Renewables are not just for highfalutin hippies, they’re cheaper and avoid the volatility of wars and chaotic leaders. We are not living the 1970s oil shock moment; there are alternatives to fossil fuels. Those who embrace renewable energy will be better off—from health benefits for communities to reducing energy shock burdens for households. The reality unfolding during this latest oil war is that many nations really do not want to be tethered to volatile energy resources. And who can blame them?

With yet another peace process collapsing and conflict renewed, the Iran war will continue to create the largest disruption to oil markets since the Covid-19 pandemic. In mere months, it’s increased the costs of oil and gas, food, and everything in-between, amplifying the global cost of living crisis. We’re at the beginning of a very bumpy ride ahead.

New pipelines that would avoid the Strait of Hormuz altogether are underway. But this type of infrastructure can take up to a decade or more to come online. In the meantime, national petroleum stockpiles are at an all-time low. Governments have a limited amount of time to buoy oil prices and stave off high fuel costs. If the Strait of Hormuz does successfully open and peace is achieved, it could take years for petroleum output to stabilize back to pre-war levels, thanks to destroyed infrastructure. Liquefied natural gas and oil processing facilities have been targets for bombing by both sides—amounting to $58 billion in damages so far.

Adding to this tableau is the reality that the days of so-called "easy oil" are now in the rearview mirror. Shell CEO Wael Sawan recently forecast that oil prices will continue to rise long after peace is achieved due to a combination of energy infrastructure damages and a need to access more expensive, more environmentally risky oil reservoirs. It’s worth calling out here that we’ve already burned through enough fossil fuels to achieve 1.5°C of warming. Every year has been another record-breaking year for global warming and global climate damages to the tune of billions of dollars.

The US and Israeli war with Iran is making renewable energy more attractive, more economically competitive, and may help us achieve our global climate targets to triple renewables by 2030.

In a world where we are witnessing the climate consequences of burning fossil fuels—where renewables like wind and solar are cheaper—just why should nations continue to rely on petroleum?

Before the Iran War, renewable energy was already growing at a rapid speed. It’s now cheaper to employ solar and wind than oil and gas. Now that petroleum costs are more volatile and associated infrastructure is in duress, the pivot to renewables will be inevitable. This March in the US, renewable energy accounted for half of all energy generation. Globally, solar energy is making up the largest share of new energy projects. If oil is the energy of warmongering and dramatic cost fluctuations, perhaps renewable energy could be the energy of peace and economic security.

Spain, China, and others leading on renewable energy power generation have seen costs remain relatively stable during this time. Now other nations are seeking that same stability. Since the war started, many fossil fuel dependent nations increased their renewable energy targets to levels that exceed their national climate goals. Egypt announced a goal to increase renewable energies like wind and solar from 10% today to 45% of energy needs in just two years. This new target overshoots any climate goal Egypt has previously set during annual United Nations climate conferences. South Korea, India, and others have likewise elevated their renewable energy targets to help lessen energy cost burdens for citizens, decrease dependency on the ebbs and flows of oil and gas, and the military whims of chaotic leaders. Now Turkey and Australia are pushing for a commitment at the next UN climate conference for nations to reach 35% renewable energy use by 2035.

The path toward a renewable energy economy will not be easy. Petroleum interests are doing everything possible to wed us all to fossil fuels through a long-established playbook of climate denial, climate skepticism around emissions and renewable energy, and wielding political influence. In the US at least, those actions have paid off. The second Trump administration has been all about tying us to oil and gas. A mere $445 million in campaign contributions to the Trump presidential campaign and related political action committees gifted a windfall of deregulation and incentives to what should be a declining energy industry on the way out.

Many Biden-era renewable energy incentives have been revoked in the second Trump administration, diminishing the potential for America’s solar, battery, and wind manufacturing to compete with China. Instead, incentives and kickbacks for oil and gas companies are everywhere, from opening public lands to reducing environmental reviews and even connecting trade agreements to oil and gas. These actions have not stymied renewable energy uptake. Last year, solar overtook coal in overall global energy consumption for the first time.

While the United States is focused on controlling the energy of the past, China has been laser focused on the energy of the future. A rapid global pivot away from fossil fuels will benefit China’s burgeoning renewable energy industries the most. Today, 80% of all renewable energy—like wind, solar, and battery storage—is manufactured by Chinese companies, with US companies a faraway second at 10% of the market.

The US and Israeli war with Iran is making renewable energy more attractive, more economically competitive, and may help us achieve our global climate targets to triple renewables by 2030. The reality is no one wants to rely on economically toxic energy sources. Renewable energy comes without the emissions, without the climate consequences, and without the oil wars that have plagued the last 30-plus years. Embracing renewable energy today means being more resilient and better prepared to weather future petroleum shocks; all while helping to reduce emissions and lessen climate impacts—a win-win if ever there was one.

This month, the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law—without President Donald Trump's signature, exactly as he'd threatened. It's a small, recent example of a much bigger habit: Trump keeps showing voters exactly how little he thinks of them. The bill wasn’t controversial at all. It was negotiated by both parties’ top committee members and aimed squarely at lowering housing costs. But Trump let it sit for weeks rather than sign it, hoping to extract an unrelated voter-suppression bill in return.

At this point, childish behavior from the president shouldn’t be surprising.

In his first inaugural address, President Trump claimed to be the champion of America’s “forgotten men and women.” But it was a lie from the start. He never cared about the poor and marginalized. He cared about cutting taxes for his friends; scapegoating immigrants for the struggles of the working class; and restoring a mythical era of American “greatness” characterized by the supremacy of straight, white, Christian males.

Although his lie was obvious, it was also effective. In 2016, Trump won around one-eighth of voters who’d supported Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the Democratic primaries. In 2024, he significantly increased his share of the Black and Hispanic vote. It might seem surprising that supporters of a democratic socialist would vote for a Reagan-style tax cutter or that minorities would support someone who campaigned on mass deportations, but desperation and repeated betrayals make voters do unnatural things. They (rightly) believed that the establishment of both parties had failed to serve their interests, so they voted for the candidate who portrayed himself as the enemy of that establishment.

Trump is perfectly happy to sacrifice the well-being of Americans, including his own supporters, to serve his own ego.

Thankfully, Americans are waking up. Trump’s approval rating has dropped to around 36% as it’s become increasingly obvious where his priorities lie. One source described as a “White House ally” recently told Politico that Trump “doesn’t care about anything beyond SAVE, Iran, and the ballroom.”

Attempting to rig elections, fighting wars nobody wants, and constructing gaudy vanity projects are apparently more important to him than whether his own voters can afford food, housing, and healthcare for their families.

He doesn’t even try to hide it anymore.

He said that the housing bill he recently refused to sign was just “of minor importance.” A few months earlier, he explicitly said he wants to keep housing prices high, favoring elderly GOP voters sitting on hundreds of thousands of dollars in unearned equity over young families struggling to buy their first home. These gaffes give Democrats an opening they can’t fail to ignore—and a path forward to lead on housing, which is the No. 1 issue for young voters according to a CNBC survey released in July.

Democrats should skip the smaller fixes, like banning rent-pricing algorithms—that’s kind of like blaming the weather forecaster for the rain, and it’s why Colorado Gov. Jared Polis vetoed such a ban. Instead, they should marshal public and private funds toward large-scale building projects with generous affordable-housing quotas, the approach Mayor Zohran Mamdani is pursuing in New York.

They should also seize on the opportunity that Trump’s highly unpopular war in Iran presents.

Trump revealed his total apathy on this front when he told a reporter in May that he doesn’t “think about Americans’ financial situation” when conducting his war with Iran.

In this case, he’s telling the truth. Trump is perfectly happy to sacrifice the well-being of Americans, including his own supporters, to serve his own ego.

All he cares about now is being remembered as “a capital G, Great Man of history,” Jonathan Swan, co-author of the new book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, explained in a recent interview. "He wants to reshape the world. I don’t think he would have gone to war in Iran in the same circumstances in Term 1. I don’t think he would have rolled the dice on what he did in Venezuela… He wouldn’t have started a trade war with the whole world.” But now that he has no more elections to win, Trump is perfectly willing to show his true colors.

Democrats running for office can seize this opportunity as well by throwing Trump’s “no new wars” campaign promise back in his face and by promising to banish the liberal warmongers who staffed previous Democratic administrations.

Republicans have done everything they can to give themselves an edge in the midterms: racist redistricting, a new court ruling that injects even more money into politics, and contrived fearmongering about communism. But if Democrats can finally convince voters that Trump doesn’t care about them—which shouldn’t be too hard since he’s constantly saying exactly that—we’ll get the blue wave we’re hoping for and then some.

The following remarks were delivered as testimony to the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Medicare for All Shadow Hearing on July 22, 2026.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak about our urgent need for Medicare for All. My name is Dr. Diljeet Singh, and as a practicing gynecologic oncologist, I do not exaggerate when I say our healthcare system is in dire straits. Every day in my clinic, I see patients struggling with the cost of healthcare: a woman on chemotherapy who cannot afford her anti-nausea prescription, or a patient forced to choose between an MRI copay and groceries for her family. If you walked through my clinic, you would know that this is no time to be tinkering with unproven reforms or complex regulations. It is long past time for Medicare for All.

I care for a part-time elementary school teacher whose health plan did not cover routine preventive care. Instead of getting regular Pap smears over the years, she arrived in my office with advanced cervical cancer. She underwent radical surgery followed by chemotherapy and radiation that fundamentally changed her body and her life—and she still has no guarantee of a cure.

Or consider another patient of mine who works two part-time jobs, with no health insurance. She ignored severe abdominal pain until it doubled her over. In the emergency room, she was told she had a potentially cancerous mass. She came to me for care, and thankfully, it turned out to be a non-cancerous ovarian cyst, cured by surgery. Yet, even in this best-case medical scenario, she still owes thousands of dollars. A treatable, curable medical problem absorbed her children’s college savings and her retirement money.

When the drive for profit outweighs patient health, professionals and patients alike are betrayed.

I am speaking to you today as president of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), an organization of more than 25,000 health professionals nationwide. We are working to achieve universal single-payer healthcare—free from corporate middlemen, copays, deductibles, prior authorization, and the risk of medical debt. Similar countries around the world provide care to all while spending only half of what we spend—yet we die younger, face higher maternal mortality, and lose more newborns. We already spend enough money, but at least 35 cents of every healthcare dollar is wasted on insurance administration and corporate profit instead of patient care.

The root cause of this failure is the corporate takeover of healthcare, where financial interests take precedence over the sacred oath we swore as physicians—to prioritize our patients’ health and make evidence-based, patient-centered decisions free from third-party interference.

At PNHP, we conducted a two-year research project speaking with doctors about working in a profit-driven system where financial goals dictate clinical care. We found that doctors, like nurses, suffer from profound “moral injury”—the acute psychological harm caused by systemic barriers that prevent us from providing compassionate, evidence-based care. When the drive for profit outweighs patient health, professionals and patients alike are betrayed, driving clinicians out of medicine in increasing numbers.

Reversing this crisis requires recentering healthcare on patients and aligning with its true mission. The most commonsense solution is single-payer Medicare for All. When everybody has guaranteed access to high-quality care without financial barriers, physicians can focus solely on their patients’ needs and patients can trust that our recommendations are based on science and their healthcare needs—not corporate bottom lines.

Doctors, nurses, and patients understand that we need Medicare for All. Now we need Congress to understand the same thing—and to act with all of the urgency that this moment requires.

There is a vision of this country that still exists to anyone who grew up near its wild places: manatees drifting beneath a dock, Florida leafwing butterflies fluttering through the wind, yellow-billed cuckoos migrating in the spring and fall. For generations of Americans, these were not rare sightings. They were proof that people and wildlife could share the same natural inheritance

That inheritance is now under direct threat, and the erosion is no longer incremental. It is accelerating at an unprecedented pace.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration formally rescinded the regulatory definition of "harm" under the Endangered Species Act (ESA)—a single word that has helped to protect this nation's imperiled wildlife for more than 50 years. For decades, "harm" was understood to include not just the direct killing or injuring of an endangered animal, but the destruction or degradation of the habitat that animal depends on to breed, feed, migrate, or shelter. That understanding was not a bureaucratic technicality. It was the legal recognition of a basic ecological truth: An animal cannot survive the loss of its home and its resources for daily living any more than a person can. Each of these species has a story that will end the same way without habitat protection: not a quick death by bullet but a slow death by a thousand cuts.

Remove that definition, and you remove the government's ability to regulate clear-cutting old growth forest filled with an endangered bird’s nesting sites, draining a wetland key for an endangered frog’s breeding, or dumping pollution into the lagoon where sea turtles and marine mammals graze. You do not need to fire a shot to kill an animal and imperil its entire species’ existence. You only need to take away the place it lives.

Habitat destruction is already the leading driver of species decline in the US, and this rollback removes one of the few legal tools available to slow it.

Congress enacted the ESA in 1973 with overwhelming bipartisan support, and Republican President Richard Nixon signed it, "to provide a means whereby the ecosystems upon which endangered species and threatened species depend may be conserved." In the more than five decades since, the ESA has prevented the extinction of an estimated 99% of the species placed under its protection—one of the most successful conservation records in the world.

Rescinding the definition of harm will eviscerate the ESA. And it does so under the pretense of streamlining obstacles to American economic growth, as if the nation's economy runs on oil, gas, logging, and mining alone. But our national economy—and our national welfare—are inextricably linked to healthy, thriving wildlife and habitats. Wildlife watching, for example, supports a $250.2 billion industry in the US. Commercial and recreational fisheries generate $319 billion in sales and sustain 2.1 million jobs. Hunting and fishing support $400 billion in annual economic value. And the ecosystem services nature provides for free—clean water, crop pollination, flood control, pest suppression—are valued at an estimated $5 trillion a year.

Habitat destruction is already the leading driver of species decline in the US, and this rollback removes one of the few legal tools available to slow it.

Consider the Florida manatee, listed as threatened under the ESA. Manatees lack blubber and cannot fully regulate their own body temperature; in winter, their survival depends on access to water near 72°F. Coastal development and polluted runoff have devastated the seagrass beds manatees depend on and degraded the natural springs that once kept them warm through the winter. More than half of Florida's manatees now survive only because they cluster near the artificial warm-water discharge of aging power plants. Without the harm definition, it will be exponentially harder to protect and restore their foraging and sheltering habitats they need to survive and recover.

The same pattern will repeat across the country. The North American wolverine depends on vanishing high-elevation snowpack at risk of being lost to development and expanding winter recreation. The whooping crane, one of the rarest birds in North America, needs undisturbed wetland corridors to complete its migration. In the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, polar bears depend on undisturbed denning sites; seismic testing, vehicle traffic, and aircraft noise associated with oil exploration can cause mother bears to abandon their dens and cubs. For five decades, the ESA enabled economic activities in the habitats species need to survive and recover, with permitting guardrails to ensure adequate protections. Now that the administration has eliminated those guardrails, it’s open season for industry to sacrifice habitat—and the future of our imperiled wildlife species. Defenders of Wildlife, along with other conservation organizations, has already gone to federal court to challenge this unlawful action.

At the same time, we’re standing up to defend the ESA itself from anti-wildlife members of Congress who favor unfettered logging, mining, grazing, and drilling, no matter the cost to endangered animals—or to our irreplaceable natural heritage. One of the most effective actions concerned citizens can take right now is to call their representative and senators and oppose any effort to undermine this bedrock wildlife law.

We are closer than most people realize to losing the manatees in our canals, the whooping cranes in our wetlands, and the wolverines in our mountains. What remains to be seen is whether we act while there is still habitat left to save.

You might think that an archconservative who has used his lifetime seat on the Supreme Court to send US law back to the 1920s would take a victory lap and maybe chill just a bit. But no. Despite his success in helping to dismantle abortion rights, attacking public-sector labor unions, elevating gun rights, promoting “religious liberty,” and destroying the Voting Rights Act, Justice Samuel Alito Jr. is still seething mad, motivated by ideological extremism and a stack of personal grievances, some dating to his childhood in Trenton, New Jersey.

