As violence spreads across Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and beyond, the Middle East stands on the brink of a direct regional war between Israel and Iran. Following Israel's assassinations of Hassan Nasrallah and Ismail Haniyeh then Iran's retaliatory missile strikes, tensions are nearing a dangerous tipping point.

Armed groups throughout the region, including Hezbollah, have long declared that their military actions are directly tied to the ongoing genocide of Gaza. Despite U.S. efforts to frame Lebanon as an isolated front, Hezbollah has made clear there will be no deescalation without a cease-fire in Gaza. Only an end to the assault on Gaza can prevent further escalation.

Last week, a U.S. State Department spokesperson claimed that Hezbollah had " delinked" its call for a cease-fire in Lebanon from the original calls for a cease-fire in Gaza. This assertion, however, is not grounded in reality. In the 33-minute speech referenced by the State Department, Hezbollah's deputy leader actually reaffirmed the importance of maintaining solidarity with Palestine. He explicitly tied Hezbollah's military operations to the situation in Gaza. Moreover, Hezbollah issues daily statements—announcing its military activities in the ongoing conformation with Israel, and all of these statements start with the same template: "In support of the steadfast Palestinian people in Gaza and in defense of Lebanon, the Islamic Resistance carried out..." These statements continuous to underscore Hezbollah's ongoing alignment with Palestine and their unwillingness to cease operations in Lebanon without a simultaneous cease-fire in Gaza.

By halting military aid to Israel and enforcing U.S. law, [Biden] can help bring about a regional cease-fire that saves lives—not just in Gaza, but across the Middle East.

In a major statement issued on October 11, Hezbollah reaffirmed its commitment to maintaining alignment with Gaza. As the message read: "The settlements of northern occupied Palestine will remain empty of settlers until the war on Gaza and Lebanon stops." This declaration makes it clear that there can be no cease-fire in Lebanon without a simultaneous cease-fire in Gaza, directly contradicting the U.S. narrative of decoupling the two fronts.

Since last October, Hezbollah, as well as armed groups in Iraq and Yemen, have made it clear that their involvement in the armed conflict is directly tied to the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza. They have explicitly linked their attacks on Israel to the violence in Gaza, stating that they are acting in solidarity with the Palestinian people living under a decades-long occupation, apartheid, and genocide. Without a cease-fire agreement in Gaza, there will be no deescalation of violence from these groups across the region. The Biden administration's focus on Lebanon alone ignores this fundamental reality.

Compounding this flawed approach is the Biden administration's contradictory and dangerous military aid policy. At the same time as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to openly defy U.S. calls for a cease-fire in both Lebanon and Gaza, the Biden administration approved a staggering $8.7 billion in military aid to Israel just last month, bringing the total for the past year closer to $20 billion of U.S. tax dollars sent to Israel—arms that have been used by the Israeli military to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity in the occupied Palestinian territories and elsewhere in the region.

This approach is not only morally indefensible but also violates U.S. law. Under Sections 620i and 620m of the Foreign Assistance Act, the U.S. is prohibited from providing military assistance to foreign security forces involved in gross violations of human rights or to entities obstructing humanitarian aid. Israel's ongoing blockade of Gaza and its military operations, which have resulted in thousands of civilian deaths and widespread destruction, clearly fall within these prohibitions. By continuing to send weapons to Israel, the Biden administration is disregarding its legal obligations and deepening its complicity in the violence.

The Biden administration's failed policies have led to a crisis not only in Gaza but across the region. Hezbollah's rocket fire, Iraqi militia activity, and Yemeni missile strikes are all part of a broader response to the situation in Gaza. Armed groups throughout the Middle East have made it clear: Until the assault on Gaza ends, they will continue to retaliate. The U.S. cannot hope to achieve a cease-fire in Lebanon while ignoring the root of the violence in Gaza.

As U.S. President Joe Biden approaches the final months of his presidency, he has an opportunity to course correct. By halting military aid to Israel and enforcing U.S. law, he can help bring about a regional cease-fire that saves lives—not just in Gaza, but across the Middle East. Achieving peace in the Middle East is a long process, but it begins with ending U.S. complicity in the brutal and ongoing genocide and pushing for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza.

This is the second-ever presidential election as conscious adults for many young folks. I remember during my first, in 2020, I was freshly 18 and brimming with an almost egoistic confidence in my decision to abstain from voting. I did not have faith in either the Democratic Party or their nominee, Joe Biden, to represent me.

Four years later, my view of the Democratic Party has only worsened, especially as Palestinian blood continues to spill by their hands. And yet, at the same time, the threat of fascism from the Republican Party is becoming ever more real. The far-right has intensified its attacks on the bodily autonomy of women, the LGTBQ community, and on the rotting carcass that is American Democracy. Now that I am 22, and in stark contrast to my past self, this election leaves me writhing in a pool of self-doubt. The same question repeats over and over in my head: Can I really sit this one out?

It is within this tension that I found myself sitting down with three next-system thinkers about the upcoming election. These activists and scholars have dedicated their lives to challenging systemic poverty and economic injustice through decades of combined experience in grassroots organizing in the United States. Our discussion touched not only on the significance of the 2024 election but the increasingly acute political crisis in the United States and the current prospects for system change.

We're living globally in a period of a profound economic crisis and environmental catastrophe.

What I learned, in some ways, reflected my own ambivalence. They too were divided on the question that Bill Fletcher described in our interview as "the politics of moral outrage versus the politics of power." As Cheri Honkala shared with me, it is important that Americans vote their conscience in the face of a genocide carried out in Palestine by the Democratic Party. However, Stephanie Luce offered an opposing perspective, urging the left to "get realistic about our power" in the context of an increasingly emboldened, fascistic right wing. Ultimately, what these contrasting tendencies represent is an ongoing historical debate between two different philosophies for the American left.

These interviews have been edited for brevity and clarity.

Q: There seems to be a general sense that, regardless of who wins the 2024 presidential election, the system as a whole—the social, ecological, economic, and political system of which we are all a part—has some very serious issues. What systemic problems do you see today and how serious are they?

Cheri Honkola: Our capitalist system has created a situation where people just can't live… People have absolutely no rights to land, no rights to free speech, and no rights to live anywhere. And there's a serious increasing criminalization just of being poor and just of being homeless in this country. People just can't live right now, so people are being forced to set up co-ops and a cooperative economy and all of those kinds of things. And the approach, I think, for folks that are on the absolute bottom, it's a little different. There's a growing equality of misery; we're very clear that there's going to be no utopia under capitalism.

Bill Fletcher Jr.: We're living globally in a period of a profound economic crisis and environmental catastrophe, and this convergence runs us into the equivalent of two tectonic plates that are crashing against one another. And in that situation, you have mountains that are built, and you have earthquakes, and we're seeing both, and so this is creating great instability and anxiety.

In the United States, in part as a reflection of that, we're living through a cold Civil War. And this cold Civil War really became very evident with Newt Gingrich and the Contract With America, there were clear signs of counterattack against the victories that had been won in the 20th century. Now since then, key elements in the Republican establishment have made use of mass movements on the right that have been developing since the late 60s and have thought that they could manipulate them, but instead, what they've done is follow the course of Dr. Frankenstein in creating a monster that they can't control, and that's why the MAGA movement smacked out of the way the opponents to former U.S. President Donald Trump both in 2016 and this year. So, it's a very dangerous situation, and the danger's compounded by an armed wing of the right-wing authoritarian movement, plus the recklessness of very wealthy men, so it creates a very unstable situation.

If we go down a path of authoritarian rule, I don't see any hope for addressing a more functioning economy or a more sustainable climate situation that's going to protect the most impacted.

Stephanie Luce: Well, I think it's multidimensional. The crises are from a number of angles. Some of the most pressing issues are certainly related to climate. There is really no way of turning back, so our choices are to slow down the worst of it and mitigate the worst impacts. But in any case, it seems, we're already in it, and a lot of people are already experiencing a climate crisis, and then certainly, there are growing threats to democracy around the world, of people even electing authoritarian leaders and losing faith in democracy. And I would say the U.S. certainly has never had a real democracy even to begin with. So, it's not like I'm romanticizing what came before, but it is possible that even that can go backwards, instead of forwards, in terms of creating a real multiracial democracy. And then how we think about the economy, there are a lot of measures that would suggest things are relatively stable right now, but underneath it is certainly not a sustainable system, it's an economy that's producing for profit instead of human need and producing for growth instead of sustainability. So, I would say those are the underlying crises that will be there no matter what the outcome of the election is.

Q: Given what you just shared, what kinds of changes to the system do you see as absolutely necessary? And what changes do you think are opening up that you are really excited about?

Cheri: One of the things I see is that this growing equality of misery is a different form of unity that is developing. The ruling class has really figured out how to keep us divided in regard to gender, race, and all of these other kinds of things. And I think that the positive side of the negative is that it's forcing us to figure out how to work together to create something very different in order to stay alive.

One of the closest people I work with is an African American male who was formerly homeless and incarcerated, served some time in the military, has seven kids, and is married. There's no way we would have been working together for 30 years just because he's a nice guy. We have nothing in common. But we've had to figure out ways to work together. People need each other desperately in order to stay alive.

For us, it's really about organizing. To literally take back land, organize to take back food, working together to demand the other half of the operation for a kid's mouth, and that's why we've just recently written this book Takeover. It's a little bit of our history, but it's also a manual on teaching homeless people across this country how to house themselves in abandoned government homes that are vacant because there are more abandoned properties than there are homeless people. And I think that the other positive thing is that there's so much surplus right now that it really is a question of redistribution and getting organized to take back our human rights.

We have to create a block that's capable of winning and introducing substantive, structural changes.

Bill: Well, the system itself is a rock, so I start there. Capitalism is antithetical to the future of humanity. Now, on top of that, the U.S. sociopolitical system that's based on or built upon, capitalism is itself rigged against people of color, women, against working-class people. And one of the things about the way it's rigged, particularly when it comes to people of color, is that when we try to play by the rules, the rules get changed. We see this in elections by different things that the Republicans have been doing in terms of voter suppression. You see this in the economy and business. The demand needs to be for consistent democracy, an expansion of democracy into all spheres, not a retraction or a retrenchment, and so we need to make it easier for people to vote, not more difficult. We need to make it easier for workers to form unions, not more difficult. We need to make it easier for women to control their own bodies, not more difficult. We need to make it easier for LGBTQ folks to live their lives in harmony and not more difficult. We need to be addressing the fact that the planet is burning rather than ignoring it. Those are the kinds of things that we need to be doing, and those are the changes that need to be introduced and that we need to demand of our political leaders.

