symbolic leadership to resist land theft, the PA security forces continued security coordination with the occupation. The PA actively cracked down on local resistance fighters, confiscated weapons, and suppressed public demonstrations, acting as a sub-contracted administrative force managing Palestinian subjugation on Israel's behalf.

Why Mainstream Analysis Fails

Most media and political analysts will inevitably frame the current escalation around narrow parliamentary metrics. They will point to upcoming Israeli elections, arguing that Netanyahu is provoking violence purely to consolidate the far-right vote, satisfy Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, and outflank his political rivals.

International human rights bodies will issue familiar warnings, humanitarian organizations like MSF will voice alarm over raids on medical facilities like Nablus Specialized Hospital, and political blocs like the European Union will issue toothless calls for "all parties to de-escalate."

Meanwhile, the United States government continues to funnel billions of dollars in heavy weaponry to Israel, reinforcing an episode of historical complicity.

What these analyses consistently fail to grasp is the reality of Palestinian agency.

They treat Palestinians as passive victims waiting for international intervention or political shifts in Tel Aviv and Washington. But the explosion in Tell proved that the status quo of total encirclement, daily humiliation, and existential dispossession is inherently unsustainable.

The rebellion did not start where standard military analysts expected it to—it ignited in a small farming town among people who decided that fighting back was the only response left to quiet, gradual annihilation.

The West Bank will not remain silent forever; it will rise at the time and place of its people's choosing, rendering conventional political forecasts useless.

The US is the richest country in the world, yet an international outlier on many measures. Among industrialized nations, the US spends a lower percentage of its GDP on public social expenditure, has no universal healthcare system, union density is at an all-time low, and the average American's standard of living is in decline, as "nearly half of US households can't make ends meet." Of course, delusional President Donald Trump continues to say that the US is the "hottest country in the world." Is the US, however, ready for radical change? After all, isn't there evidence that Americans are losing faith in capitalism and that socialism is gaining ground among voters?

Political scientist, political economist, author, and journalist C. J. Polychroniou shares provocative thoughts on these issues in an interview with the French-Greek writer and journalist Alexandra Boutri. Polychroniou believes that radical change is difficult but still possible in today's United States, even though he realizes there is a strong anti-democratic tradition standing in the way and regards the Democratic Party itself as the graveyard of radical change undertakings.

Alexandra Boutri: Recent polls indicate that capitalism is in trouble in the US, as there is a growing loss of faith in the system, apparently even among Republicans, while socialism is gaining mainstream appeal. So, I want to start this interview by inquiring about your own impression regarding political and ideological trends in the United States. Indeed, is the country on the verge of radical change?

C. J. Polychroniou: I am now old enough to take any talk of radical political change with a grain of salt. That being said, there is no doubt that the US version of capitalism has been an utter failure for the majority of Americans. In contrast to European or Asian versions of capitalism, capitalism in the US has always been structured around what we might call the Sopranos version of doing business, which is the Trump administration’s way of actually running the whole country today. But Trump aside, what kind of civilized society denies its citizens access to universal healthcare, tuition-free higher education, guaranteed long-term parental leave, 4-6 weeks of guaranteed paid vacation, and robust unemployment benefits? The US does!

Only the pathetic leadership of the Democratic Party stands in the way of Trump’s inevitable fall and disgrace.

The younger generations in the US seem to have awakened to the realization that the US economic system is brutal and thus detrimental to their well-being, even if they may not have an alternative socioeconomic system in mind that they would like to see instituted. They have indeed taken notice of the fact that the US is the only industrialized nation in the world without a universal healthcare system and that the standard of living has declined to the level of developing countries. Truth be told, even if North America remains the wealthiest on average, the quality of life in many European countries, which are, of course, still fully capitalistic, is superior to the US. There are stronger social safety nets and greater work-life balance in capitalist Europe than there are in the capitalist United States of America.

Which countries are best on women’s well-being? According to the latest Women, Peace and Security Index, European countries occupy all nine of the top positions while the US ranks 31st, below countries like Serbia and Malta. So, we do need to take into account different versions of capitalism. In that context, it is safe to say that many Americans have finally awakened to the realization that the US version of capitalism sucks! Anything more than that, however, is open to speculation. Socialism is gaining ground, but the challenges of building a unified socialist movement on a national scale and having a socialist political party that can contest power at the federal level are enormous in the United States of America.

Alexandra Boutri: Is the rise of socialism in the US the reason why Trump is reviving the boogeyman of communism?