Alito’s well-established pattern of outbursts was on full view during the court’s June 26 announcement of several late-term rulings. He set the tone for the session by reading a summary of his cruel 6-3 majority opinion that denied political asylum-seekers the right to enter the country before reaching the US-Mexico border (Mullin v. Al Otro Lado). Finishing quickly, he paused before moving on to summarize another of his opinions. Justice Sonia Sotomayor apparently took the break in the action as a cue to read a synopsis of her dissent. Dissenters often refrain from reading their summaries, but there is nothing unusual about them opting to speak up, provided they give advance notice of their intentions.

Sotomayor blasted Alito’s handiwork. “The consequences of today’s decision are predictable,” she said. “More people will die. More people will attempt to cross the border illegally, and some will make it while others will not.” Her remarks apparently enraged Alito, making him look, in the words of NPR’s legal affairs correspondent Nine Totenberg, like “he had just bitten into a lemon.”

“There is much that I would have added to my bench statement had I known there would be a dissent read,” Alito said, uttering remarks that, in the staid confines of the nation’s most august judicial body, were veritable obscenities that prompted audible gasps from spectators and reporters in the gallery. A court spokesperson later clarified that Alito was in fact notified of Sotomayor’s plans, but to date, he has not publicly apologized. Like the president whose policies he almost always supports, Alito invariably overreacts and never recants.

The problem is not that Alito has personal hang-ups—we all do—but that so many of his hang-ups have become the law of the land.

Who can forget Alito sneering on live TV during Obama’s 2010 State of the Union address, mouthing the words “not true” as the president decried the court’s Citizens United opinion and the impact it would have on future elections, including greater foreign influence? Since then, Alito has only gotten more unhinged and offensive, becoming a regular featured speaker at Federalist Society events, railing against the legalization of gay marriage, labeling the Second Amendment and freedom of religion as “unfavored” constitutional rights, and condemning liberals as a threat to civil liberties.

In September 2021, Alito went ballistic after The Atlantic magazine staff writer Adam Serwer penned a column accusing the court’s right-wing majority of releasing a 5-4 shadow-docket ruling on Texas’ newly enacted vigilante abortion law in the middle of the night to minimize public outcry. In an hour-long live-streamed speech delivered at University of Notre Dame, he excoriated the press for portraying the court’s conservatives as “a dangerous cabal that resorts to sneaky and improper methods to get its ways,” and for feeding “unprecedented efforts to intimidate the court or damage it as an independent institution.”

In June 2023, Alito again went off the rails with an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal that lambasted a ProPublica report that in 2008 he took a luxury fishing trip to Alaska, flying for free aboard a private jet owned by Republican megadonor Paul Singer. The problem, according to ProPublica, wasn’t just that Alito had failed to recuse himself from reviewing lawsuits involving Singer’s hedge fund, but that he also failed to note anything about the excursion on the annual financial disclosure forms required under the Ethics in Government Act of 1978.

Claiming he had no duty to reveal the junket, he argued that his spot on the private jet “would have otherwise been an unoccupied seat” if he had not accepted the billionaire’s offer of a free ride, and that gifts of “hospitality” need not be reported. In a follow-up interview with the Journal, he added, “Congress did not create the Supreme Court” and “No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court—period.”

Alito’s official court opinions have been equally acerbic and hyperbolic. They arguably reached a crescendo in his 2022 majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization). Not content with simply overruling the 50-year-old precedent on which US women had come to rely as an essential part of their healthcare, he wrote: “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences.”

When used by a high court justice, the phrase “egregiously wrong” is an insult and a sign of contempt. And to add further insult, Alito reached deep into the bowels of Anglo-American common law to override Roe, citing the work of Henry de Bracton, a 13th-century English cleric and judge who condemned abortions as homicide, and a 17th-century English jurist who sentenced at least three women accused of using witchcraft to death.

What’s behind Alito’s fury and habit of issuing norm-breaking invective? As Georgia State University law professor Eric Segall told The Wall Street Journal in an article published this month, “Alito thinks of the other side as the enemy.” And true to Segall’s observation, Alito unwittingly admitted as much at the Supreme Court Historical Society’s annual dinner in 2024, when documentary filmmaker Lauren Windsor asked whether there was any way the country could overcome its terrible polarization, then surreptitiously recorded Alito’s answer that “there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised.”

Like most extremists, Alito has views that derive not just from his abstract political beliefs, but from his lived experiences growing up in a predominantly white Christian community as the son of deeply religious Catholic Italian immigrants, and later as an out-of-place right winger at Princeton University and Yale Law School.

In a revealing new biography, Revenge for the Sixties: Sam Alito and the Triumph of the Conservative Legal Movement, journalist Peter S. Canellos offers a compelling psychological portrait of Alito as a man dismayed by the demographic and secular changes that have transformed and, by his estimation, degraded the country of his boyhood. Alito has been on a mission to reverse those trends ex cathedra from his perch on the Supreme Court.

The problem is not that Alito has personal hang-ups—we all do—but that so many of his hang-ups have become the law of the land. On June 30, NPR’s Totenberg erroneously reported that Alito planned to retire so that President Donald Trump might nominate a younger right-wing zealot to the bench. The story turned out not to be true and was promptly retracted. Too bad for her—and even worse for the country.

Millions of working people keep their hard-earned money in low-cost index funds to secure a dignified retirement and meet other financial goals. In choosing index funds, these everyday investors assume financial industry intermediaries, regulators, and lawmakers are working to keep this investment strategy a safe and conservative one.

But the infrastructure that has historically given index fund investors this sense of security is eroding. Index providers, exchanges, and asset managers are all changing their policies and practices in ways that weaken investor protection to the benefit of executives, directors, and other corporate insiders, just in time for several Silicon Valley companies hitting the market.

Meanwhile, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is turning away from its investor protection mission to protect corporate insiders, and states are weakening investor protection tools to convince corporate management to pick them as their state of incorporation.

SpaceX provides a clear example. Elon Musk’s company went public in June at a sky-high valuation divorced from the company’s fundamentals. Mega AI companies Anthropic and OpenAI are also expected to go public soon.

Should we face another financial crisis or drastic market correction, Congress must not bail out corporate insiders or other powerful financial players that benefited from inflating the bubble and instead focus on protecting regular investors, families, and communities.

Traditionally, the major indices have required companies’ stock to trade publicly for a length of time to establish their financial stability before adding them to an index. But nearly all the major index providers have recently changed their rules to fast-track SpaceX and other large, recently public companies. (Notably, the S&P held the line after pressure from House Financial Services Committee Ranking Member Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), the AFL-CIO, and my organization—Americans for Financial Reform.)

The fast-tracking by the Russell 3000, the Nasdaq 100, and other major indices sets the stage for deep-pocketed early investors to cash out while leaving retirement savers holding the bag in the likely event the company’s share price comes down to better reflect the company’s actual viability.

To make matters worse, most SpaceX investors will have little redress in the event they are harmed by wrongdoing on the part of the company, Musk, or other insiders. SpaceX is trying to ban class actions and force lawsuits into Texas Business Court or arbitration (both notoriously insider-friendly fora).

SpaceX was able to include a forced arbitration provision in its IPO deal after the SEC made an about-face, effectively allowing companies to block a powerful tool to combat corporate fraud and misconduct.

SpaceX is also taking advantage of Texas corporate law provisions that make it exceedingly difficult to bring claims under state law to hold corporate insiders accountable for wrongdoing.

In the meantime, regular shareholders are being denied the opportunity to provide meaningful input. Musk retains 85% voting power in a multi-class share structure where holders of one class of shares have 10 times the voting rights of shares available to the public.

One of the more disturbing implications of this structure: Only Musk can fire himself.

Meanwhile, as massive AI companies are seeking to go public, the SEC has proposed rules that would permit SpaceX and other large companies to make significantly fewer disclosures compared with what large public companies are currently required to make.

To protect working families’ retirement funds, Congress and financial regulators need to step in. Index providers play a prominent role in millions of working peoples’ retirement security, but they are largely unregulated. This needs to change. Relatedly, asset managers of index funds need to be further regulated so they do not effectively outsource their responsibilities to largely unregulated index providers or use their voting power to rubber-stamp management decisions.

We also need to curb the power of corporate insiders, who call the shots on where a company is incorporated and on which exchanges they’re listed, by setting a federal floor that protects long-term investors and workers.

Congress should also set more stringent requirements for the SEC so it doesn’t lose sight of its mission to protect investors, including by mandating robust disclosures; disallowing forced arbitration; having a more public, thorough process for reviewing the paperwork companies need to file before they can go public; and eliminating or sharply curtailing the SEC’s authority to exempt regulated entities from requirements.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon recently warned that today’s bullish stock market feels like 2007, when the country was on the brink of a financial crash. When that crash hit, working people wound up bearing the brunt of the crisis while Wall Street banks and their corporate clients got bailed out.

Should we face another financial crisis or drastic market correction, Congress must not bail out corporate insiders or other powerful financial players that benefited from inflating the bubble and instead focus on protecting regular investors, families, and communities.

On July 22, the Climate Clock—whose numbers Greta Thunberg, King Charles III, and other climate champions have for years used to demand urgent action—will drop below three years for the first time, signaling a rapidly shrinking window to avert worsening Climate Catastrophe by preventing global warming from rising above 1.5°C. We will pass this critical climate red line before the next FIFA World Cup in 2030 and by the time this year’s cohort of undergraduate students earn their degree. This is not doomerism. This is simply what the world’s best science has been telling us, clearly and accurately, for nearly a decade.

It may sound like all is lost. On the contrary: Solutions abound, and there are many reasons for hope. But first we need to understand where we are and how we got here.

The anti-progress, self-sabotaging direction of the current US administration has now all but assured that the planet will blow past this critical global deadline in three years, setting the world on a dangerous track toward increased chaos and disruption, from extreme heatwaves to increased devastation by floods to collapsing food systems.

President Donald Trump has not done this alone. Under Trump, the federal government has acted as a direct appendage of the Fossil Fuel industry, seeking profits at all costs while sabotaging the most viable climate solutions and undermining any sustainable alternatives to oil, gas, and coal.

"The best time to avert climate disaster was 10 years ago. The second best time is now.”

This administration has ended clean energy tax credits, terminated emission standards for cars and trucks, and eliminated the scientific and legal foundation for federal greenhouse gas regulations by revoking the Environmental Protection Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding. With a special spite, Trump has also forced money-losing coal plants to continue operating while cancelling perfectly good already 80% complete offshore wind projects.

And once again the world finds itself embroiled in yet another “War for Oil,” this time over the Strait of Hormuz with a running price tag of over $100 billion. The economic, social, and ecological costs of fossil fuels have become so great, that some have likened it to “Energy From Hell.”

Despite these frightening realities, there is a surprising amount of good news. While the US stumbles backward, the rest of the world races forward.

The pace of China's renewable energy growth has been staggering. China reached its 2030 wind and solar targets six years ahead of schedule. China installs 3 gigawatts of solar power per day—meaning it builds the rough equivalent of a large coal-fired power plant worth of renewable energy every eight hours. Renewables now account for over 60% of China's total power generating capacity. Climate activist and author Bill McKibben describes China as the "Costco of energy"—its massive production of solar panels is one of the key drivers of the global solar revolution. In the race toward renewables, China is now kicking the United States butt outright, having installed five times the capacity of the US.

Riding the global glut of cheap Chinese solar panels, Pakistan is undergoing one of the fastest grassroots energy transitions in the world. In over just two years, ordinary citizens independently installed an estimated 27 gigawatts of solar capacity. This consumer-led boom made solar the nation's largest single source of electricity.

India’s renewable energy sector is the world's third largest, with non-fossil sources exceeding 51% of the country’s total installed capacity, hitting its 2030 targets five years ahead of schedule. Powered by offshore wind, Denmark leads Europe's remarkable green transition, now sourcing roughly 88% of its net electricity from renewables, and aiming for 100% renewable electricity by 2030. Uruguay now generates nearly 99% of its electricity from renewable sources. This massive transition slashed production costs by half, created 50,000 jobs, and allows the country to export surplus clean energy to Argentina and Brazil. Even the Vatican is getting in on the action, driving forward hard on an ambitious initiative to make Vatican City the world's first carbon-neutral state.

And in spite of Trump’s efforts to undermine it, the USA’s transition to renewables rolls forward. This May, for the first time in the USA, solar power generated more electricity than coal. A huge milestone. Despite the reduction in federal subsidies, demand by US consumers for renewable energy continues unabated, simply because it’s the most affordable option.

Over the last decade, solar energy has become 10 times cheaper, onshore wind three times cheaper. Renewable energy is now the cheapest source of new power in most markets. Falling prices mean renewables accounted for over 90% of total worldwide new electricity-generating capacity added, pushing renewables to account for roughly one-third of global power. In 2024 alone, global power generation from renewable sources saved US$467 billion in avoided fossil fuel costs.

If it wasn’t for the relentless deluge of Climate Denialism and anti-science rhetoric muddying our public discourse (much of it paid for by the Fossil Fuel industry), these incredible human achievements in the face of catastrophe would be sources of great national and international pride, akin to World Cup victories.

Just this spring, frustrated by the United Nation’s COP process that year after year has been undermined by petro states and fossil fuel lobbyists, 50 governments, including Colombia and the Netherlands (the birthplace of oil giant Shell), gathered for a First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels. This "coalition of the willing” charted out concrete next steps to accelerate the global transition to renewables.

The renewables revolution being pursued across the globe is delivering real results. The most real result: Newsflash! we’re not going to go extinct!

Recently, scientists have determined that the most dreaded, worst-case scenario of a 4.5°C-plus global temperature increase is now, thankfully, off the table. Thanks to the combined efforts of governments, activists, scientists, engineers, and consumers, we have—for now—slowed the runaway climate train from crashing at full velocity into a horrific future. This is a massive success story of the global climate movement that has gotten far fewer headlines than it deserves.

Perhaps the part of this global crisis that future generations may have the hardest time understanding is how clear and doable the climate solutions we need are. While the rapid transition from Fossil Fuels to Renewable Energy is the foundation, other solutions reinforce the gains: Gender Parity in government (aka more women in leadership) delivers better, measurable pro-climate outcomes, while protecting 30% of our land by the year 2030 would maintain critical global biodiversity and mitigate climate impacts.

The Clock also tracks the dollar cost of inaction, currently $32 trillion! Yes, that’s right. According to an extensive recent study from the journal Nature, acting now to mitigate climate change would potentially prevent $32 trillion in damages by 2050. Meanwhile a new analysis by Bloomberg Intelligence reports that the US spends nearly $1T per year on climate damages, exceeding 3% of US GDP.

The Climate Clock has been doing it’s part to hasten progress, branching out from our monumental time keeper in New York City’s Union Square to dozens of countries, putting handheld clocks in the hands of hundreds of climate activists across the world to pressure leaders to take action. Climate champions from presidents to TV meteorologists have now used the clock to push for urgent implementation of the solutions.

The threats are very real and time is of the essence. But the solutions available to us are vast and achievable.

All these solutions are displayed on the Clock in real time, tracking our forward progress as the deadline counts down. The Climate Clock was never an “End of The World” clock, but a “How to Save The World” clock.

To paraphrase an old saying: "The best time to avert climate disaster was 10 years ago. The second best time is now.” Every fraction of a degree counts. It’s never too late to fight for people and the planet. Even as the Clock ticks toward zero, we must—and can—act in time.

In March 2025, two members of the Department of Government Efficiency team communicated with a political advocacy group that was seeking to “find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States.” The group was trying to match Social Security records with copies of voter files that it had acquired. One of the DOGE team members even signed a “voter data agreement” with the group. While it’s still unclear if DOGE members shared any personal Social Security data, the revelation raised a scary prospect: that the federal government might collaborate with election deniers looking to block American voters from the ballot box.