Stephanie: Well for me, in a sense, the building of a multiracial democracy is an outcome and a way to address the other two. I don't see how if we go down a path of authoritarian rule, I don't see any hope for addressing a more functioning economy or a more sustainable climate situation that's going to protect the most impacted. So I guess for me, some of my effort has been focusing on deepening and expanding and making democracy real, because I feel like that's one of our only hopes for addressing those other serious crises.

I think it's a strange moment of kind of real highs and lows. So, I have been involved myself in a number of efforts to engage more people in this fight around democracy, acknowledging, again, like I said, the ways in which it has failed many of us up until now. It's not about just saying, let's revive the status quo or what's done been before, but can we deepen it and make it more real, whether it's in the workplace, through having a voice at work and even thinking about worker control, whether it's in our communities, and thinking about what it would look like if we had people who are most impacted making real decisions about things like housing and transportation.

Some of the training and discussion about what democracy could look like, the ways in which it's failed us, and the historic role that working people have played in fighting off authoritarian governments, I think that's interesting. There are people definitely worried about that and engaged in that. My other arena is particularly around worker organizing, just tons of interest. I've never seen this level of interest in the entire time I've worked on this, particularly among young people, about how it's not just about fighting for things, like a union that's important, but like, really questioning, why do we even work at all? What is it for? What's the purpose of work, and who makes the decisions about how the economy runs?

Q: Staying on the theme of new possibilities: What kinds of new combinations do you see as possible—unusual allies, new ways of coming together, new sets of approaches—in the 2020s that may have been more difficult to achieve in the past?

Cheri: Well, there really is this thing that we call a growing, developing new class. And so that's like a nurse friend of mine that just figured she was going to be a nurse the rest of her life and everything would be great. And now she's an older woman, and she couldn't figure out the technology, and so she was replaced by a bunch of younger people that are going into nursing that were born and raised with computers. Or it's the person that has worked someplace, and they've totally eliminated that industry that used to pay enough so you could have a two-car garage or thought that they were going to be great for the rest of their life because they worked at a union and paid union dues their whole life, and then they close down that shop. These are the new people that are coming to the bottom and that we're working together with, and that's a huge fall. And these are people who really believe that they have an entitlement.

You know capitalism has really done a job on poor people period, to have them believe that they don't really deserve any of these things, and they don't have rights, and they've been individual failures, and it's not a part of a larger system. And I think that that's harder to buy when you're part of this growing new class of people that are becoming expendable.

Bill: We have been witnessing the rise of new and renovated social movements. We have not yet built a conscious majoritarian block that can win power. That's what we need to do. We need to first block or stop MAGA, but stopping MAGA is not enough. We have to create a block that's capable of winning and introducing substantive, structural changes.

I think that the two corporate political parties in this country are going to fight like hell to remain relevant.

So, I'm not sure that there are any new combinations as such. It's more about making the combinations more conscious and standing up against ethno-nationalism and identity-exclusive politics.

Stephanie: On the one hand, there are a lot of young people, and not just only young people, but a lot of energy from young people looking to rebuild an internationalist movement particularly focused on Gaza, but that brings people to renew their interest in learning about other parts of the world, and we do have more tools to communicate across borders and talk to and learn from activists across the globe. So that's a positive place for me. I also think there are a number of issues that are really contentious, but actually kind of divide our political parties or divide our coalitions. I think immigration is one, for example, it tends to be portrayed as if there's a Republican position and a Democratic position. I don't actually think that's true.

I think there's actually a lot of division within the Democratic Party and also division within the Republican Party, because a lot of people who are truly Christian or religious have a belief in rights. Employers, for example, have historically been wanting to embrace immigrants and bring more immigrants to the country. So, there's these issues that divide the coalitions as they stand and could make space for reconfiguration of new alliances, certainly also around things like healthcare, that crosses party lines. And it's more about 1% versus 99%—and climate as well, I think climate is another area of possibly renewed alliances, and some of that's generational, but it's also about some people's values that that they hold and it's like, Okay, actually, the parties aren't speaking for these values.

Q: It looks like system change is coming whether we like it or not. There are endless possibilities for what the next system might look like, good and bad. What do you see as the organizing and movement building challenges that absolutely must be overcome in order to build a better world?

Cheri: I think we're in an in-between stage right now, and those who are already facing fascism are terrified and having to confront that. That's immigrants in this country, and people that are already living behind bars. And neighborhoods like Kensington are already dealing with a system where the government and the police there and the politicians are all working together, and where they have mobile jails, and there is no due process, and there is no media covering our day-to-day reality. Like in Kensington and other areas of the country, they want absolute control, there already has been a genocide of different sections of the population with the fentanyl crisis, and more people have died now from fentanyl than died during the Vietnam War. And that is crippling people and killing people, and nothing is being done about it.

I think that the two corporate political parties in this country are going to fight like hell to remain relevant. They will buy or offer cabinet positions or large amounts of resources for their organizations to divert the population from system change and keep them in some kind of reform. Have the people's leaders take them in the direction of reform. So, what you see happening now in this country is the immense threat of anybody that's talking about the creation of a different kind of system, versus getting on the bandwagon for Kamala Harris. I have so many Democrat bots on my social media. It's like a full-time job for them. I'm old enough to remember back in the day when there was a real anti-war movement in this country, and you would never think of any civil rights organizations not being involved. There are so many people who are in the financial pockets right now of the Democratic Party for their places of faith. While, literally, children are being slaughtered and the genocide is going on in Gaza; it's just devastating.

Internally, I think we need to really up our internal training about long-term strategy and be realistic about our power.

Bill: One of the big dangers is purism. We see it in the electoral realm all the time, and it's the idea that if a politician does not have exactly my platform, they are a sellout and not worthy of support. It's also reflective of the politics of moral outrage versus the politics of power. So, the politics of moral outrage are represented by "we are furious about this, that, or whatever, and therefore we're not going to vote for this candidate, or we're not going to vote at all." And that view is objectively apocalyptic. Basically, it means that no change can come about until there's a total collapse. And some people believe that you have this kind of pure streak that is waiting. I often analogize it to a surfer who paddles out into the ocean waiting for the ideal wave, believing that once they get it, they can ride it straight into shore. And that's not politics. That's something else. Sectarianism is related. It's sort of the notion that it's my way or the highway.

Mountain Stronghold Mentality is something that Bill Gallegos and I have written about, and it's a notion that comes from an era in the Chinese Revolution when there were guerrilla bands that were literally on mountaintops that would be their base area. They'd come down and attack the enemy and then go back to the base areas. The revolution shifted, and they needed mobile units to engage the enemy in a different way. Many of the guerrilla commanders didn't want to come down from mountaintops, because they were comfortable. They were secure. They didn't believe that they could be captured or destroyed by the enemy, and so they basically, despite the change in conditions, sought comfort. We see this with organizations that are afraid to take risks and to unite with others because they're comfortable where they are.

Another problem is the lack of strategy and strategic thinking. We progressives are very used to fighting defensive battles when we have difficulty thinking offensively. So, I'll give you an example. I often use this example. A number of years ago, maybe 10 years ago, I was in Texas on a speaking engagement, and it was before [Greg] Abbott was elected governor. And so, I was giving a talk about something, and during the Q and A, people were telling me how bad the situation was in Texas. So, I listened. They wanted to know what I thought needed to be done. And I said, How do we take over Texas? They took a deep breath, sat back, couldn't figure out what I was thinking, whether I had lost my mind, and I said to them, look, you've told me how bad the situation is. I get it. We have two alternatives. One, we can give up, go off, and get high, right? The other is that we develop a strategy to win. And the strategy to win needs to look at everything, from which are the key cities in Texas, which are the key counties, which are the counties that we can afford to ignore? What are the social movements that are in operation? Who are the key opinion makers? Where can resources be obtained? All of these things. And then read a little bit of Sun Tzu, you know The Art of War, and think strategically about how we win.

Stephanie: Oh, there's so many. Yeah. I mean, this is a long list, but for me, I sometimes think about it as, what do we need to do internally, within our organizations and movements? I think we need to think about that. And then there's the set of external challenges. And so internally, I think we need to really up our internal training about long-term strategy and be realistic about our power. A lot of us don't have power, and instead, we tend to look for a moral stance like, what's the right thing to do? That's important, but if it doesn't come with building power, then it's not a strategy. I worked on this book called Practical Radicals because people have tended to be either radicals with big dreams and visions but with no plan to win, or very pragmatic and with a small, winnable goal, but it's too small to really change much. So, I think as organizations and movements, we have to really get better trained on how to do long-term strategy, and that includes also getting better about how to work in alliance with one another across our organizations and sectors where we don't agree on everything. People in the climate movement might not share the same goals and visions as some people in labor unions, for example, but we have to find those common-ground ways in which we're all better off. We're stronger together than we are apart.

And then I think the external challenges are massive. Because the U.S. state is well armed and powerful. The police state is massive. People will be deported, shot at, arrested. So, we have to be realistic about the powers that we are up against, not just in the United States, but globally. And really also get strategic about how to divide that ruling coalition. They don't all benefit from it, or they benefit unequally, and that means that we need to think about peeling off certain segments of that. That means working with people we really don't like and whom we disagree with on a lot of things, but we might share common end goals, such as climate sustainability or defending democracy as a system. So those external threats are real, and we just don't have the power on our own to really make those kinds of changes.

Decades long conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has ravaged lives of millions. Nearly six million people have been killed since 1996 and the country has the largest population of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Africa with 7.1 million people forced from their home or community. North Kivu Province is particularly impacted with almost one million IDPs living in makeshift camps with limited access to essential services like water, shelter, sanitation and food around the capital city of Goma.

Sexual Violence – A Weapon of War

One of the most distinct elements of this conflict is the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war. From 2021 to 2022, there was a 91 percent rise in reports of gender-based violence (GBV) in North Kivu. Between January and March 2024, more than 12,600 cases of sexual violence were recorded. These numbers, however, are only the tip of the iceberg. Many survivors are unable to access life-saving GBV services; and many do not report abuse out of fear of stigmatization by their communities or retaliation by perpetrators. Both Human rights groups to humanitarian relief organizations report that tens of thousands of women and girls have been victims of systemic sexual violence, including rape, sexual slavery, and forced prostitution.

Most cases of sexual violence involve armed combatants and militias with majority of victims being women and girls—some as young as three years old and others as old as 80. These acts have profound and lasting health consequences for the victims, ranging from physical injuries and psychological trauma to the risk of sexually transmitted infections and unintended pregnancies. Unfortunately, 2024 has been marked by an increase in this violence against women and girls in North Kivu. According to a recently released report, We Are Calling for Help, Medecins Sans Frontières (MSF) provided treatment to 25,166 victims and survivors of sexual violence across the country in 2023. Between January and May 2024, it had already treated 17,363 victims and survivors in North Kivu alone – 69 percent of the total number of victims treated in 2023.