C. J. Polychroniou: Absolutely. However much of a shallow man Trump happens to be, he is nonetheless a mastermind politician who has the pulse of today’s Republican voters. He is the greatest bullshitter of the modern age, but that’s only because of his audience. He knows how to stir fear. He also knows that he can normalize cruelty because his fanatical and racist fanbase simply loves it. Have his policies worsened economic conditions in the country to the point that even some of his own followers are beginning to doubt him? He only has to raise the volume on culture wars and then becomes again, in the eyes of his own supporters, the nation’s savior. Of course, such tactics have an expiration date even for the most popular authoritarian leaders. Look, for example, at what happened to Viktor Orbán in Hungary. After 16 years in power, even his own core supporters grew tired of his cronyism and corruption. I believe we will see something similar happen to Donald Trump and to the Republican Party, perhaps as soon as this coming November, in spite of how deeply the anti-democratic tradition has entrenched itself in all branches of government. In the end, only the pathetic leadership of the Democratic Party stands in the way of Trump’s inevitable fall and disgrace.

Alexandra Boutri: Are you also saying that the Democrats have been responsible for Trump’s rise to power?

C J. Polychroniou: Of course, and it was the Democrats, with their ability to destroy trust in government by siding themselves utterly and shamelessly with major corporate and financial interests, that rolled out the red carpet for Trump’s arrival on the nation’s political scene. The country had been moving further and further to the right since the early 1980s. In fact, the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as moderates had been declining since the Clinton years. Democrats still talk about Bill Clinton’s achievements, such as turning deficits into surpluses and making the economy more globalized, but his policies ushered in a new era of inequality while he transformed the welfare state by ending social policy. Essentially, the welfare state was dismantled under the Clinton presidency and was largely replaced in turn by volunteerism.

Neoliberalism (embraced by both parties in the US) and cultural relativism (a late obsession of liberals and segments of the left) have been at the core of the political turn to the far right in the US. The main point, though, is that the Democrats failed to advance a meaningful alternative whenever they found themselves in power. The Obama administration also had the chance to make a meaningful impact on the future of the country but opted, instead, to align itself with the status quo on all major issues, both on the domestic and foreign front. The Biden administration did make some progress on economic policy, mainly thanks to pressures from the progressive wing of the party, but failed miserably on foreign policy. As to why Kamala Harris lost to Trump, that's an issue that will forever be debated.

Alexandra Boutri: In a recent campaign speech in Michigan, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said that the Trump administration is “hellbent on tearing down in four years what it took this country 250 years to build.” What did she mean by that, and how likely is it that she will be the Democratic 2028 nominee?

C. J. Polychroniou: Naturally, the country has made progress over the past 250 years. Don’t you think it would have been unnatural if it hadn’t done so? But how do we measure progress? Wars existed in the past, and it appears that war will never end. By the same token, we have taken major steps toward protecting individuals against discrimination on the basis of sex or gender, but economic inequality is greater today than it has ever been in the modern era, while women, people of color, and minorities continue to face economic disadvantages. In any case, it is beyond dispute that Trump is destroying whatever social and economic progress has been made so far. He is a wrecking ball, an unhinged sociopath, but one who is still being treated as America's savior by something like close to 40% of voters. That’s simply mind-boggling, but it says something noteworthy about the persistence of a particular component of American political culture—one that rests on possessive individualism, anti-intellectualism, and the paranoid style. Richard Hofstadter addressed some of those aspects of American political life long before the rise of Trumpism. But we need to add racism, as it also remains a profound component of American political culture.

If popular struggles succeeded in introducing a universal healthcare system in the US, well, that would definitely constitute radical change in terms of how the nation has decided to deal with the well-being of its citizens.

I don’t know if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will decide to run for president in 2028. I hope she does. Recent polls indicate that she is more popular with Democratic voters than the likes of Pete Buttigieg, Gavin Newsom, and Kamala Harris, none of whom offers hope for a brighter future, although any one of them would be an improvement over Trump. What I do know, though, is that if AOC does decide to run for president in 2028, not only will she have at least half of the country react with extreme fear and paranoia attacks, but she will encounter massive opposition from the Democratic establishment itself. In 2016, the Democratic National Committee derided the Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) campaign. I expect something similar will happen to AOC. The current leadership of the Democratic Party is the graveyard of radical change in the US.

Alexandra Boutri: What would constitute radical change in today’s United States?

C. J. Polychroniou: That’s a very important question, and I’m glad you raised it. Political, economic, and even sociocultural settings must be taken into account whenever we speak of demands for radical change. Take something like universal healthcare. Almost every country in Europe has universal coverage, and it can also be found in many countries around the world. But in the US there has always been staunch opposition to universal healthcare policies by powerful private entities like the health and insurance industries. If popular struggles succeeded in introducing a universal healthcare system in the US, well, that would definitely constitute radical change in terms of how the nation has decided to deal with the well-being of its citizens. No question about it. Radical change should not imply the transformation of a country’s entire system of government. That would constitute a revolution. Even then, we would need to distinguish between a political revolution and a social revolution. For instance, the American Revolution was a political, not social revolution. It did not alter the fabric of society; it did not change wealth distribution and left the class system intact. On the other hand, the French Revolution that began in 1789 and the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia were truly social revolutions in that they transformed property relations and changed radically the class systems in both countries.