Most states have laws that allow voters to challenge other voters’ eligibility. Baseless mass challenges to hundreds or thousands of voters at a time are a growing problem. They threaten voters. They swamp overburdened election officials with unnecessary work. And they fuel mistrust in our elections.

As my colleague Andrew Garber lays out in a new report, the rise of the election denier movement and technological advances have come together to make mass voter challenges a persistent problem in recent elections. Our research found that at least 185,232 voter challenges were filed in 2024 alone, and that follows hundreds of thousands of challenges filed in the previous two election cycles.

Mass challenges by private citizens add little value because of the work by dedicated and professional election officials to keep the voter rolls clean. In contrast, these challenges rely on shoddy data-matching techniques often designed to confirm wild conspiracy theories.

The reality is that the president has no more power to run our elections than the activists bringing these challenges. So the only way their efforts to undermine our elections will succeed is if voters lose faith in the whole enterprise and stay home this fall.

Until recently, these challengers have been outsider activists. The idea they may now have the support of the federal government sends chills.

The Trump administration’s efforts to support baseless voter challenges go beyond a couple of stooges at DOGE. As we’ve been tracking for months, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has been pressuring states to cough up their voters’ confidential personal data. Like all the Trump administration’s election interference efforts, this pressure campaign has mostly fallen flat, with courts consistently blocking the requests. But 16 states were all too happy to hand over their voters’ data. And when they did, the DOJ asked them to sign a data security agreement that contained an ominous loophole in the protocols for private contractors with whom the department might share voter data. Meanwhile, one of the primary perpetrators of mass challenges in recent years, Rick Richards, creator of a mass challenge software called EagleAI, reportedly met with the DOJ in 2023 to demonstrate the tool. “They like it,” he claimed.

For these reasons and more, Garber predicts that “challenges will continue to be an integral strategy in the playbook to undermine the democratic process” in this year’s elections and beyond.

Promisingly, the Brennan Center’s research also reveals that thanks to the tireless efforts of election workers and federal legal protections, the vast majority of mass challenges do not lead to inappropriate purges of voters from the rolls.

But even small rates of disenfranchisement are a concern, and challenges can confuse or intimidate voters even when they don’t formally block them from voting. And the harms of mass challenges extend much further.

For one thing, they create tremendous burdens on election officials during a time when they should be preparing for the daunting task of running elections. In 2022, in Gwinnett County, Georgia, it took between 5 -10 experienced elections staff working “all day, every day, six days a week” to evaluate the 37,000 challenges filed by just one organization, VoterGA. In the end, not a single ineligible voter was removed as a result of the challenge.

You may be asking yourself: If these mass challenges do nothing to help election officials and only make their jobs more difficult, why do our laws allow them? There must be some good reason why we let Americans challenge their neighbors’ right to vote. Well, no, not really. The answer, as is so often the case when it comes to restrictive voting laws, is racism.

In a separate publication released Tuesday, my colleague Justin Lam lays out the racially discriminatory history of voter challenge laws. They were one of many devices states used to undermine the promise of the 15th Amendment and continue to deny Black people the right to vote. Some of these tools, such as poll taxes and literacy tests, were outlawed in the 1960s. Others, such as felony disenfranchisement and voter challenge laws, survived, perhaps because they were not so closely associated with Jim Crow. But history makes the association clear. As just one example, in 1946, Georgia gubernatorial candidate Eugene Talmadge distributed challenge forms to his supporters and urged them to “disqualify and mark off the voters’ list three-fourths of the Negro vote in this state.” Lam explains that these laws have also been used to successfully suppress the votes of Native, Latino, and Asian American voters.

Modern challenges look a little different. They are often more noteworthy for how incredibly wide a net they cast. Activists challenge everyone to create the illusion of issues with voter rolls. Today’s challengers often seem less concerned with targeting a particular group than they are with advancing conspiracy theories. In Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, a Republican member of the board of elections griped, “I can’t tell you how many hours of my life I’ve wasted trying to debunk” the false narratives of voter challengers.

That official’s complaint hints at the final harm of mass challenges and their true purpose: undermining public faith in elections. Indeed, it makes sense that the Trump administration might be looking to partner with mass challengers. The administration’s election interference campaign has the same goal. The reality is that the president has no more power to run our elections than the activists bringing these challenges. So the only way their efforts to undermine our elections will succeed is if voters lose faith in the whole enterprise and stay home this fall.

Garber’s report ends with a series of policy recommendations for ending mass challenges. We hope lawmakers take them up. But, as with so many other threats to our democracy, perhaps the most important response will come from voters. Check your registration and make a plan to vote. Read and respond to election mail sent by your local officials. Cast your ballot as early as possible. Consider all the options in your state and consider returning your ballot in person or via drop box if you can. Encourage your friends and family to do the same. The more we invest in our democracy, the harder it will be to undermine it.

The FIFA World Cup is over, but with the 2027 Super Bowl and 2028 Olympics on the horizon, Los Angeles’ mega-event spree is just beginning. Paul Krekorian, a former LA City councilmember and now head of the mayor’s Office of Major Events, has declared the World Cup a triumph for the city.

“Even some of the naysayers about the ’28 [Olympic] games,” he told The New York Times, “will have to look at the unmitigated success of the World Cup here in Los Angeles and say, 'OK, now I understand what you’ve been talking about, when you talk about the benefit of major events. Now I get how this is beneficial to Angelenos.'”

As one of those so-called “naysayers,” I disagree. LA’s World Cup experience reinforces concerns about the city’s ongoing efforts to bring one sports mega event after another to the region. Hosting major events always gobbles up public resources that could otherwise be directed toward pressing needs, while host cities under pressure to sparkle on camera often violate residents’ rights.

The people paid to organize these big events, like Krekorian, love to repeat myths about mega-event benefits while pooh-poohing questions about the costs. But saying, "No" to more mega events is saying, "Yes’ to a city that puts residents ahead of corporate sponsors. It’s saying, "Yes" to a city that puts long-term planning ahead of last-minute scrambling.

The host committee’s human rights listicle fails to acknowledge that mega events’ own massive security apparatuses often threaten residents’ rights and safety.

Bidding to host one major sports event after another is the explicit goal of the LA Sports and Entertainment Commission (LASEC), a little-known but influential organization that acts as the local host committee for both the FIFA World Cup and the Super Bowl.

As LA’s World Cup host committee, LASEC has refused to publish the host city contract with FIFA. That means Angelenos do not know who exactly is paying—and how much they’re paying—for the significant additional city and county-run security, transportation, and sanitation services that come with hosting. Refusing to disclose that information is shady business. What is LASEC hiding? (Probably at least the fact that taxpayers are footing a large bill.) If LASEC leaders show such little regard for basic transparency, why should residents allow them to continue shaping the region’s commitments?

Because World Cup hosts have a record of violating human rights as they prepare for and host the mega event, each 2026 host committee was supposed to develop a plan to proactively protect human rights. LA’s long-overdue “plan” turned out to be a list of existing laws and hotlines. Several local advocacy groups have concluded that human rights were an afterthought for LASEC.

The host committee’s human rights listicle fails to acknowledge that mega events’ own massive security apparatuses often threaten residents’ rights and safety. On the day of the first game in the US, for example, snipers in military fatigues sat on rooftops about a mile from the temporarily renamed “Los Angeles Stadium,” pointing rifles down in the direction of Black and Latino kids playing soccer at a street festival. Over LA’s eight game days, the area around the stadium was teeming with local, state, and federal police. Some prevented local residents from accessing their own homes; some hassled and ticketed street vendors; and others monitored the area’s extensive (and expanding) AI-powered surveillance systems, technology that has been denounced by privacy and human rights organizations. Before and during the World Cup, federal agents conducted multiple raids on a LA city park, one where homelessness and drug use are visible. The raids allegedly targeted drug trafficking networks but have had the effects of displacing vulnerable individuals and disrupting essential harm reduction services. It seems likely these spectacular policing operations were timed with the park’s World Cup watch parties in mind.

The militarization of relatively small urban areas for the World Cup offers us just a taste of the much larger, more invasive operations Angelenos can expect to see with the 2028 Olympics, as police forces try to “secure” more of the region. Unfortunately, like LASEC, LA28 is showing little appetite to take human rights seriously. Its own months-late “human rights strategy” suggests unsheltered Angelenos will be displaced from event areas, a recipe for trampling on human rights. The strategy does not mention Immigration and Customs Enforcement once, even though ICE will be a core part of Olympic security operations. While there were few reports of ICE around the Los Angeles Stadium for the World Cup, ICE arrests surged across LA and the nation while we consumed the beautiful game. ICE’s efforts will be more concentrated on LA for the Olympics.

Krekorian talks up the benefits of hosting major events. The meager “legacy” projects promoted by LA’s World Cup Host Committee—26 community grants, two volunteer days, and one soccer clinic—reflects a paradigm shift from past World Cup and Olympic host cities that promised large-scale urban transformation as legacy projects. While it’s good that LA leaders aren’t overpromising at the same scale and public expense, we’re now left with a new question: Without marquee legacy investments, what justifies the financial and social costs of hosting?

LASEC argues that mega events bring lasting economic benefits, but these claims have been consistently debunked by economists. The assertion that events generate a long-term tourism boost? There’s little evidence of that for already popular destinations like LA. The promise of a short-term bump in tourist spending? Mega events attract sports-loving tourists but actually deter other potential visitors. So while attendees spend a lot of money at stadiums and multinational hotels, other cultural attractions and businesses struggle during big events. Just ask the Louvre about the Paris 2024 Olympics. During this World Cup, much like for the 2022 Super Bowl, the owners and staff of several local businesses near the Los Angeles Stadium told me game days were bad for business, as their regular customers stayed away to avoid chaotic traffic.

Beyond one-off grants and volunteer days, LA’s World Cup “legacy” boils down to intangibles, like the moments of collective effervescence and the sense of witnessing history. These intangibles are why I love watching the World Cup. But they do not justify the costs of hosting.

LASEC is unwilling to be transparent with the public and uninterested in grappling seriously with human rights concerns. This World Cup has not demonstrated that mega events generate substantive benefits that warrant the immense expenditure of city and county resources. LA must put a stop to LASEC’s plans to continue diverting public resources to one mega event after another.

The Supreme Court of the United States today is the final arbiter of public policy—deciding incontestably which laws will stand and which will not—but that power was simply asserted by the court years ago, never bestowed by the Constitution or in law.

Merriam-Webster defines a tyrant this way: an absolute ruler unrestrained by law or constitution; a usurper of sovereignty. Close enough?

In exercising its power today the court’s priority is not the state of the nation, but the well-being of corporate enterprise in America.

A recent example: On June 29, 2026 the court issued its decision in the case of Trump v. Slaughter. It found unconstitutional the statutory isolation of the Federal Trade Commission from partisan political interference. It said President Donald Trump could fire Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter not for cause—inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance, as specified in the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914—but only because she is a Democrat.

By neutering the Voting Rights Act, encouraging gerrymandering, and freeing Trump to gut the Federal Election Assistance Commission, the court is up to its enrobed necks in rigging the upcoming elections.

The largest winner by far was not Donald Trump, but every corporation in America regulated by law. There are dozens of other independent regulatory agencies protecting the American people from harmful activities, conditions, and practices. So critical are these agencies to the health, safety, and welfare of the nation, Congress intentionally set them apart from the executive branch, to insulate them from the back-and-forth of partisan politics. The court has upended that safeguard, exposing the agencies to the whims of Donald Trump—who can staff them now with corporate-friendly Republicans. (Trump wasted no time in decapitating the Federal Election Assistance Commission, the agency funding election security measures at the state level.)

Note how the Supreme Court jeopardized the regulatory agencies. It declared as unconstitutional the provision in the Federal Trade Commission Act protecting commissioners from capricious removal. The court can do this because it holds a power known as judicial review. It measures the laws underlying its cases against the Constitution, and strikes down those it finds inconsistent.

Supreme Court justices were never elected, but they nullify laws enacted by people who were—the Congress and the president. Every time it does so the court literally overrides democracy. Isn’t that tyranny?

This is not remotely what the Framers of the Constitution intended.

Article III Section 2 specifies what the Supreme Court can do. Except for infrequent interstate and international litigation the court functions with appellate jurisdiction. The court can do either of two things: It can uphold a lower court decision, or overturn it. Nothing else. That’s it. The court is empowered to sit in judgment of law cases. Nowhere is it empowered to sit in judgment of the laws.

The Framers meant the court to be subordinate. In Federalist 78 Alexander Hamilton said this:

The Judiciary is beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments of powers... it can never attack with success either of the other two [branches]…

And in Federalist 81 he was explicit:

...there is not a syllable in the plan under consideration [i.e. the Constitution] which directly empowers the national courts to construe the laws according to the spirit of the Constitution…

Today’s Supreme Court invalidates laws without a speck of constitutional authority, and it has done so for 233 years.

That takes us back to 1803 and the Supreme Court case of Marbury v. Madison.

Federalist President John Adams in the last days of his term appointed 16 new lower court judges—all of Adams’ Federalist persuasion. Among them was William Marbury. The judges’ commissions were to be delivered by the secretary of state, as specified in the Judiciary Act of 1789, but in the scurry of a departing administration they were not. Then Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson was sworn in as president. Intending to appoint judges of his own party instead, Jefferson ordered his Secretary of State James Madison not to deliver the commissions. Marbury sued for his, citing the 1789 law. John Marshall’s Supreme Court found Madison guilty, but also saw the Judiciary Act as slightly askew of the Constitution. It was the pickiest technicality, but on that basis the court dismissed the case.

Chief Justice Marshall said in the court’s written decision, “It is emphatically the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is... a law repugnant to the Constitution is void.” So said John Marshall, but nobody else, certainly not the writers of the Constitution.

Marshall claimed judicial review simply by fiat and set the subordinate court on the road to tyranny.

Note where our Supreme Court is today. By neutering the Voting Rights Act, encouraging gerrymandering, and freeing Trump to gut the Federal Election Assistance Commission, the court is up to its enrobed necks in rigging the upcoming elections.

Judicial review was initially benign. After Marbury it wasn’t invoked again for 57 years, and might have remained tolerable had not the court paired it with another appalling action: a decision enabling corporate enterprise eventually to dominate the writing of public policy.

In the 1886 case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, the Supreme Court simply declared chartered corporations were persons as described in the 14th Amendment, with rights guaranteed by the Constitution: free speech, equal protection under the law, etc. The declaration violated the protocols for establishing legal precedents, but later courts cited the case anyway. Corporate personhood—prima facie preposterous—became a matter of stare decisis, “settled law.”

If corporations have constitutional rights and if they can prove in court those rights are violated by a law, they can sue to have the law overturned. They can use judicial review as a weapon.

And after Santa Clara County they did.

The 14th Amendment was meant to grant citizenship to Black Americans, freed from enslavement by the Emancipation Proclamation, and to guarantee their equal treatment under the law.

Three-hundred and seventy-seven cases based on the 14th Amendment were heard by the Supreme Court over the 27 years following Santa Clara County: 19 of them dealt with Black citizens seeking equal protection under the law; 288 were initiated by corporation citizens, also seeking equal protection—primarily to invalidate irksome laws.

As the centuries turned corporations succeeded in overturning minimum wage laws, child labor laws, laws limiting the workday, workmen’s compensation statutes, laws limiting corporate lobbying, and laws regulating utility companies. They sued for and won additional constitutional rights, those granted by the Fourth and Fifth Amendments—rights of privacy and the freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. Between 1905 and the mid-1930’s, the Supreme Court found some 200 corporate-restraining laws and regulations to be unconstitutional.

As the 20th century progressed the toxicity grew. The combination of judicial review and corporate personhood would prove in time to be fatal to democracy.