Displacement resulting from heavy fighting between the Congolese armed forces (FARDC) and the M23 rebel group has exacerbated the vulnerability of individuals to sexual violence. Victims are often attacked when they venture outside the IDP camps to gather firewood or seek food. The disruption of humanitarian aid due to insecurity has compounded the challenges. Women and girls are being forced to take greater risks to meet critical needs. Food insecurity and the lack of livelihood opportunities have also led to women being forced to resort to harmful coping mechanisms, including prostitution.

Urgent International Response Needed to Protect Women & Children

The situation in North Kivu is an ugly reminder of the human toll of armed conflicts, with the worst price paid by women and children. Despite the horrors unleashed on the most vulnerable, international response has yet to meet the need of the hour.

With 25.4 million people affected, DRC has the highest number of people in need of humanitarian aid in the world and yet remains one of the most underfunded crises. The United Nations $2.6 billion Humanitarian Response Plan to assist 8.7 million people in 2024, is only 16% funded. At the end of 2023, World Food Programme reported the need for $546 million to sustain its emergency response in the region over the next six months, or be forced to sharply cut assistance, provide reduced support to fewer people — and over a shorter time period. The UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, received only 41% of the required $298.9 million for the emergency situation in DRC. In the absence of sustained humanitarian support, strengthened protection measures for civilian populations, and increased funding for the Humanitarian Response Plan, especially for programs addressing GBV, displaced women are endlessly enduring violence day after day.

A Resource Curse

The conflict raging in DRC is largely for the control of the country's important raw materials—tin, tungsten, coltan and gold, collectively known as 3T or 3TG. Electronic products from cell phones, laptops to the surge in electric cars have boosted the demand and competition for DRC’s mineral wealth. 2018 Nobel Prize winner, Denis Mukwege, a Congolese doctor, condemned the global demand for these minerals for fueling conflict and consequently, rape in his country. In April 2024, lawyers representing the Congolese government notified Apple of concerns about its supply chain, stating “their products are tainted by the blood of the Congolese people.” International community and the multinational corporations who benefit from Congo’s mineral wealth have the primary responsibility to ensure the return of peace in the country.

Two neighboring countries, Rwanda and Uganda, are extensively involved in illegal exploitation of DRC’s mineral resources and the violence that has plagued the eastern region in the past three decades. The Rwanda-backed M23 has intensified its activities in recent years, resulting in the resurgence of widespread violence and massive displacement of people. For years, the United Nations has sounded the alarm over Rwanda’s continued assistance to the M23, putting forward solid evidence of the “direct involvement” of Rwandan Defense Forces in the conflict in eastern Congo-Kinshasa, as well as Rwanda’s provision of “weapons, ammunitions, and uniforms” to the M23 rebels. The United Nations has also implicated Uganda, which has allowed M23 “unhindered” access to its territory during its operations.

Despite this evidence, Western countries, especially the United States, have continued to provide support to the two countries, including military aid. This, despite the legal restrictions that are supposed to prohibit the U.S. from releasing International Military Education & Training (IMET) funds to countries in the African Great Lakes region that “facilitate or otherwise participate in destabilizing activities in a neighboring country, including aiding and abetting armed groups.” It was only in October 2023 that the U.S. State Department placed Rwanda on a blacklist for violating the Child Soldiers Prevention Act (CSPA) due to Rwandan support for M23, which recruits child soldiers. Support to Uganda continues.

Armed groups, competing for control of profitable minerals, will continue to unleash terror and perpetrate violent crimes against humanity until the impunity for the warring parties is brought to an end; Rwanda and Uganda end military support for M23; and the international community, including the United States, suspends military assistance to governments supporting armed groups. If not, the price of war and conflict will continue to be paid by women and children—victims of DRC’s “resource curse.”

The stories about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets have been debunked. Even the woman who filed a police report accusing Haitian migrants of stealing her cat apologized when she later found her cat in her own basement. Sadly, despite being proven false, the damage from these unfounded claims has been severe. Haitians living in Springfield have been subject to hate crimes and threats from people who believe the lie and have coupled their outrage with bigotry to terrorize a community of migrants who are living and working legally in the community through the Temporary Protective Status designation.

Despite the fact that there is no substantiation for the stories, a friend tried to convince me that Haitians are really, truly eating cats and dogs. The evidence, he insisted, came from police bodycam footage. As it turned out, the footage he was talking about was from an arrest of a woman—who was not Haitian—in another part of Ohio who allegedly killed and ate a cat. This woman was born and raised in America and apparently has a mental health disorder. When I pointed these facts out to my friend, he still didn’t acknowledge his error. Instead, he sent me a description of Vodou (aka Voodoo), a religion practiced by many Haitians, which included descriptions of animal sacrifice. He wrote that it would be better if this religion died out and its immigrant practitioners assimilated into American culture.

Perhaps this particularly pernicious and bigoted moment in our polarized society could be a wake-up call to become a bit more introspective and cultivate some moral consistency in how we treat others.

My head was spinning. There were so many ways I could respond. Should I focus on helping him to acknowledge that his original claim was false? Should I point out that his Irish family and my Jewish family were vilified for their cultural differences when they came to this country and invite him to reflect upon his negative judgments about newer immigrants? Should I talk about the range of religious injunctions, not confined to Vodou, which cause harm to animals? I didn’t know where to begin.

Because we’d discussed animal cruelty many times in the past, after mentioning all the points above, I further responded that what we do to billions of animals legally in the U.S. food system is far more extensive, not to mention ghastly, than much of the animal sacrifices that may occur in other people’s religious rituals. Moreover, I pointed out, he was an enthusiastic participant in the cruelty we inflict on cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and other animals raised for food because he regularly consumes meat, dairy, and eggs. Until now, he’d never expressed much concern about the welfare of animals, often telling me that he cares more about people than animals. Suddenly, along with millions of other Americans who erroneously believe Haitians are eating dogs and cats, he claims to care a lot.

In our culture, most people recoil at the thought of eating dogs and cats and believe it would be wrong to do so. But if it’s wrong to eat dogs and cats, then how is it right to eat pigs—known to be as or more intelligent than dogs—or to consume cows and chickens, both able to feel pain just as acutely as cats and cockatiels do? If we look inward to consider who we eat, we may discover justifications but little disgust or moral outrage.

And yet, the abuse we inflict upon billions of farmed animals each year is on a scale nearly unimaginable. For example, dairy cows in the United States are forced to produce a calf every year, and when they are born, the newborns are taken away from their distraught mothers on their first day of life. We then take the milk meant for the calves for ourselves. The cows are then forced to produce 5 to 10 times the amount of milk they would naturally produce to feed their young, resulting in mastitis, a painful udder infection necessitating antibiotic treatment in about half the dairy cows in the United States. After years of this cycle of artificial insemination, birth, and perpetual milking, their milk production declines. At that point, the cows are sent to slaughter, usually to become hamburger or processed meat.

What about chickens and turkeys, whose names we hurl as an insult of cowardice (for the former) and stupidity (for the latter) even though these birds are brave and intelligent? Almost all of them live the entirety of their lives in crowded, ammonia-saturated buildings; are debeaked without painkillers to prevent them from pecking each other to death in their confinement; and, if they are being used for egg production, are likely caged so tightly they cannot even stretch a wing.

Where is the outrage? Where is the disgust? In her book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows, psychologist Melanie Joy describes the invisible belief system, which she calls carnism, that leads us to eat certain animals while protecting others. It is this invisible belief system that explains our horror at the thought of people eating pets—a horror we might conceivably express around the dinner table as we gnaw on the rib of a pig or the wing of a hen.

I’d like to hope that the false accusations made against Haitian migrants will help us realize the glass houses we’re living in so that we stop throwing stones. Perhaps this particularly pernicious and bigoted moment in our polarized society could be a wake-up call to become a bit more introspective and cultivate some moral consistency in how we treat others. And then maybe we’ll each take a step toward minimizing the harm we cause humans and nonhumans alike.

Some of the oldest and largest U.S. Department of Agriculture-accredited certifiers have partnered with corporate agribusiness to change the working definition of organics, allowing large livestock factories; certified, uninspected imports; and soilless hydroponic produce grown in giant industrial greenhouses to be certified organic.

Organic certifiers are mixing lobbying, marketing, and activism with their certification responsibilities, and taking payola from the clients they certify. They are also certifying “producer groups” in Eastern Europe, Central America, and Asia without inspecting and certifying each individual farm.

This is against the law and an egregious conflict of interest—and it’s crushing U.S. farmers in the marketplace while raking in billions of dollars in profit for these large certifiers.

The corrupt practices employed by these certifiers have left authentic organic farmers, who focus on sound soil stewardship and humane animal husbandry based on pasture, highly disadvantaged in the marketplace.

In 1990, Congress passed the Organic Foods Production Act (OFPA), tasking the USDA with oversight of dozens of certifiers to ensure their independence and harmonization of standards.

Fast forward to today and the USDA is now allowing a handful of the largest certifiers to collude with corporate agribusiness to industrialize or import the organic food supply at the expense of high standards and the livelihoods of U.S. farmers who adhere to them.

As executive director of OrganicEye, an organic industry watchdog, I’ve witnessed family-scale organic farmers who abide by the USDA’s organic standards get crushed in the marketplace by dubious organic imports allowed into the U.S. without the certification or inspection that federal law requires.

In September, OrganicEye requested that the USDA Office of Inspector General investigate the National Organic Program for failing to prevent corporate influence—including financial payments made to certifiers over and above inspection fees—and failing to enforce other USDA regulations that prevent conflicts of interest, thus lowering the quality of certified organic food.

OrganicEye recently filed a third formal legal complaint against a certifier, Florida Organic Growers (FOG), and their certification arm, Quality Certification Services (QCS), for accepting contributions, conference sponsorships, and other payments over and above certification fees from operations they oversee.

FOG has joined two of the other largest “independent” certifiers in the country, California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF) and Oregon Tilth, in selling out hard-working produce and livestock farmers by certifying giant industrial operations, many allegedly flagrantly breaking the law. Legal complaints against all three are currently pending.

When money changes hands between agribusiness clients and the profiting organizations that certify them, we call that “payola,” classically defined as corruption. These certifiers are acting as agents of the USDA. And the regulators in Washington responsible for auditing them are looking the other way.

Large organic certifiers should not be partnering with corporate agribusiness and cashing in on the growth of organics, especially while other certifiers are upholding the traditionally high standards.

In its first action to reign in certification abuses, OrganicEye filed an administrative law complaint against CCOF, the nation’s largest certifier, in November 2023 to address this out-of-control certification system.

We’ve seen organizations like CCOF, Oregon Tilth, and FOG morph from being among the founding farmer-led groups facilitating the growth of organic farming in the U.S. to multimillion-dollar business enterprises certifying multibillion-dollar corporate agribusinesses.