Alexandra Boutri: Today’s left focuses too much on cultural issues without really challenging capitalism. Indeed, in the recent past, issues like multiculturalism and even certain variants of feminism have functioned like ideologies of capitalism. In addition, some segments of the left have a knack for spreading ideas that are either not well thought out or simply impractical. For instance, and I believe this also captures your own sentiments, I find talk about “degrowth” and “wealth tax” schemes that fail to address the dynamics of unfettered capital accumulation while making in addition ludicrous claims that their implementation would solve the climate crisis as rather wishy-washy responses to capitalist crises and thus by no means game-changing strategies. My question then is this: What sort of new ideas would qualify, in your view, as game changers for the contemporary capitalist environment in the United States?

C. J. Polychroniou: I have already mentioned universal healthcare. In any case, it would be rather easy for anyone, I think, to simply suggest ideas to improve the state of the US economy and to create a better society but that would be meaningless if the ideas themselves weren't accompanied by concrete steps and specific policy proposals on how to erect alternative socioeconomic arrangements. But we need expertise for that to happen. That being said, a new project has been launched by the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst called Game Changers: Economic Policies for a Working America. It’s a project that was conceived of and is being directed by Gerald Epstein, a world-leading progressive economist who also happens to be PERI’s co-director. The issues addressed range from health and the environment to trade and finance. The policy briefs produced by different economists contain the sort of policy proposals that are desperately needed for rewriting the rules of the US economy in a manner that caters first and foremost to the needs and interests of American workers. I recommend everyone interested in progressive ideas on how to create a fairer, greener, and sustainable US economy to study some of the policy briefs that have been posted on PERI's website.

The United States should not roll out the red carpet for a foreign leader who has systematically starved and slaughtered thousands of people, including children.

This simple principle is what led New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to declare that Benjamin Netanyahu is not welcome in the Big Apple and call on the federal government to honor the International Criminal Court's arrest warrant for the Israeli prime minister.

By publishing this speech, which is now the most popular video he has ever posted on social media, Mayor Mamdani did what no mayor before him dared: speak the truth about American complicity in the Israeli government's human rights abuses.

For decades, New York City's leaders have gone out of their way to embrace all things Israel. From Eric Adams to Rudy Giuliani and beyond, past mayors have praised Israeli leaders, traveled to Israel, encouraged the purchase of Israeli bonds, and supported policies designed to suppress criticism of the Israeli government, including unconstitutional anti-boycott orders.

Mayor Mamdani has made clear that he will not stay silent when a mass murderer of children plans to visit New York City. Most New Yorkers agree with him.

Rather than engage honestly with the substance of Mayor Mamdani's change in course, most Israel advocacy organizations responded to his speech by effectively claiming that criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu is somehow equivalent to criticism of Jewish people. The Anti-Defamation League and other prominent pro-Israel groups even tried to blame the mayor, without any evidence whatsoever, for an attack on an Asian man and Jewish man that occurred in the days after the speech.

The argument that criticizing Israel is inherently antisemitic—which has been used to silence college students, elected officials, and other critics of the Gaza genocide—is both dishonest and dangerous.

It should go without saying, yet must apparently be said again, that Benjamin Netanyahu is not the Jewish community.

Conflating Netanyahu with Jews around the world undermines the fight against real antisemitism. It also insults the many Jewish Americans who have vocally criticized Netanyahu's war crimes in Gaza and called for an end to US support for those crimes.

What the Israeli government's worst enablers have revealed through their hysterical response to Mayor Mamdani's speech is that they simply cannot tolerate any criticism whatsoever of the Israeli government, even criticism focused exclusively on Benjamin Netanyahu, and that they are willing to conflate the entire Jewish community with Netanyahu in a bid to protect Israel from legitimate criticism.

As for those who try to justify the antisemitism smear by claiming that Mayor Mamdani gives an inordinate amount of attention to Israel, this claim ignores three important points.

For one thing, Israel is actively committing its crimes with billions in American taxpayer dollars and weapons, which is why it warrants so much attention from the American people.

Second, the Israeli government's supporters are the ones who insisted that mayors of New York City embrace Israel's policies, defend Israel from criticism, and make Israel their first foreign visit. Mamdani has given Israel far less attention than Eric Adams, Michael Bloomberg, and Rudy Giuliani.

Third, national and local reporters keep asking Mamdani about Israel, sometimes the exact same questions about whether Israel has a right to exist. Don't blame Mamdani for answering the questions

Mayor Mamdani has made clear that he will not stay silent when a mass murderer of children plans to visit New York City. Most New Yorkers agree with him. So do many Americans; a recent poll showed 46% of Americans believe Netanyahu should be arrested if he comes to the United States. Another poll showed that Mamdani has a higher favorability rating among Jewish Americans than Netanyahu.

The claim that criticizing Israel's human rights abuses is antisemitic no longer works on the American public, and it is long past time for Israel's supporters to stop telling it.