In a 1976 case, Buckley v. Valero, the Supreme Court found unconstitutional the 1910 Corrupt Practices Act, a law strictly limiting the money political candidates could spend campaigning. No, the court said, spending money is a form of free speech, and the Congress cannot abridge that right. Dollars are words? Isn’t that also prima facie preposterous? Two years later in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, the court overturned the 1907 Tilman Act, prohibiting corporations from spending money on political campaigns. Citing Buckley, the court said the equivalence of money and speech applied to corporations as well.

Bellotti, however, clashed with an existing law, not prohibiting but sharply limiting corporate campaign contributions: FECA, the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1972.

In 2010 the case of Citizens United v. FEC resolved the clash. If corporations could not be restrained at all, then how much they spent was immaterial. Section 441b of FECA was unconstitutional. Out with it. Corporations can spend as much as they please.

But not to worry, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority:

...independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption…The appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in democracy.

Yes, prima facie preposterous, as documented in a 2026 study by the Brennan Center: 92% of registered voters surveyed said corruption is a major problem in politics and government, citing campaign contributions from corporations and billionaires as the causative factors.

After Citizens United a torrent of corporate money cascaded into the political campaigns of both parties, protected by the right of free speech. And for years corporate lobbying had been protected by their right of petition. The corporate grip tightened in a frontal attack on democracy.

Corporations today outspend citizen interest groups in lobbying by a factor of 86:1. In the 2024 election cycle corporations and their PACs and super PACs contributed 71% of the total of campaign donations, about $10.65 billion. “Large private donors” (read billionaires) contributed another $2.85 billion, 19% of the total. Small individual donations came to $1.5 billion, about 10%.

By any measure corporations and to a lesser extent billionaires are the dominant influencers of federal governance today. Their financing of political campaigns renders elected officials into indentured servitude, open to corporate requests. Then corporate lobbyists specify the details.

Public policy today routinely advances not the well-being of the American people, then, but the preferences of corporate America and its embedded billionaires.

This is what the Supreme Court has enabled, after Marbury, after Santa Clara County, after Buckley, after Bellotti, after Citizens United, after Trump v. Slaughter,

Dollars outweigh votes.

This article is drawn from a book the author is completing, The Triumph of Corporate Oligarchy: How It Defeated Democracy, Normalized Fraudulent Warfare, Devastated a Thriving Nation, and Enabled the Trump Presidencies.

Imagine this 2029 scenario: Americans making $1,000,001 or more per year have a slightly higher federal income tax rate than they currently do, while Americans who can’t afford to put food on the table—the ones who make less than what it takes to cover basic living expenses—don’t pay federal income taxes at all. Now imagine that President JD Vance proposes to cut the income tax rates of those with incomes over $1 million and to recover the lost revenue by taxing the working poor even further into poverty.

How many Democratic politicians would vote for that? How many left-leaning think tanks would write white papers supporting it? And how many left-leaning activist groups would lobby in support of it? NONE.

Unfortunately, the very tax structure that hypothetical proposal envisions already exists. Yet, amazingly, many of those who would adamantly oppose the creation of a society where the income tax impoverishes struggling workers to enable those with seven-figure incomes to pay low rates are working overtime to maintain that very same situation.

Recognizing that taxing hardworking people into poverty is both morally wrong and economically asinine, earlier this year, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) introduced the Working Americans’ Tax Cut Act (WATCA). Twenty-one senators and 13 representatives have signed on. The AFL-CIO has endorsed WATCA, as have the American Federation of Teachers, Oxfam, Americans for Tax Fairness, Take on Wall Street, and nearly a dozen other tax and justice organizations.

WATCA is based on the simple concept that workers with incomes equal to or less than the basic cost of living should not be required to divert income needed for basic necessities to pay federal income tax. WATCA provides an exemption from federal income tax for income up to the basic cost of living, $46,000 per year for a single American with no children, and recovers the lost tax revenue with a surtax on incomes over $1 million.

Criticism of WATCA has been fast and furious, coming mostly from folks who purport to advocate for average Americans. Their commentary, which can be found in American Prospect, Democracy, The New York Times, and even Rolling Stone, is chock-full of concocted reasons why continuing to oppressively tax struggling Americans is a fine idea. Mostly, their arguments are a repackaged version of billionaire Republican Sen. Rick Scott’s (R-Fla.) idea that he pushed in 2022 that the income tax requires all Americans to have “skin in the game.” Scott’s idea bombed badly—so badly, in fact, that he shelved it after just a few months.

The Working Americans’ Tax Cut Act fixes a fundamental structural flaw in the federal income tax: We’re taxing those with no ability to pay into poverty, while maintaining top rates that are absurdly low.

The words used by WATCA critics differ, although often not by very much, but the concept is the same. A Roosevelt Institute blog post explains how tax policy should “bind us all to one another.” In an impressive mental gymnastics routine, former Larry Summers acolyte Natasha Sarin acknowledges that ordinary Americans are “right to resent a tax system that’s skewed against them,” but that making those at the top pay their fair share would not be enough, so it’s the civic duty of everyone, no matter their level of income, to pay federal income tax. In Democracy, writers from the Tax Law Center at NYU Law, including two Obama and Biden administration alums, somehow manage to start by recognizing that the income tax "embodies the principle that the government should be financed based on ability to pay” yet end by attacking a proposal based on its recognition of the inability of those with income below the basic cost of living—or income below any threshold for that matter—to pay income tax.

You can’t top the tone-deafness of a billionaire Republican senator insisting that all Americans pay income tax to have “skin in the game.” But you know what comes close? A group of ivory-tower policy wonks ensconced in air-conditioned offices and drawing comfortable six-figure salaries insisting that exempting janitors making $40,000 a year from federal income tax would be a tragic policy mistake. No, they don’t use the phrase “skin in the game,” but they may as well.

And let’s be clear, all Americans have a lot of skin in the tax game whether or not they pay federal income tax. In fact, if Social Security and Medicare taxes were labeled to reflect what they actually are—income taxes—all but the lowest income Americans would be considered to be paying federal income tax.

Other attacks on the Working Americans’ Tax Cut Act are equally off base. The second favored theme is to mischaracterize WATCA as a middle-class tax cut. That attack line seizes on the reality that it’s never possible to craft a tax bill that precisely addresses its underlying policy objective. Exempting income up to the basic cost of living from income tax unavoidably confers an incidental benefit on those with incomes at a slightly higher level, a benefit that is rapidly phased out under WATCA.

So, yes, Americans with incomes considered middle class stand to benefit from WATCA. The benefit, however, becomes vanishingly smaller as income increases into middle-class range. But that didn’t stop former Biden National Economic Council member Bharat Ramamurti from referring to WATCA as a “very sweeping middle-class tax cut” which he suggested reflected poor prioritization. Consider how flat Ramamurti’s criticism would fall had he said that a tax cut for underpaid workers struggling to make rent reflected poor prioritization.

The Working Americans’ Tax Cut Act fixes a fundamental structural flaw in the federal income tax: We’re taxing those with no ability to pay into poverty, while maintaining top rates that are absurdly low. We can quibble about the details of fixing that flaw. Maybe the basic cost of living in America is not exactly $46,000. Maybe the cost-of-living exemption should be phased out over a narrower income range.

When our organization, Patriotic Millionaires, worked with congressional offices to develop WATCA, we fully expected commentary along those lines. But ironically enough, there has been remarkably little of it. Instead, we’re hearing that the fundamental structural flaw—and the misery it inflicts on struggling workers—should be left unaddressed. And as a result of their moral ambivalence, we’re left with a Democratic Party that can’t understand why working-class Americans have left them. We can.

Let’s face it: Donald Trump should be considered an atomic bomb of a president—potentially all too literally, even if in slow motion, thanks to climate change. When it comes to actual atomic weaponry, he’s been threatening for a while first to restart the testing of nuclear weapons, which the US stopped 33 years ago, and then (at least implicitly) to use just such a weapon against the Iranians. In April, in fact, he insisted that, if Iran refused to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back”—only to later deny that he meant he would ever consider using an atomic weapon against that country.

Of course, once upon a time in school (think the 1950s), the young Donald Trump, like me, must have “ducked and covered“ under his desk in preparation for a potential Soviet atomic attack on our city (New York). During those Cold War years, of course, atomic testing was considered normal, while our country and the Soviet Union were indeed facing off globally in a remarkably threatening fashion. But no ducking and covering now, not from our president anyway.

Once upon a time, in the last century when I was an editor at Pantheon Books, I published Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors. Then, at the invitation of the Japanese editor of that book, I actually visited Hiroshima and went to the museum there dedicated to my country’s nuclear devastation of that city and Nagasaki to end World War II. I’ll never forget that dead 12-year-old’s charred lunchbox or that human shadow etched in stone by the atomic blast. Of course, as a boy, I had all too typically grown up dreaming (in the sense of a nightmare) about mushroom clouds exploding over New York City.

But in all those years, I never quite imagined that there might be a slow-motion version of atomic warfare on this planet, which we’ve come to mildly label “climate change.” (It should, of course, be called something more like “climate catastrophe” or “climate hell.”) Nor had I ever quite imagined that we would elect a president seemingly intent on making it happen ever more quickly and severely. After all, he’s pushed remarkably hard to further fossil-fuelize our world. As Juan Cole noted all too aptly at his Informed Comment website, just as the 250th anniversary of this country’s founding was passing, “Trump’s promotion of coal burning and cancellation of wind turbines makes him the Benedict Arnold of America’s current struggle.”

When it comes to him and the possibility of either a potentially devastating nuclear war or a fossil-fuelized heat war on this planet, he seems perfectly willing to engage in world-ending activities.

These days, of course, nine countries have nuclear arsenals (enough weapons to wipe out any number of Earth-sized planets), and Donald Trump has recently been at war with Iran, the country he feared might become the 10th. And yet, in the 80 years since my country ended World War II by dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 200,000 people (including an estimated 38,000 children), consider it a miracle that another of those weapons (now horrifically more powerful) has never been used, although since the first nuclear test in 1945, there have been more than 2,000 other “tests” in which such weapons were exploded, which have, of course, sent cancer-causing radiation across the planet.

But don’t push that miracle idea too far, since it turns out that we humans proved all too capable of coming up with another way to devastate this planet, a distinctly slow-motion version of atomic warfare. In fact, at this very moment, I’m sitting in an air-conditioned room writing this piece, while the world more or less burns outside my window. Recently, high temperature records were tied or broken across 21 states in my country, including my own state, with worse potentially still to come in our future. (The same, by the way, has been true across much of Europe, the part of the planet reputedly heating fastest in this increasingly strange world of ours, with Spain only recently topping a record 113°F.) I’m thinking, of course, of climate change and, sadly, at this very moment, when it comes to that version of warfare—and it should indeed be thought of as a form of warfare!—against this planet, there really is no ducking and covering (unless you count air conditioning, which uses electricity and so only makes matters worse). If you happened to live in Europe recently or in the Midwestern and Eastern parts of the United States where temperatures rose to striking heights or simply went crazy (including hitting 104°F in my hometown, New York City), you would certainly know that.

In short, it’s increasingly hot, hot, hot, damagingly so on this planet of ours, and Donald Trump, the second time around, not only doesn’t give a damn (an all too appropriate term under the circumstances) but seems remarkably intent on making this planet hotter still. At least, to look on the bright side, climate change did make something of a mess of his celebration of the 250th anniversary of American independence, or was that the 250th anniversary of Glorious Donald? When it comes to him and the possibility of either a potentially devastating nuclear war or a fossil-fuelized heat war on this planet, he seems perfectly willing to engage in world-ending activities as long as they’re in slow motion and, at 80 years old, he (like me) won’t be around to experience the resulting holocaust, which he has, of course, termed a “green energy scam” and a “hoax.”

Yes, make no mistake about it, while he’s officially ended that 33-year moratorium on nuclear testing, that may be the least of our problems. Whatever other recent presidents have (or haven’t) done in terms of climate change, he seems remarkably intent on doing so much worse by wildly promoting fossil fuels, while doing everything he can to dismiss anything that might make this planet less hot, including wind and solar power of any sort. (In the process, he’s giving imperial decline a new meaning by turning what’s left of imperial power on this planet over to China, which now controls so much of green energy development and production.)

If his dreams (oh, sorry, nightmares) come true, he will certainly be known historically (if, of course, there is any “historically” then) as the president of the United States who did his best to end it all (even if in slow motion).

Under the circumstances, we should consider Donald Trump the human equivalent of a slow-motion atomic bomb.

As a Maryland pediatrician, I serve patients and communities who struggle at the broken edges of the American healthcare “system.” My patients are from families working three or four jobs with no benefits, just barely getting by. With more grace than I could ever summon, these families diligently follow the protocols to determine their children’s “eligibility” for healthcare. The American healthcare system scrutinizes a family’s pay stubs, bank statements, and employment status—a process called means testing—to determine if they are eligible for Medicaid or a pittance of help to purchase a private insurance plan. It is not enough to be a human being. Our healthcare system must determine where you are on the spectrum of worthy to unworthy before you can get any medical care.

My pediatric patients whose parents get health insurance through their employment are not doing much better. An inhaler that helps an asthmatic breathe easier is covered by the insurance corporation one year, but not the next. Similarly, a specialist who has masterfully managed a patient’s seizures for several years is suddenly “out of network.” Never mind that the patient’s parents are paying premiums from every single paycheck to that multibillion-dollar insurance corporation. Playing by the corporate greed machine’s rules does not protect patients from arbitrary decisions that are supposedly good for business.

Over the course of my 20 years working in healthcare, I have seen more and more patients with supposedly good insurance avoid necessary medical care because the out-of-pocket costs keep increasing. In the richest country in the world, families are stuck between the false choices of paying for rent, groceries, utilities, or healthcare. Choosing healthcare can cost anywhere from feeding your family to putting a roof over their head.

All of us are trapped in this infuriating maze of puzzles and peril. Looking at this cruel mess of a system, we have politicians saying a “public option” is enough to fix things. There are think tanks describing a system of “universal healthcare” where the expensive (and yet, worthless) plans from private insurance corporations, the 50 shades of Medicaid, and a public option somehow achieve a magical harmony. To make things even more complicated, it is unclear what exactly a public option could look like. It could mean patients have the option of buying into Medicare or Medicaid. Or it could mean a separate public insurance plan at the federal level, possibly available to everyone or possibly just the ones deemed needy enough.

Medicare For All is true universal healthcare, where patients and families have peace of mind whenever and wherever they need medical help.

We need to be clear about what “universal healthcare” ought to mean. Everybody getting expensive-but-worthless plans from insurance corporations is universal financial stress, not universal healthcare. Similarly, adding any kind of “public option” fragment to a ridiculously fragmented system is universal confusion, not universal healthcare.

Insurance corporations have a long track record of deploying lobbyists and misinformation to undermine provisions of the Affordable Care Act. It is foolish to think these greed machines will become good-faith partners in our healthcare, competing fair and square with any kind of public option. Corporate lobbyists will see to it that any public option uses complicated means testing to determine which members of the public are worthy or unworthy of the care. These corporations will also manipulate their own plans to shut out patients who need healthcare the most, leaving them to a public option struggling to pay doctors and hospitals. Insurance greed machines do not want competition, and will undermine a public option any way they can.

Rather than tinker with a corporate-driven healthcare system determined to put profits before patients, let’s build universal healthcare through Medicare For All. Because healthcare is a human right, Medicare For All guarantees every single person living in America is eligible. We can save billions of dollars when we stop scrutinizing who is worthy or unworthy. Medicare For All provides the kind of coverage that stays with people from cradle to grave. It is mobile coverage, staying with patients from state to state, or job to job. Hospitals and clinics will remain open and properly staffed because Medicare For All puts patients first, not profits. Because all 342 million of us are covered, Medicare For All will have powerful leverage to negotiate with Big Pharma about the cost of prescriptions. Medicare For All is true universal healthcare, where patients and families have peace of mind whenever and wherever they need medical help.