Recent IRS filings show these certification giants have reaped tens of millions of dollars a year in revenue while “masquerading” as tax-exempt public charities, with the vast preponderance of income derived from service fees paid by their business clients.

In addition to the controversies surrounding certification of livestock factories, a number of prominent certifiers, along with the industry’s primary lobby group, the Organic Trade Association, executed a stealthy campaign in 2017 that resulted in regulators allowing mammoth hydroponic greenhouses (soilless production) to be certified as organic, despite statutory and regulatory language requiring careful soil stewardship before a farm can be certified as organic under the USDA program.

That rich, organically-curated soil microbiome is the foundation of organic farming practices, resulting in superior nutrition density and flavor. That’s lacking in hydroponics, which uses liquid fertilizers derived from materials like conventional soybean meal.

The corrupt practices employed by these certifiers have left authentic organic farmers, who focus on sound soil stewardship and humane animal husbandry based on pasture, highly disadvantaged in the marketplace. With many small organic farms struggling economically—and hundreds more being forced out altogether—the devastating impacts are clear.

It doesn’t have to be this way. And not all certifiers are behaving badly.

For example, Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association is universally viewed as one of the most ethical certifiers. They do not approve hydroponic greenhouses or factory farms as organic.

Since OrganicEye began publishing its research concerning alleged improprieties at the nation’s largest certifiers, we have received numerous inquiries from farmers indicating interest in switching certifiers.

We hope that our research inspires ethical farmers and certified organic business operations to consider switching their allegiance and economic patronage to certifiers who share their values and interpretations of federal law.

In the meantime, consumers and eaters can use the same guide that we have prepared for farmers to help identify some of the most creditable organic food in the marketplace. Federal law requires every package with the word “organic” on the front label to include the name of the certifier supervising the production process. This is commonly found on the back or side panel near the ingredient list.

With the USDA delegating so much authority to certifiers, there are now effectively two organic labels: corporate brands affiliated with OTA lobbyists and certified by their members, motivated by profit and industry growth, and other ethical brands that have not lost touch with the foundational precepts of the organic movement.

OrganicEye is offering free consulting and other resources to farmers around the country who are switching their patronage to certifiers who share their values rather than undercutting their livelihoods.

The precautionary principle—the ethical equivalent of the common sense notion that it’s “better to be safe than sorry”—means that when some economic or policy change may endanger the public, business and government leaders ought to thoroughly conduct research so as to avoid exposing anyone to unnecessary risks.

Unfortunately, with our food system, our government continues to ignore ethics and common sense, recently approving as “safe for breeding and growing” a new genetically modified (GM) variety of wheat—HB4. Copying and combining certain genes from sunflowers to create this new variety, HB4 is not only pitched to farmers as a tool they could use to battle our ever increasingly dire climate crisis, but also to increase yields.

The truth is another, as this latest proposed tech solution to address our climate crisis stands to improve the financial situation of agribusiness corporations more than farmers, while also likely harming our environment instead of helping it. Not only should the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) rethink their decision, but our officials ought to instead support publicly financing regional and local varieties of seed. Strengthening key provisions of the Farm Bill that is currently in Congress could make such proposals a reality.

We need to develop diverse kinds of seeds that suit different ecosystems instead of global “one size fits all” varieties like we find with GM options.

The overarching problem with HB4—particularly for U.S. farmers—is economic.

According to USDA data from the past 25 years, operating costs for wheat farmers have more than tripled in terms of dollars spent per acre—increasing from just over $57 in 1998, to more than $187 in 2023. Also during this time, while the input cost of seed has more than doubled, going from $7 to $16, chemicals have tripled, climbing from $7 to $22. Fertilizer expenses have risen the most—going from $18 to over $78—representing nearly half of what farmers spend per acre.

Wheat is more than a crop, or ingredient that ends up in bread, but an industry, with chemical, fertilizer, and seed companies each clawing for a share.

Meanwhile, wheat prices in our global marketplace have been volatile. The 28% price jump that farmers experienced in the first months of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 quickly stabilized thanks to the Black Sea Grain Initiative—the plan that allowed grain to leave the region for a time until Russia left the agreement in 2023—and different countries easing their export restrictions. Prices then fell, as Ukraine, regularly one of the world’s top wheat exporters, saw its production rebound to pre-invasion levels. Russia’s 2023-2024 exports also exceeded expectations, increasing by 7% over the prior year, making this country the world’s leader in export sales by far.

Meanwhile, the U.S.’ share of wheat exports has steadily fallen for decades, from about 45% in 1980 to just over 15% in 2014. With worldwide production increasing, U.S. wheat farmers may take a loss in 2024.

Maintaining open export markets for wheat can spell the difference between financial life or death for U.S. farmers. On this point, there is no indication that world markets are currently willing to accept HB4, as major international buyers of U.S. wheat have not approved it. With contamination of non-GM wheat a problem that we have been aware of for years, we need to be careful as U.S. farmers can only sell what importers will accept.

The other issue with HB4 wheat is that the seed not only resists drought, but also glufosinate herbicides. Farmers who purchase the seed will have to buy this chemical, in addition to fertilizer. And despite what the USDA claims about safety, studies show that this class of herbicides is toxic to wildlife and humans.

Overall, in addition to potential environmental harm, we have a case of the “price-cost” squeeze that farmers suffer too often, with the inputs that they need taking a significant chunk of their earnings, while the prices that they receive for their labor either shrinking or fluctuating in ways that are largely out of their control.

Accordingly, if we really want safety—for farmers’ finances and the environment—we ought to work more on promoting regional and local seed varieties instead of looking to multinational corporations for guidance.

Both versions of our beleaguered Farm Bill contain such provisions, with the House and Senate versions of the legislation dedicating grant funding to the development of regional seed varieties (referred to as “cultivars” in the legislation).

The operative word here is “regional,” as grant funding may lead to the creation of new seed varieties that would be suited to particular areas and climates. Droughts in general entail a lack of water; but soil conditions and weather patterns vary significantly by region. As a result, we need to develop diverse kinds of seeds that suit different ecosystems instead of global “one size fits all” varieties like we find with GM options.

When the USDA decided that HB4 was “safe,” they must have left out considerations for farmer financial well-being and the environment. But our legislators can make up for this mistake with the Farm Bill—whether it emerges in a lame duck session this year following the elections in November or awaits our next Congress—taking heed of the risks that GM crops pose, and supporting more local and regional food system development.

Wouldn’t you think the Republican Party, that is as gung-ho for Empire and Genocide as the Democratic Party, but domestically is blatantly open about its policies against women, children, workers, the environment, climate crisis, public lands, public education, and fair share taxes for the wealthy, would be easy to defeat? Not when you see how the Dems, whose campaigns are controlled by corporate-conflicted political consultants using corporate campaign cash, keep making the election razor close.

In 1988, the formidable spouse of Senator Pat Moynihan—Elizabeth Moynihan—told me “Ralph, these consultants are destroying the Democratic Party,” right after she fired them and took over managing Pat’s last re-election campaign.

Elizabeth Moynihan’s observation is true now more than ever, as corporate money looms gigantically over all elections with no limits on how much these PACs can spend.

Still, with three and a half weeks before November 5th, the Party of the Donkey can lighten some of its self-imposed burdens and prevail in congressional races and the presidential race.

First, Bibi-Biden and Bibi-Blinken have to end their serfdom and stand up for American interests. Tell Netanyahu to stop dissembling, agree to a ceasefire in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, and open up Gaza to all those thousands of U.S.-funded humanitarian aid trucks with food, medicine, water, and other critical supplies. Tell him to open up occupied Gaza to American reporters—along with Israeli and other nations’ journalists—prohibited from independently reporting the realities of the genocidal destruction of that Palestinian enclave and its dying 2.3 million people. Otherwise, no more U.S. weapons of mass destruction, no more vetoes at the U.N., and no more arm-twisting other critical countries. These just and proper moves could be vote-getters in swing states.

Second, give the media vote-getting authentic commitments to benefit millions of voters. A serious commitment to a living wage would move millions of low-paid workers to vote.

Raise Social Security benefits, frozen for over 50 years. This would get the attention of 65 million elderly (See the Social Security 2100 Act, a bill introduced on July 12, 2023, by Congressman John B. Larson and Senator Richard Blumenthal).

Demand with specifics the raising of taxes on the wealthy. This taps into the 85% of the people backing such a decision.

Crack down on corporate crooks, with specific illustrations on how they harm daily lives and livelihoods. This issue comes in with heavy left-right support.

Respect the millions of midnight shift workers who keep our society going while we sleep. Campaign before midnight shifts at hospitals, factories, all-night stores, police, and fire stations.

The few Democratic operatives who approve the strategies, tactics, and messaging are notoriously tone-deaf, defiantly incommunicado to citizen group input—activists who know how, what, and when to communicate to all workers, consumers, patients, and parents, regardless of their labels. (For effective elaborations, see winningamerica.net).

The Dems have huge amounts of money and when used to pay for ads, often vacuous and irritatingly repetitive, these consulting profiteers reap 15% commissions. More of this money should be used for an advanced ground game of locating voters, persuading them, transporting them to the polls if need be, and festively celebrating with a snack or supper. Australians, where voting (for anyone) is a civic duty, are known to make voting a joyous social occasion.

Massively assailing Trump for his lawbreaking, his lies, his bigotry, his corruption, his delusions, his incitements to violence, voter suppression and precinct worker harassment does not seem to diminish support from his base. Why not concentrate laser-like on getting out more of the 80 or 90 million non-voters, instead of pushing off the ballot and harassing the small Green Party with frivolous suits and political bigotry?

Many of these non-voting eligible voters are low-wage workers. Listen to Rev. William Barber who says just increasing their vote by ten to fifteen percent from 2020 would win the election. Few people have interacted with as many impoverished Americans as has Rev. Barber. Even fewer can match the details and inspirations of his oratory. (See, breachrepairers.org).

The media covers the horse race—give them more horses. They cover the money raised—tell them you’re using it for people-to-people voter turnout behind explicit progressive mandates. The media covers spontaneous comments that magnify as faux pas—give them spontaneous statements that mean something—like increasing the number of federal cops on the corporate crime beat.

Or support the expanding interstate compact of states that gives the anti-democratic Electoral College votes to the candidate who wins the national presidential vote (See, NationalPopularVote.com).

Or why not support more consumer cooperatives, or repeal handcuffs on union organizing and expression embodied by the notorious Taft-Hartley Act of 1947?

The media gets bored with the same old stump speech day after day. Give them some variety that invigorates a democratic society. Especially tell them ways you would empower the powerless people to overcome corporatism, apathy, indifference, and withdrawal from elections and politics. These could be short educational addresses on TV.