We have tolerated an intolerable healthcare system for far too long. In the coming years, as politicians debate “universal healthcare,” we need those two words to be much more than a campaign slogan or an empty promise. Healthcare must be a true human right, easily exercised by every single person in America. We can and we will make that right a reality with Medicare For All.

One day before the FIFA Men’s World Cup final between Argentina and Spain, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his support for Argentina. In a video released before the match, he said: “I don’t hide that I’m a fan of Argentina. I think most Israeli citizens do. That is because President Milei has revolutionized Israel’s relationship with Argentina, and we have no greater nor better friends. Which is why we support them.”

Both media outlets known for supporting Palestinian solidarity and media outlets affiliated with or supportive of the Israeli state immediately framed the World Cup final as a proxy for the relationship between Palestine and Israel. The final turned into a symbolic contest due to the official state policies of Argentina and Spain toward Palestine and Israel. Acts of individual actors, for example, Lionel Messi’s commercial connection with Israeli companies or his visit to Israel and the occupied West Bank as part of a 2013 “Peace Tour” organized by Barcelona or Lamin Yamal’s waving of a Palestinian flag after the La Liga championship, were turned into symbols of the collective stance of a nation and became reasons enough to support or oppose a specific team in the World Cup final.

As a Bangladeshi-American who grew up in Bangladesh—a country known for its passion for Latin American football powerhouses and its split loyalties between Argentina and Brazil—I have been a fan of the Argentine men’s football team since the age of 10. I have also been in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom since I was old enough to read newspapers. I found it appalling to see the head of a genocidal state publicly endorse my favorite men’s football team and to watch Palestinian solidarity become over simplistically reduced to supporting or opposing a football team. Can we end settler-colonial violence by winning a football match?

While people have argued that symbols matter, I would urge them to consider how such symbolism ignores two important points: First, it overlooks the problem of transforming one of the world’s most celebrated sporting spectacles into a stage upon which Benjamin Netanyahu’s ethnonationalist genocidal project can be publicly performed and normalized. Second, people are not their governments. Argentina’s self-proclaimed “most Zionist president in the world” Javier Milei’s unconditional alignment with Netanyahu’s government does not reflect the fact that Argentina is also the home to a substantial and increasingly visible Palestinian solidarity movement.

To reduce Argentina to its president is to reproduce a colonial logic that erases the vibrant historical and contemporary social movements, labor struggles, Indigenous resistance, feminist and queer organizing, anti-racist and anti-fascist activism, and transnational solidarity engagements that have long shaped political life in Argentina.

Using sports as a platform for promoting geopolitical interests is not new. Sports have always been entangled with powerful states and institutions. They were exported globally as tools of European colonial expansion, serving as instruments of the so-called civilizing mission, mechanisms of control, and tactics of assimilation between the 16th and the 20th centuries. Many colonized and indigenous communities have also turned sports into powerful symbols of defiance, through which they subverted the master’s tools, beat the colonizers at their own game, and transformed stadiums and playing fields into communal spaces for practicing decolonial solidarity and organizing resistance away from colonial surveillance and policing.

Football is no exception. The imperial and colonial legacy still shapes the way football—especially the FIFA Men’s World Cup—is organized, governed, and experienced today. Concerns have been raised about the displacement of the unhoused population by local governments in US host cities. Immigration and Customs Enforcement continued to arbitrarily and violently target, deport, and kill members of communities of color through paramilitary-style operations while World Cup matches were held across US cities. In Canadian and Mexican host cities, marginalized and minoritized communities expressed concerns about disruptions to water supplies, threats to land access, rising living costs, and disruptive infrastructural development.

Even though FIFA has chosen the official slogan “United as One” for the 2026 Men’s World Cup, a series of events has already demonstrated that the powerful and the powerless are not united and that the playing field is not level for everyone. US President Donald Trump has publicly intervened in FIFA’s disciplinary process, and FIFA President Gianni Infantino’s cozy relationship with Trump has raised serious concerns. Unusually strict travel restrictions disproportionately affected the Iranian team's World Cup experience. The 2026 FIFA World Cup has repeatedly been used and abused to exert both hard and soft neoliberal, disciplinary, and diplomatic power.

By expressing support for the Argentine men’s football team, Netanyahu also utilized the World Cup to manufacture legitimacy for the Israeli settler-colonial apartheid state that has a long history of systematically evicting, segregating, displacing, and killing Indigenous Palestinians. He has appropriated this transnational sporting spectacle as an instrument for promoting and normalizing his settler-colonial mission.

What is at stake, however, extends beyond the universalization of a violent settler-colonial regime.

Drawing on Edward Said, I would argue that Netanyahu’s embrace of Argentina illustrates how the Israeli settler-colonial project is not just about colonizing Palestinian land and annihilating the Indigenous Palestinian population. The settler-colonial project involves careful production of knowledge through a politics of representation, turning representation into a technology of discursive and political rule. Through his symbolic embrace, Netanyahu deliberately erases complexities and contradictions, propagating an oversimplified and monolithic discourse about the state of Argentina and its communities. In his representation, Argentina is no longer a society of millions negotiating overlapping and competing political traditions; it becomes merely an extension of President Javier Milei’s geopolitical loyalties.

Yet Milei does not constitute Argentina.

To reduce Argentina to its president is to reproduce a colonial logic that erases the vibrant historical and contemporary social movements, labor struggles, Indigenous resistance, feminist and queer organizing, anti-racist and anti-fascist activism, and transnational solidarity engagements that have long shaped political life in Argentina. It renders invisible the thousands of Argentines who have mobilized in solidarity with Palestinians despite President Milei’s continuing unabashed support for Israel, including members of Argentine Jewish organizations critical of Israeli state-sponsored settler-colonial violence, as well as union organizers, students, artists, and social justice activists who refuse to equate support for Palestinian liberation with hostility toward Jewish lives and communities.

For example, the Comité Argentino de Solidaridad con el Pueblo Palestino (Argentine Solidarity Committee with the Palestinian People) organizes national demonstrations, educational events, BDS campaigns, and solidarity actions across Argentina. It ran a nationwide campaign under the slogan, “Argentina Rejects Genocide in Gaza” and mobilized a massive demonstration involving thousands of people in Buenos Aires in July 2025. A diverse collective of Argentine lawyers, doctors, educators, politicians, journalists, and activists participated in the Global Sumud Flotilla, which attempted to break the Israeli criminal blockade and carried humanitarian aid to Gaza. Judíos por Palestina (Jews for Palestine) operates in Argentina as part of the Global Jews for Palestine Network, which is known for its rejection of Zionism, Israeli apartheid, and genocidal state policies.

A 2026 Pew Research Center survey found that 55% of Argentines hold “very unfavorable” or “somewhat unfavorable” views of Israel. Only 21% view the country favorably. Argentina recognized Palestine as a “free and independent state” under former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner back in 2010—more than 13 years before Spain formally recognized the state of Palestine. The Argentine football legend Diego Maradona, who famously said, “In my heart, I am Palestinian,” was known for his vocal critiques of the settler-colonial violence of the Israeli state.

The issue is not whether a political leader may cheer for Argentina. The issue is how the imperial and settler-colonial power repeatedly attempts to equate a diplomatic alliance between Milei and Netanyahu with the political imagination of the entire population of Argentina.

The Argentine national football team does not belong to Javier Milei. Nor does it belong to Benjamin Netanyahu. Argentina does not speak with one voice. The Argentine football team belongs to generations of communities that have transformed football into an archive of collective memory—of neighborhood life, working-class identity, migration, anti-authoritarian and democratic struggles, joy, grief, and resistance. To appropriate that symbolic inheritance for the purpose of normalizing settler-colonial violence is to strip football of its decolonial legacy. No geopolitical alliance—and no World Cup final—can or should erase that legacy.

At the World Inequality Conference in June, the renowned economist Thomas Piketty and a team of 45 researchers from the World Inequality Lab unveiled the Global Justice Report. It’s a highly impressive and eloquent proposal to achieve "equality and prosperity within planetary boundaries" by the end of the century. Based on a fully quantified road map derived from extensive macroeconomic analysis, the 135-page report sets forth an ambitious vision: to construct a global economy that shares global wealth and achieves high well-being for all while rapidly decarbonizing energy systems, thereby maintaining emissions within the relatively safe limits of 1.8°C.

This hopeful outlook provides a welcome antidote to our times, in which the world is already reeling from climate breakdown, geo-economic confrontation, and a widening structural economic divide.

The core aim of the proposal is to achieve full income convergence across all countries by 2100, centered around a target level of €5,000 (about $5,700) per month for every person. To achieve this, the bottom 50% of humanity need to increase their global wealth share from 2-30%. The top 0.001%, in contrast, would see their wealth fall from 6% to 0.05%—a "striking redistribution," to quote the report, which would essentially abolish the billionaire class.

A Global Justice Fund serves to administer this immense effort at international economic sharing, financed by a global wealth tax and a top income tax levied on the richest 1% of the world’s population. Some of the revenue raised would go into a World Sovereign Fund, which is projected to accumulate assets equivalent to 60% of world GDP and replace tax revenue as the main source of financing. Country dividends are designed to be distributed on an equal per-capita basis, therefore providing more resources to poorer than richer countries and vastly more resources than currently allocated to development aid. These funds also come with strong conditionalities in terms of climate investments, inequality targets, and health and education expenditures.

A Vision of Sufficiency

The main novelty of the report is to put the concept of sufficiency at the center of its analysis, rightly arguing that we cannot stay within a 2°C carbon budget if the entire human population adopts a rich-world lifestyle of high private consumption. Sufficiency, as the report defines it, therefore requires more than halving average working time to 1,000 hours, roughly the equivalent of a two-and-a-half-day standard week.

This needs to be accompanied by a significant shift from material to immaterial sectors, such as health and education, which in turn would help refocus the economy toward low-consumption activities. A substantial change in food habits and reduced meat consumption could also allow for a strict deforestation ban, freeing up arable land while scaling down high-emitting agricultural practices. At the same time, sufficiency in production and consumption patterns must be combined with rapid decarbonization of the energy system, as spurred and enabled by the Global Justice Fund.

All this can read, at times, as a wish list of sustainability concepts and policies long espoused by environmental thinkers. But the work of the Global Justice Project is far wider in scope than Piketty’s best-selling tome, Capital in the 21st Century, which famously used vast historical and economic data to argue the case for a progressive global tax on wealth. Back in 2015, we at Share the World's Resources and others criticized the book for failing to take seriously the ecological limits to growth and planetary boundaries. So it’s inspiring to see the World Inequality Lab authors directly engaging in this debate, fully denouncing the rhetoric of "green growth" that assumes we can address environmental challenges by indefinitely increasing the size of the pie without reducing inequality, consuming less, or sharing resources globally.

Sharing Environmental Space

Their new report argues that technology alone is not enough to achieve rapid decarbonization. They acknowledge that to manage the green transition globally within a strict carbon budget, it will be necessary for today’s richest countries to radically downscale their resource and energy demands with near-zero growth in GDP. This will clear the ecological and carbon space needed for poorer countries of the Global South to continue growing their economies, enabling a fast energy transition while guaranteeing essential public services and a decent standard of living to all people.

It is hardly a novel framing of the issue, but the report emphasizes how their Sustainable Convergence Scenario entails a form of "class-based reparatory justice," in that the very rich—who have benefited the most from fossil-based global economic growth in recent decades—will primarily fund the Global Justice Platform. What’s more, the proposal is somewhat aligned with the concept of climate equity, and effectively translates the principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities" into quantitative policies for addressing climate change.

Another strength of the report is how it connects macroeconomic and environmental projections directly to questions of international institutional reform. It centrally highlights the need for a broader overhaul and democratization of the global economic and monetary system, including the reconstitution of the International Monetary Fund into a United Nations Central Bank that issues its own reserve currency. This would eliminate the exorbitant privilege of the US dollar and other major currencies that can borrow at much lower rates, ending a massive reverse redistribution of wealth from Global South countries to the Global North.

All other international institutions would be governed by strict rules and equal voting rights, further eradicating the special privileges and veto powers of dominant nations. A new international order would include the reform of World Trade Organisation rules and a reset of dispute settlement mechanisms. And the large financial resources allocated to the Global Justice Fund would de facto underwrite a major restructuring of the entire UN system, strengthening its many agencies, human rights protections and international laws.

From Plutocracy to Democracy

As the report affirms, these proposals to transform global governance from "plutocracy to democracy" are closely related to many other existing frameworks and initiatives. The Bridgetown Initiative in 2022, for example, also stresses the complementary role of global wealth taxation and international monetary reform. The UN Tax Convention process also focuses on democratizing the international tax system and curbing illicit financial flows, while the G20 initiatives led by Brazil and South Africa also champion global wealth taxes to fund climate policies and green energy transitions.

There are numerous other networks and organizations that aim toward similar tax and governance reforms, such as the work of Progressive International with their Program of Action on the Construction of a New International Economic Order. The Stiglitz Commission of 2010 and Brandt Commission of 1980 are gladly cited by the Global Justice Report as complementary discussions surrounding the reform of the international monetary and reserve system.

Above all, the report authors deservedly mention the Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth—a major project coordinated by the former UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, Olivier De Schutter, that puts forward an exhaustive policy toolkit for building a global economy with human rights and ecological justice at its core. Thomas Piketty and many other prominent economists have put their names to this plan, which is one of the most comprehensive policy documents of recent years to define "living well within planetary boundaries" through increased South-South cooperation, reparative climate finance, and support for universal social protection floors. De Schutter’s pioneering proposal for a Global Fund for Social Protection is arguably a less utopian prospect for closing chronic financing gaps in low-income countries, building upon existing structures like the UN’s International Labour Organisation, and seeking more immediately viable sources of international financing.

The operative question, as always, is how the political conditions will arise to implement these policies as an alternative to the far-right techno-authoritarian vision being championed by reactionary political elites and their billionaire supporters. It’s certainly true, as Piketty and his team write in a Guardian op-ed, that technical impossibility is not what is standing in the way but rather “the absence of a shared vision of social progress, at once concrete and radical.” And both the Piketty and De Schutter road maps make clear that formidable forces will oppose any socioeconomic shift toward global sustainable convergence, with the fiercest resistance coming from the ultra rich.

Both reports also briefly outline the need to build countervailing power from the grassroots, explicitly supporting collective action from progressive political parties, labor unions, and civil society organisations. The Global Justice Report even gives its conclusion the subtitle: "A global citizen movement for social justice," and it modestly proffers its analysis to the broader collective mobilization that is already (if all too slowly) advancing at the world scale. So whatever limitations and shortcomings these reports may contain, we can only hope they spur the massive groundswell of popular support that is urgently needed to share the world’s finite resources before it’s too late.

A funny thing happened on the way to the NBA Championship Finals this season. Despite being die-hard Celtics fans, my six-year-old son and I fell in love with Jalen Brunson of the rival New York Knicks. We’ve risked excommunication from Celtics Nation for this sacrilege.

But let me state our case. First, and obviously, Brunson is one of the most fearless basketball players to have ever played the game. Driving the lane repeatedly in the face of Victor Wembanyama, the 7’4” consensus NBA defensive player of the year, was a wonder to behold. The guy has ice in his veins.

Second, we love the kind of humble teammate Brunson is: deflecting praise, not spending his time on social media battling critics like a certain ex-Celtic, being forever encouraging of his teammates, and living out his faith in God.

Third, perhaps strangely, we love Brunson’s dietary habits. My son is a carb and treat monster (wonder where he got that from?), but when we learned about Brunson’s incredibly healthy meals, we both got on board. Even Celtics like John Havlicek and Paul Silas couldn’t do that for me as a kid.

Fourth, since I’m always drilling my son to share his toys and be generous with those less fortunate, we were inspired to learn that Brunson took a pay cut so that there would be more money to—wait for it—win a championship.

Fifth and relatedly, Brunson has used his wealth to better the lives of others through his Second Round Foundation. He received an NBA Cares award for his community work, something we have prioritized with our son from a very early age.