Above all, open up electoral campaigning to regular input by the citizenry and citizen groups from the grassroots to Washington, D.C. Drop the force fields around you, Nancy Pelosi, Gary Peters, Suzan DelBene, Pete Aguilar, Jaime Harrison, Et al. None of you are smarter than all of us. Ignoring that truism is why you will be needlessly sweating on election night. (See my book “Let’s Start the Revolution: Tools for Displacing the Corporate State and Building a Country that Works for the People” and the report, “Crushing the GOP, 2022.”)

The last year of a relentless Israeli war on Gaza, and bloody raids and violence in the West Bank, have been largely viewed in terms of their horrific humanitarian outcomes: the unequaled killing of tens of thousands, the obliteration of Gaza, and the destruction in the West Bank.

While humanitarian urgency must indeed be a priority, other factors are also deserving of consideration, especially as we mark the one-year anniversary of the ongoing war.

Even though the mass killing is yet to end, there are several conclusions that can already be drawn about the long-term consequences of the war.

The new global consciousness that has developed around the Palestinian struggle may have already achieved the required critical mass which will, with time, result in the much-coveted paradigm shift: justice for the Palestinian people.

One, Palestinians, despite the military occupation, the siege, and the numerous failures of their leadership, remain political actors, with powerful agency.

This agency does not stem from any superficial achievements of their autocratic leadership or the still symbolic recognition of the state of Palestine, but the collective resilience and power of ordinary Palestinians in Gaza and throughout Occupied Palestine.

The war in Gaza would have looked different if Palestinian society broke down in the face of the war machine, fragmented into fighting factions or grew desperate in the face of impossible pressures—war, unprecedented destruction, acute famine, etc.

This fact alone reassures us that the Palestinian people's destiny will not be that of erasure or even marginalization, but of continuity and even future prosperity.

Two, that Arab societies, however consumed with their own struggles and social and political challenges, remain united in perceiving the Palestinian cause as a top Arab priority. This has allowed many Arab governments to reiterate their position regarding the centrality of the Palestinian cause.

Though current circumstances may, for now, prevent some Arab societies from being direct participants in turning their devotion to Palestine into tangible and practical support, the future shall prove that the renewed centrality of Palestine in Arab political and popular discourses will have its own weight and value.

The same logic applies to the Muslim Ummah, which has never been so united around a cause in decades as it is now united around Palestine. This can be felt in all Muslim countries, and among Muslim communities around the world, especially in the West.

The future shall reveal more regarding the meaning of the return of Palestine to the embrace of Arabs and Muslims. However, one can already conclude that the resilience of the Palestinian people has, once more, refocused the attention on Palestine as the leading cause of all Arabs and Muslims.

While some Arab states are desperately trying to find a safe distance, and to play no part in the Gaza-centered regional conflict, non-state actors in Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere are challenging the traditional rules of Middle East politics.

Arab masses are no longer beseeching Arab armies to save the Palestinians as has been the case in previous wars, conflicts, and massacres.

The roles being played by Ansarallah in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon seem to have filled the roles that should have, in theory, been played by traditional armies.

This is no longer expected, or frankly, even required. Official Arab armies have historically proven ineffective and corrupt. Now, they are mere spectators as powerful armed groups have moved in to fill in the gaps, showing solidarity with Palestinians in word and deed.

Historically, this is unprecedented. This change shall further undercut whatever legitimacy was still possessed by Arab governments, especially those with immediate proximity to Palestine.

Three, though international law remains as ineffective as ever, the bloody war in Palestine is creating rifts between the Global South and the Global North. The latter, with a few exceptions, remains adamant in repeating old mantras about Israel's "right to defend itself," while disregarding all Palestinian rights.

However, many countries in Africa, the Middle East, South America, and elsewhere are becoming louder and bolder in their demands for justice for Palestinians, and for the equal application of international law.

The Global South's political revolt has already resulted in slow, but serious actions taken by the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, and, as of late, the United Nations General Assembly as well.

The UNGA passed a resolution on September 17 that assigned an actual deadline for when the Israeli occupation of Palestine must end. Resolution A/ES-10/L.31/Rev.1, and its "no later than 12 months" deadline essentially declared null and void all actions that Israel has illegally carried out in the Occupied Territories, including all settlements, annexation of Palestinian land, and all the rest.

Four, a whole generation of people around the world has been affected by the horror show in Gaza. The gory images, the desperate pleas of children who lost their parents, the unbelievable destruction and the failure of the international system to stop any of this, will be etched in the collective memory of the world for many years to come.

This means that the boundaries of global solidarity with Palestine will finally break the confines of the Middle East into new and growing geographic and cultural spaces, and that, at least in the West, Palestine will no longer remain a political discussion or an academic subject.

The new global consciousness that has developed around the Palestinian struggle may have already achieved the required critical mass which will, with time, result in the much-coveted paradigm shift: justice for the Palestinian people.

And last, one year of war has taught us that, while superior firepower may determine political outcomes in the short run, no amount of weapons can possibly break the will of a nation that has vowed to restore its dignity and win its freedom, no matter the cost.

Millions of working American families are facing a crisis: how to care for loved ones.

We all need to give or get care at some point in our lives, but all too often this can be incredibly burdensome or even impossible. Too many Americans simply cannot afford their own care or are unable to take time off work for the birth of a child, a loved one falling ill, or an aging parent.

Most of us have no access to any sort of paid leave, and few employers provide leave to employees. This leaves more than 1 in 5 Americans, or 53 million people, working as unpaid family caregivers and providing more than $600 billion in unpaid care annually.

My family is among the millions who struggle with this every day.

A few months ago, my life changed in an instant. My brother Dave, his wife Katie, and their child Mikey were involved in a terrible car accident. We lost my brother that night, and Katie was severely injured, but thankfully Mikey survived unscathed.

This isn’t just about my family. This is about all of our families. It’s about the kind of country we want to live in. A country where reality is acknowledged, care is valued, families are supported, and where no one faces tragedy alone.

And as if that weren’t enough, we discovered that Katie was pregnant. She’d planned to surprise our family with the news the next week. Instead, we were left grieving the loss of a husband, a father, and a brother, while trying to support a family that was suddenly in crisis.

Our family came together as best we could. Katie and Mikey needed care, and we all needed time to process our grief. But time wasn’t something we had the luxury of affording.

Why? Because work beckoned.

Like many Americans, most of my family doesn’t have paid leave in the event of an emergency. In fact, I’m the only one in my family with access to a paid leave program. My mother-in-law had to take unpaid leave under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act to care for Katie.

Imagine going weeks, even months, without a paycheck while trying to care for your family. Most people can’t afford that.

The rest of my family — farmers, preschool teachers, nursing assistants, small business owners — also don’t have paid leave. These are the same people we applauded and called “essential” during the pandemic. But we don’t treat them as essential when it comes to supporting them through life’s hardest moments. Where is their paid leave?

I’m sad that we lost Dave, but I’m also angry that when tragedy hits, our policies make life harder for families. I’m angry that for most of us, going back to work is a necessity, not a choice.

This is a policy failure. There is no federal rule that provides paid family leave or sick days for all workers. Only a small minority of workers receive dedicated paid family leave through their jobs. Most aren’t so fortunate. Millions of workers don’t even have a single paid sick day.

That’s why we need paid family leave for all.

Imagine a world where every family has the time to care for each other in moments of crisis. Where a parent doesn’t have to choose between being there for their child and keeping a roof over their head. Where we treat each other with the dignity and respect we all deserve.

This isn’t just about my family. This is about all of our families. It’s about the kind of country we want to live in. A country where reality is acknowledged, care is valued, families are supported, and where no one faces tragedy alone. No wonder paid leave has massive support from voters across party lines.

It’s time we ask every politician running for office if they support paid family leave. And if they don’t, we need to hold them accountable.

And then in 2025, let’s pass paid leave for all. For Dave. For Katie. For Mikey. And for every family like mine that’s faced a moment of crisis.

The Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Nihon Hidankyo is long overdue and could not come at a more important time.

The Hibakusha (A-bomb witness/survivors) of Nihon Hidankyo have been among the world’s most courageous and steadfast advocates of nuclear disarmament. The organization has focused on three core demands: preventing nuclear war, eliminating nuclear weapons, and obtaining essential medical care for A-bomb victims.

Hidankyo was founded in 1956, in the wake of the Bravo H-Bomb test 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima A-bomb, which poisoned Japanese fishermen and Marshall Islanders.

As Wilfred Burchett, the first Western journalist to witness the ruins and suffering in Hiroshima in 1945, later reported, despite their excruciating physical and emotional suffering, the Hibakusha became the world’s most powerful and influential force for the abolition. With the award of the Nobel Peace Prize, the voices of the Hibakusha, their tortured testimonies, and their truth that human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist will now ring out more powerfully around the world.

Nihon Hidankyo was repeatedly nominated for its now well-earned Peace Prize, and the Nobel Committee is now to be celebrated for finally making this year’s decision. With the world, our species, facing the greatest danger of nuclear apocalypse since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, this year’s Peace Prize will refocus world attention on the urgency of renewing nuclear disarmament diplomacy. In addition to Russian nuclear threats related to the continuing Ukraine war, an accident, incident, or miscalculation growing out of provocative U.S., allied, and Chinese military operations in and around the Taiwan Strait and the South China/West could ignite escalation to a nuclear cataclysm.

With uncertainties about a possible Trump election victory, there are growing demands among Japanese and South Korean elites for their nations to become nuclear powers. The U.S. and Russia have lowered their official operational thresholds for launching their nuclear weapons. All of the nuclear weapons states are upgrading their nuclear arsenals and delivery systems, with the U.S. committing an estimated two trillion dollars to “modernize” its systems when that money could be spent to stanch and reverse the climate emergency and to address other urgent human needs.

"The Hibakusha have identified with victims of other holocausts and massacres going back to Vietnam, when they identified with the people under the bombs."

Let us marvel and learn from the reality that Hibakusha, who were literally the last people on Earth, once seen by U.S. leaders and media as “vermin” to be eliminated, have awakened the conscience of the world after suffering what was probably the world’s worst war crime. And contrary to the myth propagated by President Truman, the A-bombs were not necessary to defeat Japan. Senior U.S. military officials from Eisenhower to LeMay and Leahy advised the president that “it wasn’t necessary to hit Japan with that awful thing” Secretary of War Stimson had already advised that Japan’s surrender on terms acceptable to the U.S. could be negotiated.”

Hibakusha’s friends, families, and neighbors were incinerated, irradiated, and physically ripped apart by the radiation’s heat and blast waves of the world’s first A-bombs. An entire city was destroyed and burned to the ground. Amidst their own agonies, many Hibakusha were unable to save their families in their shattered and burning homes. They witnessed ghostlike figures, no longer recognizable as human beings, some holding their eyeballs or intestines in their hands marching to their deaths, often in cisterns or the city’s rivers.

In the months and years that followed, many died from radiation-inflicted cancers and other diseases. Memories remain of the birthing of mutant babies and of other young children whose lives were cut short by radiation diseases. With initial fears that the radiation diseases might be contagious and about genetic damages, Hibakusha’s suffering was compounded by marginalization and discrimination.

As a result of the U.S. military occupation which continued until 1952 and subsequently with Japan functioning as the United States’ subservient ally, essential medical and other support services were long denied to Hibakusha. Among the achievements of Nihon Hidankyo and its allies are the collaborations they have built with other “global hibakusha.” These included forced laborers who were brought from Japanese-occupied Korea who also suffered the A-bombings. Compassionately and strategically they supported and joined with nuclear weapons test victims from the Marshall Islands, the United States, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tahiti, the Christmas Islands, and other Pacific Islands. Together with their testimonies in communities across the world and in the United Nations they forged the powerful but still inadequate taboo against the use of nuclear weapons. With their testimonies at the U.N. and elsewhere they have won the majority of the world’s governments to the understanding that for the human species to survive, priority must be given to the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons, not so-called “state security” interests.

Hibakusha testimonies were essential to the successful negotiation of the Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which seeks to hold the nuclear weapons states accountable to their Article VI Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty obligation to engage in good faith negotiations for the complete abolition of nuclear weapons.

That nuclear weapons have not been used since the Nagasaki A-bombing was an unfortunate misstatement in the Nobel Peace Prize Committee’s award announcement. As Daniel Ellsberg, a principal author of the United States’ nuclear war planning in the Kennedy administration, taught during many international crises and wars, the U.S. has used its nuclear arsenal in the same way that an armed robber uses his gun when pointed at his victim’s head. Whether or not the trigger is pulled, the gun has been used.

Tragically, this is a playbook from which the Russian government has been working with its Ukraine-war nuclear threats. It is worth noting that in response to the announcement of the award, Hidankyo referenced the terrible assaults on the people of Gaza. The Hibakusha have identified with victims of other holocausts and massacres going back to Vietnam, when they identified with the people under the bombs.

They then warned of the danger that the U.S. might resort to a nuclear attack (which the U.S. prepared and threatened in 1954, 1957, and with President Nixon's 1969 "madman" nuclear mobilization. Numerous popular initiatives are at work in the world which will be boosted by the Peace Prize award to Nihon Hibakusha.

In the U.S., the Back from the Brink campaign, initiated by Physicians for Social Responsibility, has been at the cutting edge. Its call for negotiation of a verifiable agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons, renunciation of first-use policies, ending the president’s sole authority to launch nuclear weapons, taking U.S. nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert, and canceling the plan to replace the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal with enhanced weapons has been endorsed by 43 members of Congress and numerous U.S. cities and states.

The Campaign for Peace, Disarmament, and Common Security works to prevent nuclear war and achieve a nuclear weapons-free world via its advocacy of Common Security. This is the ancient truth that no nation can achieve security at the expense of its rival. As with the INF Treaty that ended the Cold War before the fall of the Cold War, peaceful coexistence and security can be achieved only through mutual recognition and respectful, if difficult, win-win negotiations between rivals.

In the face of the horrors of nuclear weapons and drawing on the courage of Hibakusha, this is the paradigm on which the Hibakusha's vision of a nuclear weapons-free world can be achieved.

Colonialism is hardly a thing of the past. It’s alive and vibrant as ever—from the Middle East to Western Europe to the United States to India and God knows where else. And it can be profitable as hell, at least for the right industries.

Be afraid. Be very afraid!

This is true especially if you belong to a wealthy, heavily armed nation—because your enemies are everywhere, clustering at your borders or, even worse, daring to claim possession of their ancestral land and inconveniencing your possession of it.

In an interview at Democracy Now, Anthony Lowenstein, author of The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, referred to the phenomenon as a “global Palestine.” That is to say, the Israeli genocide of Palestinians and its current bombing of Lebanon—possibly the beginning of a devastating war in the Middle East—is just the most egregious example of the planet’s evolving colonialism in the present moment.

And as Lowenstein points out, the global link is both political and financial (not to mention racial). It doesn’t always morph into war, but violence and loss of life are always present in various ways.

Consider the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of surveillance towers have been installed over the last two decades, giving invaluable assistance to border patrol agents. As a recent Guardian story points out: “All along, officials have claimed the new technology would deter migration and help migrant safety, yet nearly 10,000 migrants have died crossing the border in the last 25 years, and the deaths are increasing.”

This is because migrants, fleeing hell in their homeland, are forced to take longer and more dangerous routes to the U.S. border, often with lethal consequences. Still, those who are in true danger, at least according to the “border protectors”—such as, for instance, surveillance-tower construction company Anduril—are the Americans. Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, for instance, said the company’s goal is to “radically transform the defense capabilities of the United States” via AI.

In other words, this is war. Rather than a global effort to address the causes of all the emigration occurring across the planet, the wealthy countries—the ones that have inherited the rewards of colonial conquest—are choosing to “protect” themselves from it. As Pedro Rios of the American Friends Service Committee has put it, according to the Guardian, “the framing of migration by media and politicians in war-like terms—such as ‘surge’ or ‘invasion’—drives more investment in border security.”

You know: Be afraid. Be very afraid. And of course, if the ones who are surveilled and/or occupied dare to fight back, they’re called terrorists.

Moving across the Atlantic, I note that the European Union has to deal with its own version of the “global Palestine”—immigrants fleeing their homelands across the Mediterranean, often in horrifically unsafe boats that wind up capsizing. More than 3,000 emigrants drowned last year alone, trying to reach the EU. And in the last decade, over 30,000 are simply missing.

Another Guardian story reports on a significantly contributing factor to these high numbers. It notes: “The EU doesn’t have a coordinated search-and-rescue operation but, according to international maritime law, any coastal state aware of a boat in distress has a duty to intervene. However, this often doesn’t happen and NGOs trying to fill this gap receive little support – only additional obstacles.”

These obstacles include strict regulations on the rescue boats, such as forcing them to dock at ports inconveniently distant from where they operate, forcing them to travel thousands of unnecessary miles and waste enormous amounts of money simply paying for the fuel to do so. In other words, there’s no coordinated public-private effort to save emigrants’ lives, but rather a public attitude that amounts to “let them drown.”

As an SOS Humanity report put it, rescue vessels wasted 374 days in 2023 making unnecessarily long docking journeys. According to the report: “This is not a coincidence, but a political tactic.”

And then, in a different section of Planet Earth, Hafsa Kanjwal writes in Middle East Eye about the disconcerting link India has with Israel in regard to Hindu-majority India’s relationship with the predominantly Muslim region of Kashmir. Right-wing pundits, Kanjwal notes, are known to call for “the Israeli model to be implemented in Kashmir”—which basically means replacing the Muslims.

She writes: “To be sure, Kashmir and Palestine are not identical, nor are any other two global regions. But their struggles share a common source: British colonization.”

The link is between the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which promised a national home for the Jewish people on Palestinian lands, and the 1846 Treaty of Amritsar, in which the British sold the Kashmir territory to a Hindu warlord, which resulted in severe suppression of the Muslim-majority population.

“The ‘births’ of India and Israel also meant the displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians through the Nakba and Kashmiris through the Jammu massacre.”

And, with the rise of India’s Hindu nationalism, “long gone is the benevolent discourse of inclusion; this ideology explicitly calls for demographic change and the building of Hindu settlements in Kashmir.”

This is called us v. them. It’s a world in which only some lives matter, which winds up meaning that no lives matter. It’s the definition of hell and it’s the militarized world, I fear, that we are continuing to create for ourselves. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Vice President Kamala Harris' recently announced "Medicare at Home" plan represents a crucial acknowledgment of America's caregiving crisis. However, it's a band-aid on a gaping wound—a wound that exposes the deep-seated inequities and systemic failures in our approach to elder care and support for family caregivers. I believe with some thoughtful adjustments, the proposal can lead to a more equitable elder care system in America.

The numbers are staggering: 53 million Americans provide unpaid care for aging or disabled loved ones, sacrificing their own financial security and well-being. By 2030, all Baby Boomers will be over 65, comprising 21% of our population. This demographic shift demands not just incremental change, but a radical reimagining of how we value and support care work in our society.

Harris' plan, while well-intentioned, risks perpetuating a broken care system that exploits caregivers—predominantly women and people of color—while failing to meet the diverse needs of families. By focusing on paying for "designated" Medicare aides, the current proposal supports only the high-cost portion of the market: the traditional for-profit home care agencies.

The current system is a microcosm of larger societal inequities.

That leaves behind many other care options that are vital to addressing our urgent care crisis. It ignores the reality that 78% of adults requiring long-term care solely rely on family and friends for support. And of those who can afford to pay for help, nearly a third rely on the “gray market” of informal caregivers. These groups—family caregivers and informal non-professional caregivers – should also be covered if Medicare were to pay for home-based care. Otherwise, the Harris proposal is favoring a for-profit home care agency system, at the expense of more affordable options, that the majority of people rely on.

Beyond affordability, many people actually prefer to not deal with the for-profit care market. One NIH-funded study on home care needs revealed a stark truth: patients value vouchers to pay for family and informal caregivers 50% more than agency-provided aides. This preference isn't just about familiarity. It's about dignity, cultural competence, and the recognition that care is deeply personal.

The current system is a microcosm of larger societal inequities. Unpaid family caregivers—mostly women, and disproportionately women of color—lose an average of $304,000 in wages and benefits over their lifetime. This is a form of structural inequality that perpetuates gender and racial wealth gaps.

To truly revolutionize home care, we must embrace a progressive vision that centers on equity, worker empowerment, and community-based solutions. Here's what that could look like:

1. A Universal Caregiver Benefit: Instead of means-tested programs, we need a universal benefit that recognizes caregiving as valuable work, regardless of who performs it. This would include payment to family members, friends, and community members, not just professional Medicare-designated aides. Such an approach would bring this existing "gray market" of family and informal caregivers into a more regulated and supported economy.

2. Technology for Social Impact: To truly transform home care, we must embrace innovation and flexibility. We can leverage technology platforms to create a more dynamic, responsive caregiver workforce. This can create flexible, well-compensated opportunities that benefit both caregivers and lower the costs for care recipients.

3. Community Care Cooperatives: Encourage the formation of worker-owned care cooperatives, empowering caregivers and ensuring that the benefits of their labor stay within their communities.

4. Comprehensive Training and Support: Provide accessible, culturally competent training for all types of caregivers, recognizing the diverse needs of care recipients and the varied skills of potential caregivers.

5. Intersectional Policy Approach: Recognize that caregiving intersects with issues of gender equality, racial justice, immigrant rights, and economic justice. Our solutions must address all these facets.