Sixth, as on-and-off New York residents ourselves, Brunson is quintessential New York City. The comebacks, the underdog, the grit, the discounted. For all those who are doubted and dismissed, he is the patron saint.

Seventh, by every account, Brunson is an amazing father to his daughter Jordyn, a devoted husband to his wife Ali, and a loving son to his mom Sandra and dad Rick.

I could go on. The guy is the real deal, the kind of role model the sports world—and frankly, this country—needs right now for so many reasons.

But there is one problem, one outlier in this litany of goodness. It isn’t his fault by any stretch, but just maybe he could do something about it.

If I ever met Brunson, after telling him how much my son and I have admired and been inspired by him, I would raise this one uncomfortable truth with him: Right above his heart on his and his teammates’ Knicks jerseys is a patch with the words “Experience Abu Dhabi.” The New York Knicks have a marketing deal worth $30 million with Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. It is one of the most expensive uniform patches in the NBA.

Seems innocuous enough. There are lots of these kinds of ads all over uniforms and arenas throughout the sporting world globally. But this ad carries enormous baggage, and it’s unlikely that Brunson and most people even know why. Through this marketing deal, the Knicks are connected to the people of Sudan. But the Sudanese are not experiencing Abu Dhabi in the same way the tourists the UAE is wooing might be. The people of Sudan are experiencing Abu Dhabi through the killer drones the UAE government has been delivering to a deadly militia amid one of the most destructive wars globally this century. The United Nations and the US government have said the militia that the UAE supports is committing genocide, which is the deliberate killing of people on the basis of their identity, in this case, racial and ethnic.

If I had the good fortune of meeting Jalen Brunson, I would urge him to learn about what the UAE is doing in Sudan, to educate others about it, and to ask the Knicks owner, James Dolan, to end the UAE deal. The Knicks and Brunson have been the good news story of the sports world this year. Imagine the good news and hope the team could bring to the suffering people of Sudan if the team cut its connection to such horrific violence.

In his farewell address of January 1961, Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans against the "acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex," and the danger that "public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite." Sixty-five years on, Eisenhower’s warnings have been repeatedly and tragically vindicated. American democracy hangs by a thread, while the military-industrial complex, now including Silicon Valley, runs American foreign policy over the objections of the American people.

The aim is American primacy, meaning the unchallenged wealth, power, and prerogatives of American elites, unchecked by any other nation or group of nations. What this means in practice is that Wall Street, military contractors, Silicon Valley, and Big Oil control American foreign policy to maximize elite wealth and access to global resources, supply chains, and strategic choke points. The rest of the world is to fall in line.

The military-industrial complex deploys a toolkit that we summarize as “regime control,” directed at subordinating the rest of the world’s governments to the United States. The instruments used for regime control include the imposition or removal of trade barriers; the access to or denial of technologies; the introduction or removal of economic sanctions; the ownership and manipulation of foreign media; electoral interference of varying extent; political assassinations, color revolutions, CIA-backed coups; the instigation of overseas bank runs and the supply of emergency loans when states submit; the freezing and unfreezing of foreign assets; the targeting of foreign officials with corruption claims, extradition, or kidnapping; and, when none of these suffice for regime control, outright war. The US wars of choice (really, wars for regime control) are perpetual, and lucrative for the war industries, though the deep state typically prefers that other governments cave in without a fight.

Geopolitical Pivots and American Primacy

Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard (1997) laid out the goal of regime control with remarkable candor. Eurasia is the board on which America’s global primacy must be secured. To succeed, America should dominate “geopolitical pivots,” meaning states that are unimportant to America per se but useful for weakening another major power. Brzezinski named key geopolitical pivots, the most important of which was Ukraine. He repeatedly proclaimed that Russia without Ukraine ceases to be a great power. He identified Iran as another pivot. Control over Iran secures America’s hold on the Persian Gulf, Mideast oil, and the Caspian region. It is no surprise that US wars rage in both places.

The US does not want security with mutual respect. It wants primacy, which is an altogether different thing.

This is important to understand the decisions of six seemingly different presidents, who all pursued one consistent Ukraine policy. Bill Clinton set out to enlarge NATO to Ukraine and other border states of Russia, counting on Russia being too weak to object. He and subsequent presidents assumed that Russia would ultimately accept its diminished global status, accept the reality of NATO on its borders, and settle into a subordinate role of supplying raw materials to the West within an American-ordered Eurasia.

Clinton launched NATO enlargement in the 1990s, over George Kennan’s warning that it was "the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold-War era" and despite the legally binding assurances given by the US to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would move "not one inch eastward." George W. Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty and, at Bucharest in 2008, committed NATO to membership for Ukraine and Georgia, crossing what William Burns, then ambassador in Moscow and later CIA director, privately called "the brightest of all redlines" for the entire Russian elite. Barack Obama’s administration backed the 2014 Maidan overthrow of Ukraine’s elected, neutral government (we know this through Victoria Nuland’s intercepted call where she discusses choosing the next prime minister), and then supported the new regime’s bid to join NATO. Donald Trump, in his first term, sent Javelin systems to the US-backed regime in Kyiv to fight the breakaway, Russian-speaking Donbas. Joe Biden brushed aside Russia’s December 2021 draft security treaties without negotiating and scuttled the near-agreement between Russia and Ukraine at Istanbul in the spring of 2022, which would have ended the war. And so the war continues to this day.

Trump's Vacuous Anti-War Campaign Promises

Donald Trump campaigned in 2024 as the man who would end America’s forever wars. This turned out to be far from the truth.

The year 2025 opened with theater including the Oval Office humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in February, the taunt that Ukraine had "no cards," and in March a week-long suspension of US intelligence sharing with Kyiv. That week proved two things. First, this is an American war: Deprived of US intelligence for only a few days, Ukraine’s deep-strike capacity and battlefield awareness visibly degraded. Second, the White House pressure was aimed not at peace with Moscow but at obedience from Kyiv. The US military spigot was reopened, and what followed, behind a proscenium of summits and phone calls, was the most systematic escalation of the American military role since 2022.

In June 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14307, "Unleashing American Drone Dominance," directing the rebuilding of the American drone industrial base and instructing that the Pentagon "must be able to procure, integrate, and train using low-cost, high-performing drones." In July, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth staged a drone demonstration at the Pentagon and stripped away procurement restrictions to "unleash" military drone dominance; the same month, on a call with Zelenskyy, Trump asked, according to the Financial Times’ later reporting, whether Ukraine could strike Moscow if given longer-range weapons.

From midsummer 2025, the US supplied the intelligence for Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign against Russian refineries, pipelines, and power stations, shaping route planning, altitude, timing, and mission decisions; by some officials’ account, setting the target priorities itself. In August came the Alaska summit, suggesting diplomacy, yet at the same time the sale of Extended Range Attack Munitions for Ukraine, with European allies paying. By October, Trump had formally authorized the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies to hand Ukraine targeting data for strikes on Russian energy infrastructure deep inside Russia, a step the Biden administration itself had refused as too escalatory, while Washington pressed NATO allies to do the same and openly debated Tomahawks with the range to reach Moscow. Through it all, CIA Director John Ratcliffe kept the agency’s presence in Ukraine at its highest level, increased funding for its programs there, coordinated Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries by sharing intelligence on infrastructure vulnerabilities, and patiently guided Trump toward blessing the campaign. The United States, it emerged, had spent billions building Ukraine’s drone program from the start, in an effort backed by the CIA throughout.

Trump lies constantly, and much of it is the improvisation of a vain and careless man. But the consequential lying is systematic, and in one direction: in the service of the military-industrial complex.

The Laboratory

Eisenhower’s warning that US policy would be captured by a scientific-technological elite supplies a specific reason the US sustains the Ukraine war. Ukraine has become a unique, live-fire laboratory for AI warfare at scale: millions of drone sorties, a continuous adaptation race against a peer adversary’s electronic warfare, and thousands of hours of combat data that constitute the most valuable military AI asset on Earth.

At the center of this sits Palantir, born of CIA seed money, running the Pentagon’s Maven targeting enterprise, and threaded through the British security establishment via a revolving door that includes a former MI6 chief among more than 30 UK officials hired or contracted by the company. Its chief executive openly boasts that Palantir software performs "most of the targeting" done by Ukraine. In January 2026 Ukraine’s defense ministry announced that Palantir was building the "Brave1 Dataroom" to feed real battlefield data into the AI brains of interceptor drones; by May, minister and CEO were discussing expanded cooperation in battlefield analysis and military planning, the ministry promising to "transfer the war onto Russian territory."

Nor is Iran a separate story from the Ukraine saga. Recall that in Brzezinski’s geography the arc from the Persian Gulf through the Caspian is the second great prize, with Iran as its keystone pivot. Ukrainian interceptor teams have deployed to Jordan against Iranian drones; the counter-drone systems proven against Russia are marketed to the Gulf. Two geopolitical pivots, one chessboard, and one ultimate source of these two wars of choice: the military-industrial complex.

Kissinger’s Admonition to Friends of the US

Henry Kissinger is famously credited with telling the truth to nations that the US would use and discard: To be an enemy of the United States may be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.

Ukraine is dying at American hands. Thirty years since Brzezinski pointed to Ukraine as the key geopolitical pivot for American primacy, Ukraine has been demographically hollowed and territorially truncated, with its energy grid pounded, its elections suspended, and its politics reduced to corrupted palace intrigues. This month’s rupture in Kyiv shows that in the midst of what Western coverage calls Ukraine’s great comeback, Zelenskyy dissolved his government for the fourth time in the war; dispatched his prime minister toward the Washington embassy to manage the "key partner;" and summarily sacked Mykhailo Fedorov, the popular minister celebrated as the architect of the drone ecosystem. A country truly winning its war does not behave this way.

The deepest cruelty is that Russia sought, repeatedly and for 30 years, a security arrangement with the US in which both countries and their neighborhoods would live in peace, mutual respect, and indivisible security. Yet the US does not want security with mutual respect. It wants primacy, which is an altogether different thing. In the process, it sacrifices Ukraine and Iran to its hubris. Peace in Ukraine requires only that the US relinquish the hubris it has maintained for decades that Russia can be pressured into surrender, and instead accept Ukraine as a neutral bridge between Europe and Russia rather than a geopolitical pivot to be used against Russia. Eisenhower foresaw why acceptance of peace would be so hard: The military-industrial complex does not merely influence policy; it defines it. Until the American people reclaim the democracy from Palantir, BlackRock, SpaceX, Chevron, and their ilk, the battlefield “laboratories” will stay open, and Ukraine will pay the fatal price for American “friendship.”

As William Perry, former secretary of defense under Bill Clinton, and Tom Collina state in The Button: “Within minutes, with just one phone call, President Trump could unleash up to a thousand nuclear weapons, each one many times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. It would be the end of civilization... For President Trump, starting nuclear war is about as easy as sending a tweet.”

US policy, which invests “sole authority” in the president to launch nuclear weapons, crystallizes the utter absurdity of the nuclear predicament that we have lived under for 81 years. Contrary to popular belief, there is no “button.” Instead, there is a military aide, who carries a 40-plus pound briefcase, referred to as the “nuclear football” (officially called the Presidential Emergency Satchel), which follows the president 24/7/365, whenever he is away from fixed command centers. The fact that the president can use the football to launch US nuclear weapons at any moment, day or night—without having to consult or listen to anyone—beggars belief. Clearly, the ability to start a nuclear war that could destroy most life on Earth should not be entrusted to one person, especially one known to be erratically capriciousness and highly unstable.

Inside the nuclear football is a secure communications device that allows the president to order a launch, as well as a “Black Book,” outlining pre-planned presidential options for targets, delivery systems, and estimated casualties. It originally contained a heavy set of war plans, but after Jimmy Carter complained that it was too complicated for the extremely short time frame, it was simplified into a menu of strike options for either limited strikes or full retaliation, presented as a “one-page, cartoon-like menu.” One of Clinton’s aides quipped that it was like a “Denny’s breakfast menu.”

There is also a small laminated card, called the “biscuit,” with unique codes which are used to establish the president’s identity. If the president were to decide on a nuclear launch, he would read the codes over secure communications to the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon or one of its alternates. Once authenticated, the president's will is converted into a “highly encrypted, time-sensitive message called the Emergency Action Message, which includes the authentication codes, the strike option, timing details, and the codes to unlock the weapons.” It is then transmitted by the US Strategic Command Headquarters located in a bunker under the Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, again by secure communication, to land-based intercontinental ballistic missile launch control centers, ballistic missile submarines, and air force strategic bombers, each with their own authentication and launch procedures. A full nuclear launch order can be executed in 5-15 minutes.

The only way to truly overcome the total absurdity of the incredibly reckless situation that we have created for ourselves during the nuclear age is to recognize the danger and to collectively “get our act together” to work toward the abolition of nuclear weapons.

Presidents often keep the biscuit in a pocket, which has presented problems: Carter inadvertently sent his to the dry cleaners in a suit pocket; Clinton lost it altogether for several months. When Ronald Reagan was taken to hospital after an assassination attempt, he was stripped of clothing and the biscuit was later found by the FBI in a hospital trash can.

Once the nuclear football is opened, the president would have less than 10 minutes to absorb the information inside, review the options, and make a decision. Other sources suggest it would be six minutes. As Reagan lamented: “Six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radar scope and decide whether to unleash Armageddon? How could anyone apply reason at a time like that?”

Indeed, there have been concerns about several presidents during the nuclear age: John F. Kennedy was on heavy pain medication for back pain; Richard Nixon was drinking too much due to the strain of the Watergate investigations. (At one point, he threatened, “I can go back in my office and pick up the telephone and in 25 minutes, 70 million people will be dead.”) Lyndon B. Johnson alternated between manic energy and bouts of gloominess. At the end of their terms, Reagan had early-stage Alzheimer’s and Joe Biden’s clarity of thinking has also been questioned. But of all the 14 presidents who have been in office in the nuclear age, Trump’s stability has been the most extensively questioned. As reported by The New York Times, “Never before in modern times has the stability of a president been so publicly and forensically debated—and with such profound consequences.”

Most presidents had previous experience with nuclear issues: 9 of 14 had military experience before taking office; five served as vice president; several served in other parts of the executive branch; and more than half, in Congress. Trump had none of this prior experience.

When Trump took charge of the nuclear football for a second time in 2025, Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Congressman Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), who had previously introduced legislation to Congress against “sole authority,” stated:

As Donald Trump returns to the White House, it is more important than ever to take the power to start a nuclear war out of the hands of a single individual and ensure that Congress’ constitutional role is respected and fulfilled. We must put guardrails on presidential authority to start nuclear war. We must never again entrust the fate of the world to just one fallible human.

Upon receiving a nuclear briefing just before their inauguration, presidents are often horrified by the awesome responsibility. Dwight D. Eisenhower was “visibly shaken”; Kennedy asked, “And we call ourselves the human race?” Carter recounted that, as president, the horror “was constantly on my mind.” George H.W. Bush stated, “I had no idea we had so many weapons... What do we need them for?” Barack Obama told a close adviser, it was “one of the most sobering experiences of my life.” Trump said, “a very sobering moment... very, very scary.” But as Perry and Collina comment, “While that statement might sound reassuring, Trump also asked, on several occasions [during his first term] ‘If we have nuclear weapons, why can’t we use them?’”

Indeed, during both terms, Trump has occasionally appeared to threaten their use. In 2017, when he and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, were in a tense standoff, Trump said: “North Korea, best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” When Kim boasted that his nuclear button is “always on my table,” Trump tweeted in return, “Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is much bigger & more powerful than his, and my Button works!”

During the current ongoing war with Iran, Trump has also made a number of extremely ominous threats, the worst of which was probably on April 7 when he posted on Truth Social: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

Following this post, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) wrote to the White House physician on April 10, citing the above comments and requesting an evaluation of Trump due to “signs consistent with dementia and cognitive decline” and “increasingly incoherent, volatile, profane, deranged, and threatening tantrums.” No answer was received.