Critics may argue that this approach could compromise care quality. However, with proper oversight and community-based accountability mechanisms, we can create a system that's more responsive, more equitable, and more aligned with the values of dignity and self-determination.

The economic impact of this revolution would be profound. By recognizing and compensating currently unpaid care work, we could stimulate local economies, reduce gender and racial wealth gaps, and create a more robust social safety net for all.

We can create a level playing field where all care providers—from traditional care agencies to tech platforms to family caregivers and informal caregivers—can thrive while prioritizing the needs of care recipients and care workers.

Harris' Medicare at Home plan opens the door to a necessary conversation. Now, we must push it wide open and envision a care system that truly serves all Americans. We can build a society that recognizes the value of care work in all its forms.

Harris' Medicare at Home plan opens the door to a necessary conversation. Now, we must push it wide open and envision a care system that truly serves all Americans.

As we debate this plan, let's not lose sight of the broader struggle for social and economic justice. Reimagining home care for the 21st century is part of a larger project of creating an economy that works for all, not just the privileged few.

It's time for a care revolution that puts people over profit, community over corporations, and equity at the center of our policies. Harris has taken the first step—now let's march forward towards a truly just and compassionate care system for all Americans.

Katrina is the mother of three children, one of whom lives with major disabilities that require Katrina to spend most of her time as a caregiver. Katrina was already struggling to make ends meet, but then an unexpected car repair and reduced work hours caused her to fall behind on her rent.

Darren was hurt on the job and lost six weeks of pay. Now he is trying to put in as much work time as his employer will give him, but the pay is only about $17 an hour. Darren shares custody of two very young children, ages three and nine months, and he is desperately struggling to catch up on overdue rent.

Sheila‘s husband has been arrested and jailed for violently abusing her. Safe for the moment, Sheila has returned to work as a manager at a retail business. But she owes several months of back rent, plus late fees and court fees. It is more than she can pull together, so Sheila will have to move within the month. She is putting most of her possessions into storage. She is also packing a few trash bags of clothes to take with her to her new home—a friend’s unheated garage with no access to plumbing.

I teach a law school clinic in Indianapolis, where my students and I represent Katrina, Darren, Sheila and other clients in eviction court. They have a shared need, one that also applies to the nine million U.S. households that are behind on their rent right now:

They need money.

Katrina, Darren, and Sheila are among the three of every four households who qualify for subsidized housing, but do not receive it because we don’t fully fund the programs. They are forced to try to pay market-rate rent, which takes up most of their income even in the good times. In the bad times, the rent is more than what is coming in. So we see them in eviction court.

Turns out that some of the usual suspects—volunteer work, random acts of kindness—may not be as impactful as we hoped in delivering happiness. But what does work? You guessed it: money, especially for low-income folks.

We can do better than this. We know we can, because just a few years ago Katrina, Darren, and Sheila and almost everyone else we see eviction court now were safely housed. Emergency rental assistance, expanded child tax credits, maximized food stamps, and extended unemployment benefits prevented more than three million eviction cases, according to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. In fact, poverty rates actually dropped during the Covid pandemic.

Since then, researchers from Columbia University and City University of New York, CUNY, studied the impact of those benefits, and confirmed what we saw in our clients’ lives. “We find that direct cash payments were the single most useful tool for helping people ride out the pandemic and were first and foremost, used to cover basic needs, including rent or mortgage payments, utilities, and food,” they said.

That is powerful evidence pointing us toward what we can do to help. Add that to the pile of research showing that strings-free cash leads to dramatically positive outcomes. Specifically to housing, studies have shown that unconditional cash given to unhoused persons both reduced homelessness and saved money that would have been spent on government programs the recipients. Cash is so effective because this and other studies show that low-income people are far more likely to spend cash assistance on rent, food, and transportation than “temptation goods” like alcohol or drugs.

More broadly, analysis in the Annual Review of Psychology reviewed multiple studies examining what actually makes human beings happier. Turns out that some of the usual suspects—volunteer work, random acts of kindness—may not be as impactful as we hoped in delivering happiness. But what does work? You guessed it: money, especially for low-income folks.

“A growing number of rigorous preregistered experiments suggest that such cash transfers and other forms of financial support can provide an efficient mechanism for enhancing happiness,” wrote Dunigan Folk and Elizabeth Dunn, professors of psychology at the University of British Columbia. “Cash seems to be as good or better than other interventions that carry similar costs, including psychotherapy and job training.”

This analysis matches what we see in court. Would Katrina and Darren and Sheila benefit from psychotherapy? Maybe. But for most clients it appears that their financial crises are causing their mental health struggles, more so than the other way around. Would job training help? Again, maybe. But these people are already doing work in the community—home healthcare, food, service, retail work, warehouse work, etc.—that is essential for our economy. So, shouldn’t those jobs pay a living wage?

As we evaluate presidential candidates’ responses to our housing crisis and the clamor over building more housing, it is worth keeping this simplicity in mind. Until and unless we create much more subsidized housing, which is the real solution to the crisis, what our clients need most is straight-up cash.

Considered Angola’s crown jewel by many, Lobito is a colorful port city on the country’s scenic Atlantic coast where a nearly five-kilometer strip of land creates a natural harbor. Its white sand beaches, vibrant blue waters, and mild tropical climate have made Lobito a tourist destination in recent years. Yet under its shiny new facade is a history fraught with colonial violence and exploitation.

The Portuguese were the first Europeans to lay claim to Angola in the late sixteenth century. For nearly four centuries, they didn’t relent until a bloody, 27-year civil war with anticolonial guerillas (aided by the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces) and bolstered by a leftist coup in distant Lisbon, Portugal’s capital, overthrew that colonial regime in 1974.

Lobito’s port was the economic heart of Portugal’s reign in Angola, along with the meandering 1,866-kilometer Benguela Railway, which first became operational in the early 1900s. For much of the twentieth century, Lobito was the hub for exporting to Europe agricultural goods and metals mined in Africa’s Copperbelt. Today, the Copperbelt remains a resource-rich region encompassing much of the Democratic Republic of Congo and northern Zambia.

Perhaps it won’t shock you to learn that, half a century after Portugal’s colonial control of Angola ended, neocolonialism is now sinking its hooks into Lobito. Its port and the Benguela Railway, which travels along what’s known as the Lobito Corridor, have become a key nucleus of China’s and the Western world’s efforts to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources in our hot new world. If capitalist interests continue to drive this crucial transition, which is all too likely, while global energy consumption isn’t scaled back radically, the amount of critical minerals needed to power the global future remains unfathomable. The World Economic Forum estimates that three billion tons of metals will be required. The International Energy Forum estimates that to meet the global goals of radically reducing carbon emissions, we’ll also need between 35 and 194 massive copper mines by 2050.

It should come as no surprise that most of the minerals from copper to cobalt needed for that transition’s machinery (including electric batteries, wind turbines, and solar panels) are located in Latin America and Africa. Worse yet, more than half (54%) of the critical minerals needed are on or near Indigenous lands, which means the most vulnerable populations in the world are at the most significant risk of being impacted in a deeply negative fashion by future mining and related operations.

Having lagged behind that country’s investments in Africa for years, the U.S. is now looking to make up ground.

When you want to understand what the future holds for a country in the “developing” world, as economists still like to call such regions, look no further than the International Monetary Fund (IMF). “With growing demand, proceeds from critical minerals are poised to rise significantly over the next two decades,” reports the IMF. “Global revenues from the extraction of just four key minerals — copper, nickel, cobalt, and lithium — are estimated to total $16 trillion over the next 25 years. Sub-Saharan Africa stands to reap over 10 percent of these accumulated revenues, which could correspond to an increase in the region’s GDP by 12 percent or more by 2050.”

Sub-Saharan Africa alone is believed to contain 30% of the world’s total critical mineral reserves. It’s estimated that the Congo is responsible for 70% of global cobalt output and approximately 50% of the globe’s reserves. In fact, the demand for cobalt, a key ingredient in most lithium-ion batteries, is rapidly increasing because of its use in everything from cell phones to electric vehicles. As for copper, Africa has two of the world’s top producers, with Zambia accounting for 70% of the continent’s output. “This transition,” adds the IMF, “if managed properly, has the potential to transform the region.” And, of course, it won’t be pretty.

While such critical minerals might be mined in rural areas of the Congo and Zambia, they must reach the international marketplace to become profitable, which makes Angola and the Lobito Corridor key to Africa’s booming mining industry.

In 2024, China committed $4.5 billion to African lithium mines alone and another $7 billion to investments in copper and cobalt mining infrastructure. In the Congo, for example, China controls 70% of the mining sector.

Having lagged behind that country’s investments in Africa for years, the U.S. is now looking to make up ground.

Zambia’s Copper Colonialism

In September 2023, on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in India, Secretary of State Antony Blinken quietly signed an agreement with Angola, Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the European Union to launch the Lobito Corridor project. There wasn’t much fanfare or news coverage, but the United States had made a significant move. Almost 50 years after Portugal was forced out of Angola, the West was back, offering a $4 billion commitment and assessing the need to update the infrastructure first built by European colonizers. With a growing need for critical minerals, Western countries are now setting their sights on Africa and its green energy treasures.

“We meet at a historic moment,” President Joe Biden said as he welcomed Angolan President João Lourenço to Washington last year. Biden then called the Lobito project the “biggest U.S. rail investment in Africa ever” and affirmed the West’s interest in what the region might have to offer in the future. “America,” he added, “is all in on Africa… We’re all in with you and Angola.”

Both Africa and the U.S., Biden was careful to imply, would reap the benefits of such a coalition. Of course, that’s precisely the kind of rhetoric we can expect when Western (or Chinese) interests are intent on acquiring the resources of the Global South. If this were about oil or coal, questions and concerns would undoubtedly be raised regarding America’s regional intentions. Yet, with the fight against climate change providing cover, few are considering the geopolitical ramifications of such a position — and even fewer acknowledging the impacts of massively increased mining on the continent.

In his book Cobalt Red, Siddharth Kara exposes the bloody conditions cobalt miners in the Congo endure, many of them children laboring against their will for days on end, with little sleep and under excruciatingly abusive conditions. The dreadful story is much the same in Zambia, where copper exports account for more than 70% of the country’s total export revenue. A devastating 126-page report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) from 2011 exposed the wretchedness inside Zambia’s Chinese-owned mines: 18-hour work days, unsafe working environments, rampant anti-union activities, and fatal workplace accidents. There is little reason to believe it’s much different in the more recent Western-owned operations.

“Friends tell you that there’s a danger as they’re coming out of shift,” a miner who was injured while working for a Chinese company told HRW. “You’ll be fired if you refuse, they threaten this all the time… The main accidents are from rock falls, but you also have electrical shocks, people hit by mining trucks underground, people falling from platforms that aren’t stable… In my accident, I was in a loading box. The mine captain… didn’t put a platform. So when we were working, a rock fell down and hit my arm. It broke to the extent that the bone was coming out of the arm.”