On April 14, Raskin submitted legislation to Congress to establish a nonpartisan “Commission on Presidential Capacity to Discharge the Powers and Duties of Office.” Such a mechanism is allowed by the 25th Amendment as an alternative to the vice president and Cabinet deciding whether the president should be removed from office (which is currently unlikely since Trump’s Cabinet members were selected because of their extreme loyalty). The legislation is still in committee.

On June 18, Raskin again wrote to the White House physician demanding that he comply with his previous request; provide a complete list of all medications and dosages; identify each of the 22 medical providers and their specialty that Trump saw during his May 26 examination at Walter Reed; and publicly release the complete results of this visit—again, without response.

Although the American Psychiatric Association’s “Goldwater Rule” forbids psychiatrists from offering public opinions about the diagnosis and mental health status of public figures they have not examined, many have argued that the rule is poorly conceived and that there is an overriding “duty to warn.” In this spirit, a group of 36 senior neurologists, forensic psychiatrists, general psychiatrists, and mental health professionals experienced in the diagnosis of cognitive disorders and evaluation of dangerousness, who had signed an earlier statement in 2024, issued an update on April 30 of this year.

They cited examples of Trump’s “marked deterioration in cognitive functioning, evidenced by disorganized and tangential speech, rambling digressions, factual confusions, unexplained sudden changes of course in strategic matters, both national and international, episodes of apparent somnolence during crucial public proceeding. Grandiose and delusional beliefs, including assertions of infallibility... claims that his decision-making authority is unlimited—with no need to consider domestic and international laws and constrained only by his ‘own morality.’ Severely impaired judgment and impulse control... Significant loss of self-control (disinhibition) and getting stuck on the same thoughts or actions, unable to let go or move on (perseveration), including seemingly compulsive, manic-like late-night communications—e.g., 150 social media posts in one night.”

They conclude:

It is our professional opinion that the behaviors of Donald Trump, tragically, are neither momentary lapses nor political theater. It is our professional opinion that they reflect a rapidly worsening, reality-untethered, increasingly dangerous decline... For the reasons cited above, emphasizing that he presents a clear and present danger to our country and to the world, it is our expert opinion that Donald J. Trump is mentally unfit to be the president of the United States, and that steps to remove him from office must be undertaken with the greatest urgency.

On six occasions since 2016, Markey and Lieu have introduced legislation entitled the Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act, which would reallocate the responsibility for launching nuclear weapons from the president to Congress when the US is not being attacked. It would require Congress to explicitly approve any first nuclear strike by the US before federal money could be spent on the attack. So far it has not been adopted.

If the Democratic Party wins a majority in the next Congress, the Markey and Lieu bill or Raskin’s bill could be passed. If the latter is adopted, the use of Article 25 might become politically possible. Alternatively, it is also remotely conceivable that Trump could be impeached, convicted, and removed from office. But the concern remains as to whether this is soon enough to spare the world the possible use of Trump’s “sole authority”—given his deteriorating cognitive abilities.

Of course, the only way to truly overcome the total absurdity of the incredibly reckless situation that we have created for ourselves during the nuclear age is to recognize the danger and to collectively “get our act together” to work toward the abolition of nuclear weapons.

As Jonathan Schell sums up in The Fate of the Earth: “The machinery of destruction is complete, poised on a hair trigger, waiting for the ‘button’ to be ‘pushed’ by some misguided or deranged human being or for some faulty computer chip to send out the instruction to fire. That so much should be balanced on so fine a point—that the fruit of four and a half billion years can be undone in a careless moment—is a fact against which belief rebels.”

I inherited a few things from my father, who, as the story goes, when I was a baby in Transylvania, swam across a frozen river to escape communist Romania, toward a faith that we could forge our own brave futures, free from ethnic oppression. I inherited his unruly curls, refusing control and predictability. I inherited his sometimes comic rage at injustice. I inherited his love of the beautiful game, its history, its ever-evolving, complex entanglements with state and power. His faith that people who have little can stand proudly against nations who have stolen their wealth, and refuse to back down.

He is no longer here for me to talk to about the World Cup. And this impossible and forever grief has been opened fresh as I try to imagine what he would say about what we have watched unfold in the 2026 games. There is a chip inside the ball now. It hums at 500 times a second, registering contacts no eye can see, no crowd can feel, no player can dispute. It enters the conversation as an indisputable, objective data point, asserting authority over anyone and everyone. On the third of July, in Toronto, that sensor ended Croatia's World Cup. Joško Gvardiol had bundled home what looked like an equalizer 13 minutes into stoppage time, and for a few delirious seconds the stadium believed. Then according to officials the sensor detected the smallest brush of a teammate's hair against the ball, on its way to the man who set up the goal. FIFA officials decided it was enough to call it offside. The goal was erased. Portugal advanced, 2-1. A machine had registered what no human present could, and in registering it, unmade a moment of collective joy.

FIFA insists the call was correct. Perhaps it was. I can’t say, the beautiful game is rife with instances when fans felt distraught by calls refs have made. But I can say that this is different. We have built a tournament where correctness is now adjudicated by inertial sensors and video rooms and it lies beyond dispute. Eduardo Galeano, the great Uruguayan chronicler of the game, warned us. "The more the technocrats program it down to the smallest detail," he wrote, "the more the powerful manipulate it, football continues to be the art of the unforeseeable." The chip in the ball is the technocrat's dream: a game with the unforeseeable engineered out. It is not just that the game has been made less human under the guise of objectivity. It is that the fantasy of objectivity itself has become the cudgel.

Objectivity as Disguise

Here is what I am reflecting on, wishing I could discuss with my dad, at the close of this tournament: The promise of VAR was never really neutrality. It was the appearance of neutrality, which is a different and more useful thing if you happen to hold power. The appearance of objectivity is not a side effect of the manipulation; instead, it is the mechanism, because a decision the machine is presumed to have made is a decision no one thinks to question. A goal-line sensor cannot be bribed. But the humans who decide when to consult it, what angle to review, which foul to freeze and which to wave through, can be, and the data increasingly suggests they have been, whether by conscious design or the gravitational pull of a superstar's fame and the money this can make for FIFA.

This World Cup has gifted us many lessons and reminders, one of them is that supposed objectivity is not the same thing as fairness.

Similarly, there are echoes of this pattern in Egypt against Argentina in the round of 16. Egypt led early. Mostafa Ziko put the ball in the net for what would have been a two-goal cushion, and VAR chalked it off for the faintest infraction in the buildup. Late in the match, with Egypt still level, a shove in the box went unpunished by the same system that had been so exacting minutes before. Argentina scored in the 90-second minute and advanced, 3-2. Egypt's football association filed a formal complaint. Their coach made clear the issue when he said his team had suffered an injustice, and suggested that FIFA needed Lionel Messi to keep playing. Analysts who reviewed the tournament's VAR data found that Argentina and Mexico received the most favorable review outcomes of any teams at the tournament, while Croatia and Iran received the least. From this data it appears that a system built to remove human judgment from the game continues to produce outcomes that track, with uncomfortable fidelity, who those in power most need to keep around to increase earnings.

The instances telling this story are culminating into a chorus. In an Iran-Belgium match, a goal was disallowed because VAR determined that an Iranian player's rear end, not his foot, not his knee, but the curve of his backside, had drifted a fraction past the last defender. It was, on its face, absurd, and it was also revealing, because it showed the machine doing exactly what it was built to do: finding a violation so microscopic that no stadium, no broadcast, no human referee running at full speed could ever have called it in real time, and then presenting that finding as more true, more final, than what 40,000 people had just watched with their own eyes. Such instances, of which there are others, are leading fans and experts alike to ask whether VAR had gone too far. In this variation, football survived for 150 years on the premise that referees would sometimes be wrong, and that this was a condition of the game being played by humans, for humans, at human speed. It appears that under the guise of taking away the possibility of human error to allocate the decision to VAR, we are simply relocating the injustice somewhere less visible and giving it a machine's alibi.

This World Cup has gifted us many lessons and reminders, one of them is that supposed objectivity is not the same thing as fairness, and a system that claims the first while abandoning the second is more dangerous than one that never claimed either, because it forecloses the argument. You cannot appeal to a sensor's conscience. What we need, and what this World Cup has made painfully clear we are losing, is the return of human judgment, fallible and accountable and answerable to a crowd, back into the center of the game. And this goes for on the pitch and off the pitch.

Breaking the Rhythm to Cash In

If you want to understand who the 2026 World Cup is really for, watch what happens 22 minutes into each half. The rhythm is interrupted, and the play stops. Not because it is dangerously hot, though with climate change it too often is; the breaks run on schedule even in roofed, air-conditioned stadiums. They stop because FIFA decreed a mandatory three-minute "hydration break" in all 104 matches, "regardless of heat conditions." It is the first World Cup in history to do so. Officially, the line is that this is about player welfare, but if we follow the money a different story emerges.

Soccer, alone among the major North American television products, historically offered almost no in-game commercial inventory. Ninety minutes, two halves, no timeouts to sell. The mandatory breaks changed that overnight, manufacturing 208 guaranteed advertising windows across the tournament and restructuring the game into four quarters, conveniently familiar to the American fan and the American businesses FIFA is courting. Media buyers estimate Fox Sports alone stands to reap a minimum of $250 million from these breaks, with plausible figures running to half a billion. Former England defender Gary Neville called it what it is: a "stealth advertising break."

Heat is real, and climate change is making it deadlier. Here, a genuine safety concern has been laundered into a revenue engine, and the game's rhythm, its uninterrupted, breath-held flow, the very thing that distinguishes it, has been sold for the price of a commercial slot. Once you see that the game's own rhythm is for sale, the question is no longer whether other decisions are being bent, only which ones, and in whose favor.

What Lawrence Did

And yet, capitalism did not manage to buy everything. Not everyone in this tournament was for sale, and not everyone who showed up did so for the sponsors.

Algeria, making the trip to the American Midwest, chose the college town of Lawrence, Kansas as their base. And Lawrence welcomed them with open arms. The University of Kansas marching band learned and played the Algerian national anthem. A local artist built a massive Algerian flag out of organic materials. No hydration break manufactured that. It happened because people decided, without being asked and without being paid, to open a door.

That reminder of who we are is also a gift we received from this World Cup alongside everything else this tournament has shown us about who is trying to own the game. There may be polarizing narratives that cultivate a sense of suspicion about people who do not think like us or look like us, but the world is filled with people who look at the visitor and welcome them with a song that reminds them of home.

The Trump Card (vs. the Red Card)

Oh and perhaps the least surprising of all the events from this World Cup was the phone call. Folarin Balogun, the United States' top scorer, a Black, American-born son of Nigerian immigrants, playing for a nation whose president has spent the year trying to end birthright citizenship, was sent off against Bosnia on a red card, triggering an automatic one-match ban that FIFA had repeatedly described as beyond appeal. Days later, that unappealable ban vanished. FIFA invoked a probationary loophole to suspend the suspension, clearing Balogun to face Belgium in Seattle less than 24 hours after the decision. It was the first time since 1962 that a red card issued at a World Cup did not result in a suspension.

Trump personally called FIFA president Gianni Infantino to ask for a review. He then thanked FIFA publicly for "reversing a great injustice." Belgium's football association said it was "astonished," and UEFA called the reversal "unprecedented, incomprehensible, and unjustifiable." Speaking from the White House, Trump said he hadn't known what a red card was until this happened; once he found out, he said, "You got to be kidding," and picked up the phone.

Trump may think he can do anything in this world, but the consequences are ours to carry and ours to refuse.

Infantino had handed Trump the inaugural "FIFA Peace Prize" the year before, an award invented, it is hard not to conclude, to flatter a notoriously fragile ego. And a supposedly ironclad suspension dissolved within days of a presidential request, reshaping how an opponent could prepare for a knockout match. When the game's governance rearranges itself around a head of state's preference, the fix does not have to be spoken to be real. Of course, this is all according to the script of authoritarian power hoarding that the Trump administration follows.

The United States lost to Belgium, 1-4, eliminated in the Round of 16. Balogun played, amid a firestorm no team should have to carry onto a pitch, and the US was outclassed from the opening minutes to the final whistle. There is a version of this story where I tell you the team was cursed, or simply outmatched, and maybe some of both is true. But it is hard, watching that scoreline, not to think of everything this team had earned up to that point, the grit against Bosnia, the composure that got them here, and everything Trump's intervention cost them in return: a level playing field to lose on, if lose they had to; the dignity of an opponent who did not have cause to call the whole thing rigged before kickoff; a story about their own merit instead of a story about a president's ego.

The team was better than the man who could not let them face Belgium without first bending the rules in their favor. He gave them a phone call. He did not give them a win. That, too, is a lesson: Intervention dressed as favor still costs the person it claims to help. Trump needed his own father to intervene to keep him afloat as a young man, bailing him out with millions he did not earn. He does not seem to understand that a team should not be, and cannot be, rescued into victory. It can only be robbed of the chance to win or lose on its own terms. Trump may think he can do anything in this world, but the consequences are ours to carry and ours to refuse.

The Public Riot of a Thing

Another thing I inherited from my father (who much like Maradona, was also a scoundrel and a genius) is my love of history. And if we look at the history of this sport we find that football never really belonged to the corporate sponsors, the technocrats, and the authoritarian strongmen. It has a dispersed history, thousands of years old; ancestors of the sport were present in pre-Hispanic American culture and in ancient Rome. Before it was standardized into the sport we know today, football was a folk practice, a public riot of a thing in which entire English villages chased a stuffed ball across open country and used the chaos as an occasion for popular justice.

What ended the people's sport was the enclosure of the commons, when the English parliament converted collective fields into private profit and the gentry moved to regulate the festivals of people they had just dispossessed. The standardized game that followed, codified in the elite schools of the 1840s, was explicitly a tool of order: a way to discipline boys and, later, to keep factory workers fit for labor and distracted from dissent. The chip in the ball, the hydration break timed to the ad break, is only the enclosure's newest fence, an attempt to measure and monetize the very unruliness that made the commons worth having in the first place.

And yet. Every attempt to control the game produced its own resistance. Scottish workers, migrating for wages, carried with them a "combination game" of passing and possession, a style rooted in the cooperation and solidarity of the factory floor, set against the individualist "kick and rush" of their bosses. When the First World War pulled men into the trenches, women took their places in the factories and on the pitch; the Dick, Kerr Ladies drew 10,000 spectators to a charity match in 1917, only to be shoved back into domestic invisibility once the men returned. And in Brazil, where the colonial elite first played football in whites-only clubs, Black, mixed-race, and Indigenous players took the imported game and reinvented it. Arthur Friedenreich, son of a German businessman and a Black washerwoman, fouled without protection because referees refused to blow the whistle for him, learned to weave and swerve and vanish from contact. That is where the dribble was born. The dribble developed as an act of survival and resistance, a body making itself impossible to catch in a world built to exclude it.

History has a wonderful way of exposing commercial breaks, all-knowing sensors, and presidential phone calls for the small, ridiculous things they are. The game has always been a site of capture and a site of escape. Maradona was a genius and a scoundrel, the hand of God and the man ruined by it. We should not sanctify the players or the fans or the game itself. The Egyptian ultras who helped topple President Hosni Mubarak, who stood in Tahrir Square and paid for it with their lives at Port Said, also carried their own contradictions. Everything is a story of everything. There is no pure resistance untouched by the thing it resists.

But there is always resistance. That is the point French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote about brilliantly: Where there is power, there is resistance, not outside it, but woven through it. The disciplinary schoolyard produced the combination game. The colonial clubs produced Friedenreich's dribble. The chip in the ball, and the biases it has laundered into data, produced an Egyptian federation that stood up to corporate oligarchs, and a Kansas college town that decided, sensor or no sensor, to throw a party for a team it had no obligation to love. And this summer, a nation of half a million people produced something no sensor could measure at all.

Cabo Verde

The Blue Sharks of Cabo Verde had never been to a World Cup. Ranked 67th in the world, they drew with Spain, scored their first-ever World Cup goal against Uruguay, and clawed their way out of the group as its runners-up, the first debutant to reach the knockout stage since Slovakia in 2010. Then, in the Round of 32, they met the reigning champions, Messi and Argentina, and refused to be a footnote. Messi scored early. Cabo Verde equalized in the second half. Argentina retook the lead two minutes into extra time. Cabo Verde equalized again, in the 103rd minute, when Sidny Lopes Cabral curled a shot into the top corner that made me want to kneel on the ground in a prayer of gratitude. Then in the chaos of bodies clashing deep in the second period of extra time, mere minutes from penalties, Argentina scored to survive, 3-2. The reigning champions of the world barely avoided the biggest upset in World Cup history, against a nation smaller than most American counties.

And Cabo Verde was incandescent. They were brilliant. They played the beautiful game with joy. A tiny island nation, a former Portuguese colony, had stood on the largest stage the sport offers and refused fear, anger, and pettiness. They embodied joy. No sensor could register what that meant. No commercial break could sell it. No phone call from any president could reverse it.

Football, no matter how much authoritarians and corporate greed try to stifle it, is the art of the unforeseeable. Just as we are.

And then the final offered us an impeccable microcosm of the metanarrative. Spain beat Argentina 1-0, a tournament of collective, patient, disciplined possession culminating in a team that simply held the ball and refused to be provoked, that stayed connected until the opposition frayed. Argentina was formidable and proud, and played most of extra time a man down after a red card. This was no clean fable of virtue over villainy, only two proud teams and their contradictions. On Sunday we watched lessons unfolding on the pitch that we need to hang on to during these times of rising authoritarianism: hold your shape, keep the ball, don't let the other side bait you into their game, and the pressure eventually tells on them, not you.

And there, lingering in the confetti where he did not belong, was Trump, booed as he took the stage, presenting the trophy and then refusing to leave it, until Infantino had to usher him aside so the winners could have their moment. Two Argentine players declined his handshake. And by the next morning, Spain's football federation had posted its official victory photo with the president cropped cleanly out of the frame. Trump could not bully himself into the celebration of the victors. He did not earn his place on the podium. And the Spanish team preserved their joy and made sure history would center those who earned their place.

The powerful will keep trying to program the game down to its smallest detail, to meter its joy, monetize its pauses, and bend its rules toward whoever holds the most valuable tickets and the peace prizes. Yet. The ball keeps moving in ways the sensors did not predict. The dribble keeps being invented, on waste ground and back streets, by people the game was designed to exclude. Football continues to be the art of the unforeseeable. It was never theirs to own. It was always, at its heart, ours.

My father, after working third shifts at a car parts factory in the Midwest, would stay awake to watch the World Cup, screaming at judgments refs made, screaming at the striker who refused to be a team player and let others score who were in better positions.

What would he say, the man who survived torture by an authoritarian state, the man who risked everything so his children could join him eventually in the "land of the free"? I can't say for certain. I did not inherit his gift for spicy gab; my father was hilarious, with a fantastically foul mouth and a searing sense of humor. But maybe I can tap into that sometimes-comic rage. Trump is a grifter, and state leaders and corporations regularly buy his favors. He has tried to ruin everything meaningful about this country: our excellent higher education system, our ability to coexist in diverse joy and learn and create and build together, our immigrant sisters and brothers, our trans sisters and brothers, any of us trying to survive by working hard. He has mocked our love of this world and of each other. And now, no surprise, he is trying to squeeze the soul out of this sport too.

But my dad and Eduardo Galeano are both right. Football, no matter how much authoritarians and corporate greed try to stifle it, is the art of the unforeseeable. Just as we are. They have not written our future. We are writing it. Football is just another reminder that yes, things are entangled and complicated, and our gods are also scoundrels, and a sensor can be wrong even when it insists it cannot be. But we are the ones writing what comes next, and the unforeseeable, stubborn and ungovernable, is our power too.

Everything I’m about to write is fairly obvious. But since wildfires, and hence smoke, will persist all summer, and since the hot world we’re creating produces ever more wildfire and hence an endless supply of future smoke, I think it’s worth taking a moment to get all this on the record.

Also, the flow of smoke down from Canada has produced a perfect MRI of the MAGA nervous system, revealing with unparalleled clarity the belligerence, ignorance, self-love, and utter lack of irony that mark the species.

To hit the basics: Roughly 1,000 wildfires are currently burning in Canada, many in northern reaches of the province of Ontario. Much of the direct fire damage is being borne by members of Canada’s First Nation communities, whose small communities are the main inhabitants of these wild places. People are crowded into Thunder Bay, Ontario, where every hotel room is filled; the stories of escapes like the one pictured above are truly harrowing. Alessandra Freitas, for instance, interviewed members of the Namaygoosisagagun First Nation in the northwest part of the province. Here, for instance, is the account of Miiyah Paavola:

“It was all very fast-paced. There was not really much time to think about what was happening,” Paavola told CNN.

She grabbed a wet towel before squeezing aboard a small aluminum boat with five other people, three dogs, and a cat. The isolated community, also known as Collins First Nation, has no road access, only a railway line and Collins Lake.

Paavola couldn’t fully grasp the scope of the danger until her boat pulled away.

“All you could see was orange and gray and it was very dark,” she said. But as they sailed away, she could finally see just how close they’d been to the fires. “When I was going across maybe about the second island, that’s when I watched it. I could just barely see the flames reach the shoreline. And it was a very thick wall of smoke that followed it very quickly.”

“If we had waited any longer, we would have been dead.”

As Johnnie Jae, the founder of Red Pop! News pointed out:

It's NOT just that people and wildlife are losing their homes... it's the history that is being lost for generations to come.

It's tribal records, artifacts, art, regalia, ceremonial grounds, things that have been passed from generation to generation, hidden, protected and preserved, repatriated and restored.

So, just to be clear—the most powerful disruption from these fires is to small bands of people who have done nothing to cause them, and whose culture has been endlessly damaged by the larger Western project of settlement and control.

But flame, of course, is not the only product of fire. There’s also smoke, which contains high concentrations of particulates, the solid and liquid droplets in all forms of air pollution that are especially dangerous because they can slip past a body’s natural filters, aggravating asthma and pulmonary disease and contributing to heart attacks and smoke. Those clouds of smoke drift on the prevailing winds, which have been blowing south towards southern Ontario, where Toronto has been engulfed in smoke. Here’s a particularly vivid portrayal of the life in North America’s fourth-largest city.

But of course the border with the US does not prevent smoke from spilling across, and some of the most densely populated parts of America have been inundated with smoke as well. Last Thursday, for instance, Detroit had the most polluted air in the world, as Charles Ramirez chronicled:

Detroit had an air quality index, or AQI, of 724 at one point, the No. 1 spot on IQAir’s ranking of the most polluted global major cities on Thursday. IQAir makes air quality monitoring and air cleaning products. The index is a measure of PM2.5 or particulate matter, and the index reading makes the air “hazardous,” according to the company, which means unhealthy for everyone.

By 5:00 pm, Detroit’s index number had fallen to 341 and its ranking to second, behind Chicago’s 402. Both measures were considered “hazardous.”

Parts of Ohio were even worse. Toledo, for instance, doubled its old record for air pollution, and nearby Monroe recorded AQI values above 800. I’ve been in Beijing and Delhi on days when you couldn’t see across the street, and this was worse.

Jeff Masters has the most comprehensive set of numbers, as per usual:

The award for worst air in the nation on July 16 went to the city that has in the past billed itself as a climate haven: Duluth, Minnesota. The city’s 24-hour air quality index, or AQI, for PM2.5 particle pollution hit 934, over three times the threshold for “Hazardous” pollution. This shattered Duluth’s previous all-time AQI record of 159 set July 20, 2021. EPA pollution records go back to 1999.

Now, in a normal world, this scenario would trigger a compassionate response, as leaders sought to help the people most at risk. But MAGA is an almost perfect mirror world, where every impulse is bad. On Fox, for instance, the channel’s public health expert timidly (“I know you’re going to cringe”) recommended that people at risk wear KN95 masks to prevent particulates from getting sucked down your throat. “Not a chance. Not a chance,” said host Brian Kilmeade.

Meanwhile, a series of Republican “leaders” started producing angry denunciations of Canada, for polluting America’s air with their thoughtless fires:

Michigan congressman John James, whose campaign for state governor has been endorsed by President Donald Trump wrote in an X post on Thursday: “FINAL WARNING TO CANADA: Manage your forests to prevent these fires. American lungs are paying the price for Canadian inaction, year after year.”

Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno, longtime car dealer, said he planned to introduce “a bill next week to sanction Canada and the responsible Canadian government officials for this atrocity.”

And of course the ultimate source of all MAGA craziness weighed in as well. Here’s Donald Trump:

We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!

Trump promised tariffs to make up for the costs, and indeed—and remember this—insisted that “maybe they should pay us some damages.”

The GOP case, such as it is, rests on the idea that Canada has erred in “managing” its woodlands, an outgrowth of the idea that he expressed during one wave of California’s hideous fires that the state should simply “rake its forests.” Or, as he expressed it during its first term, “You gotta clean your floors.”

Whatever the use of this prescription in America’s forests, it doesn’t apply to most of the land now burning in Canada. That’s because Canada has never managed these forests in any way, certainly not to suppress burning the way that America did across the 20th century. These are not forests with roads; these are vast, trackless expanses. Climate analyst Zeke Hausfather has performed his usual public service by actually looking at the data:

Here’s the short version. Canada’s area burned has surged, and it has surged in step with warming: hot, dry fire seasons burn far more forest, with area burned rises roughly 80% for each 1°C increase in fire-season temperature (with a correlation coefficient of 0.61). This relationship is robust to a variety of statistical tests and controlling for confounding variables. The boreal burns in rare, high-intensity crown fires on a natural cycle measured in a century or more, across enormous remote areas that have never been logged, thinned, or effectively suppressed. Only about a fifth of Canada’s burned area over the past four decades was even inside forest regions that have ever been actively managed. You cannot have a fuel-buildup from forest mismanagement in a forest you were never managing.

As he points out, even if the Canadians somehow decided to go “thin the forest,” it wouldn’t work:

The boreal is on the order of 3 million square kilometers. You are not going to thin or prescribe-burn your way across it, and the crown fires that produce the smoke wouldn’t stop at a fuel break anyway.

So what is driving the huge increase in Canadian wildfires? It appears some mysterious force is raising the temperature of the Earth. As Quinn Gablicki points out, quoting the University of Michigan climate scientist Jonathan Overpeck:

As long as humans continue to burn fossil fuels, global temperatures will increase, droughts will worsen, and there will be bigger, more frequent wildfires and smoke events.

The haze hanging over much of the United States today, Dr. Overpeck said, is “the harbinger of worse times to come.”

Or, as Eleanor Olszewski, Canada’s minister of emergency management put it on Friday:

“Warmer, drier weather is becoming more common, increasing wildfire risk in Canada and around the world,” she wrote. “Northern Ontario and Quebec, for example, received less than 40% of normal precipitation this June, with temperatures above historical averages.”

None of this, of course, is surprising in any way. America’s forests are currently on fire too, and in remarkable fashion. With our no-pack snowpack year, large fires are burning across the interior West—and what do you know, lots of the smoke is drifting north into Canada, causing bad air quality in British Columbia:

“As wildfire activity increases, so has smoke across many areas of the region. Much of this smoke is originating from fires south of the Canada-US border and will have varying impacts over the coming days,” an update Saturday evening from the provincial wildfire service said.

This is far from the smallest irony in this saga. In fact, “irony” hardly seems an apt word, suggesting that there is something even slightly subtle about the idiocy. For instance, as our leaders complain about Canada, it seems as if it might be nice if they also noted that our neighbors to the north have consistently set firefighters south to help America fight its great blazes. When Los Angeles caught on fire in January of 2025, Ontario deployed 150 firefighters to help:

“Our closest friend and our closest ally needs help, and we’re going to make sure we’re going to be there supporting them,” the province’s premier said.

And what do you know, last week a Canadian pilot died fighting one of the vast conflagrations on the Colorado-Utah border. As Michele Brunoro reports, Nicholas Dale left behind a wife and two sons:

“He was out there doing his best and just so very sad that we lost a great person and an experienced person fighting something, a natural disaster,” said Dale’s long-time friend Adam Gilliver.

While we’re on ironies, let’s note in passing that the smoke pouring out of these great blazes temporarily diminishes the power of the solar panels that are our main weapon in slowing the heating of the Earth. Miriam Wasser reports on the experience of one Massachusetts homeowner:

In the two days before the first big plume arrived, Stephen Gordon’s solar array produced about 53 kilowatt-hours of power per day—an amount he said is typical for a warm summer day, and more than covers his household needs during daylight hours.

Then came Wednesday, when people throughout New England woke up to gray or even orange-tinted skies. Gordon’s total output that day was just under 23 kilowatt hours, less than half of what his panels generated the previous day.

But of course all of those ironies pale next to the main one: Smoke drifts across borders when there’s a big fire, but carbon dioxide constantly drifts across every border every day. And if you could see carbon dioxide, and watch its flow over time, the biggest single cloud has emanated from the United States. China may catch us someday, but we’re the ones who have produced the current mess.

I’m sitting listening to David Wallace-Wells lecture this morning at the Chautauqua Institution, and he reminds us that the carbon humans have produced “weighs more than everything we have ever built on the surface of this planet. It weighs more than the total mass of life on the planet. It weighs more than the total mass of life and buildings combined.”

So—if there are “damages” to be paid, who should pay them? Canada, whose forests are burning? Or America, who set those forests on fire.

This is not an academic question. Lots of players are trying to extract damages from the fossil fuel companies. As the Center for Climate Integrity documented:

Eleven US states and dozens of city, county, and tribal governments collectively representing more than 1 in 4 Americans are currently taking major oil and gas companies to court to hold them accountable for deceiving the public about the dangers of fossil fuels and make them pay for the resulting damages.

And MAGA politicians are doing everything they can to try and stop those suits from succeeding. As Abraham Lustgarten reported in April:

Republican-led state legislatures are passing a slate of laws that effectively shield oil and gas companies from legal claims that they are responsible for the destruction and mounting toll caused by climate change. Fifteen laws have either been passed or are currently being debated in 11 states. Together, they threaten to remove long-standing tools for the public to hold corporations accountable.

A ProPublica investigation has found that most of these bills are part of a coordinated effort, orchestrated by a constellation of groups that share staff or have funding ties to the prominent conservative activist Leonard Leo, who is credited with placing conservative justices on the US Supreme Court. These groups have drafted state legislation, planned its dissemination and engaged a well-connected lobbying firm to get them signed into law.

At the federal level, the very same politicians complaining about Canadian wildfires are trying to moment, this takes the form of the Stop Climate Shakedowns Act. They’ve drawn support from the industry that owns them:

“We thank Senator Cruz and Rep. Hageman for introducing legislation to stop a growing patchwork of state laws and lawsuits that threaten American energy and risk raising costs for consumers,” said American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) President and CEO Chet Thompson and American Petroleum Institute (API) President and CEO Mike Sommers in a joint statement.

America, though the all-time champion, is not alone in spewing fossil fuels, of course. One of the other ironies of the moment is that just as Canada catches on fire, its Prime Minister Mark Carney is announcing a new system of pipelines from the tar sands of Alberta. As veteran climate journalist Adam Radwanski wrote in the Toronto Star, under Toronto’s “dystopian haze” Canada’s pivot away from climate action is “impossible to ignore.” In her excellent new newsletter Patterns, Naomi Klein writes, “As the nation burns, Carney celebrates new fossil fuel projects as 'nation building.'”

So irony drifts back and forth. But responsibility can never really be shed. MAGA means never having to say you’re sorry, but that’s simply not true.