An explosion at one mine killed 51 workers in 2005 and things have only devolved since then. Ten workers died in 2018 at an illegal copper extraction site. In 2019, three mineworkers were burned to death in an underground shaft fire and a landslide at an open-pit copper mine in Zambia killed more than 30 miners in 2023. Despite such horrors, there’s a rush to extract ever more copper in Zambia. As of 2022, five gigantic open-pit copper mines were operating in the country, and eight more underground mines were in production, many of which are to be further expanded in the years ahead. With new U.S.-backed mines in the works, Washington believes the Lobito Corridor may prove to be the missing link needed to ensure Zambian copper will end up in green energy goods consumed in the West.

AI Mining for AI Energy

The office of KoBold Metals in quaint downtown Berkeley, California, is about as far away from Zambia’s dirty mines as you can get. Yet, at KoBold’s nondescript headquarters, which sits above a row of trendy bars and restaurants, a team of tech entrepreneurs diligently work to locate the next big mine operation in Zambia using proprietary Artificial Intelligence (AI). Backed by billionaires Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, KoBold bills itself as a green Silicon Valley machine, committed to the world’s green energy transition (while turning a nice profit).

It is in KoBold’s interest, of course, to secure the energy deposits of the future because it will take an immense amount of energy to support their artificially intelligent world. A recent report by the International Energy Agency estimates that, in the near future, electricity usage by AI data centers will increase significantly. As of 2022, such data centers were already utilizing 460 terawatt hours (TWh) but are on pace to increase to 1,050 TWh by the middle of the decade. To put that in perspective, Europe’s total energy consumption in 2023 was around 2,700 TWh.

“Anyone who’s in the renewable space in the western world… is looking for copper and cobalt, which are fundamental to making electric vehicles,” Mfikeyi Makayi, chief executive of KoBold in Zambia, explained to the Financial Times in 2024. “That is going to come from this part of the world and the shortest route to take them out is Lobito.”

Makayi wasn’t beating around the bush. The critical minerals in KoBold mines won’t end up in the possession of Zambia or any other African country. They are bound for Western consumers alone. KoBold’s CEO Kurt House is also honest about his intentions: “I don’t need to be reminded again that I’m a capitalist,” he’s been known to quip.

In July 2024, House rang his company’s investors with great news: KoBold had just hit the jackpot in Zambia. Its novel AI tech had located the largest copper find in more than a decade. Once running, it could produce upwards of 300,000 tons of copper annually — or, in the language investors understand, the cash will soon flow. As of late summer 2024, one ton of copper on the international market cost more than $9,600. Of course, KoBold has gone all in, spending $2.3 billion to get the Zambian mine operable by 2030. Surely, KoBold’s investors were excited by the prospect, but not everyone was as thrilled as them.

“The value of copper that has left Zambia is in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Hold that figure in your mind, and then look around yourself in Zambia,” says Zambian economist Grieve Chelwa. “The link between resource and benefit is severed.”

Not only has Zambia relinquished the benefits of such mineral exploitation, but — consider it a guarantee — its people will be left to suffer the local mess that will result.

The Poisoned River

Konkola Copper Mines (KCM) is today the largest ore producer in Zambia, ripping out a combined two million tons of copper a year. It’s one of the nation’s largest employers, with a brutally long record of worker and environmental abuses. KCM runs Zambia’s largest open-pit mine, which stretches for seven miles. In 2019, the British-based Vedanta Resources acquired an 80% stake in KCM by covering $250 million of that company’s debt. Vedanta has deep pockets and is run by Indian billionaire Anil Agarwal, affectionately known in the mining world as “the Metal King.”

One thing should be taken for granted: You don’t become the Metal King without leaving entrails of toxic waste on your coattails. In India, Agarwal’s alumina mines have polluted the lands of the Indigenous Kondh tribes in Orissa Province. In Zambia, his copper mines have wrecked farmlands and waterways that once supplied fish and drinking water to thousands of villagers.

The Kafue River runs for more than 1,500 kilometers, making it Zambia’s longest river and now probably its most polluted as well. Going north to south, its waters flow through the Copperbelt, carrying with them cadmium, lead, and mercury from KCM’s mine. In 2019, thousands of Zambian villagers sued Vedanta, claiming its subsidiary KCM had poisoned the Kafue River and caused insurmountable damage to their lands.

The British Supreme Court then found Vedanta liable, and the company was forced to pay an undisclosed settlement, likely in the millions of dollars. Such a landmark victory for those Zambian villagers couldn’t have happened without the work of Chilekwa Mumba, who organized communities and convinced an international law firm to take up the case. Mumba grew up in the Chingola region of Zambia, where his father worked in the mines.

“[T]here was some environmental degradation going on as a result of the mining activities. As we found, there were times when the acid levels of water was so high,” explained Mumba, the 2023 African recipient of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize. “So there were very specific complaints about stomach issues from children. Children just really wander around the villages and if they are thirsty, they don’t think about what’s happening, they’ll just get a cup and take their drink of water from the river. That’s how they live. So they’ll usually get diseases. It’s hard to quantify, but clearly the impact was there.”

Sadly enough, though, despite that important legal victory, little has changed in Zambia, where environmental regulations remain weak and nearly impossible to enforce, which leaves mining companies like KCM to regulate themselves. A 2024 Zambian legislative bill seeks to create a regulatory body to oversee mining operations, but the industry has pushed back, making it unclear if it will ever be signed into law. Even if the law does pass, it may have little real-world impact on mining practices there.

The warming climate, at least to the billionaire mine owners and their Western accomplices, will remain an afterthought, as well as a justification to exploit more of Africa’s critical minerals. Consider it a new type of colonialism, this time with a green capitalist veneer. There are just too many AI programs to run, too many tech gadgets to manufacture, and too much money to be made.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump and GOP leaders continue to promote the insidious falsehood that noncitizen immigrants are voting. Democrats and pundits point to evidence in study after study showing noncitizens are not voting, except in exceedingly rare occasions.

Few talk about whether noncitizen immigrants should have voting rights. Although it may sound odd or outlandish at first blush, there are strong moral and practical reasons to consider the merits of immigrant voting rights:

First, it’s rational. Twenty-two million residents are noncitizens (about 1 in 14), both documented and unauthorized immigrants. They live in every state and virtually every town. They are teachers and students, physicians and nurses, musicians and construction workers. They raise families, send kids to schools, contribute billions in taxes, make countless social and cultural contributions, serve in the military, and even die defending this country. Despite Trump’s desire to deport them, immigrants make the operation of much of our economy and society possible. Yet they cannot vote on issues crucial to their daily lives.

Just as the civil rights movement extended the franchise to African-Americans who had been barred from voting, efforts to extend the franchise to new Americans similarly seek to advance their equitable representation and inclusion.

America’s experience of excluding African Americans, women, and young people points to the dangers of excluding groups from the political process. Discriminatory practices and public policy in housing, education, healthcare, welfare, and criminal justice are the inevitable by-products of political exclusion. As the age-old political maxim attests, if you are excluded from the vote, politicians can more easily ignore you.

Although highly heterogeneous, as a group immigrants rank at the bottom of the social order, scoring low on indicators of well-being, including income, education, housing, and health. One in four low-income children is the child of an immigrant, and one in four low-wage workers is foreign-born. Immigrant families are more likely to lack health insurance, have poor health, and be “food-insecure” than the native-born. Latinos, the largest group of immigrants, experience the worst conditions, and Mexicans, the largest group of Latinos, face the biggest obstacles. Social scientists have long established that immigrants’ lack of access to citizenship and patterns of low voter registration and participation are highly correlated with underrepresentation in government and biased public policy outcomes.

Just as the civil rights movement extended the franchise to African-Americans who had been barred from voting, efforts to extend the franchise to new Americans similarly seek to advance their equitable representation and inclusion.

Second, it’s as American as apple pie. Most people are surprised to learn that noncitizens legally voted in 40 states at some point in time between 1776 to 1926. Immigrants voted not just in local elections, but also in state and even federal elections, and noncitizens could run for office. “Alien suffrage,” as these laws were called, was seen not as a substitute for citizenship, but as a pathway to foster citizenship and immigrant integration. The notion that noncitizens should have the vote is older, was practiced longer, and is more consistent with democratic ideals than the idea that they should not. Curiously, this 150-year history has been largely eviscerated from American national memory. In fact, the U.S. Constitution still does not preclude noncitizen voting, and the courts—including the Supreme Court—have upheld voting by noncitizens.

During the 19th century, when immigrants comprised 10% to 30% of the population in many states, noncitizens voted in significant numbers, and factored into election outcomes on salient issues of the day, helping advance anti-slavery causes, pro-worker issues, and progressive policy. The abolition of alien suffrage in the early 1920s coincided with the enactment of literacy tests, poll taxes, felony disenfranchisement laws, and restrictive residency and voter registration requirements that disenfranchised millions of voters.

Third, it’s feasible. Immigrant voting rights are being restored. Today, noncitizens legally vote in 17 localities from coast to coast, and other jurisdictions are considering restoring immigrant voting rights.

The Civil Rights movement helped revive immigrant voting in New York City in 1968, followed by the Sanctuary movement in the 1980s in Maryland where 10 towns allow it, and more recently in three towns in Vermont during the 2020s (Montpelier, Winooski and Burlington); San Francisco (2016) and Oakland (2022), California; New York City (2021) and Washington D.C. (2022). Other jurisdictions have enacted local laws—or have considered restoring immigrant-voting rights—including five localities in Massachusetts, six in California, one in Maine and Ohio, and in state elections in Connecticut.

Some laws provide voting rights to all residents—both documented and undocumented immigrants (MD, SF, D.C.)—while other jurisdictions enfranchise only Legal Permanent Residents (LPRs) and those with work permits (NY, VT). In some jurisdictions, noncitizens have voted in significant numbers, electing diverse representative bodies and fostering improvements in schools and student outcomes.

Globally, at least 45 countries on nearly every continent have extended voting rights to noncitizens in local, regional, and even national elections during the past several decades. These laws seek to align democratic principles with democratic practice.

Immigrants are under attack today and need greater tools to defend themselves, so why not debate the merits of restoring immigrant voting rights? As Jamie Raskin, a Maryland congressman and law professor who wrote a seminal 1992 law review journal article about alien suffrage that spurred its revival, put it, “immigrant rights are the civil rights” of the day and “by that logic, noncitizen voting is the suffrage movement” of our time.

Today, our nation celebrates National Coming Out Day. This October 11, you may see a wave of brave stories from your friends or family members, right along with messages of support from corporations touting their inclusive environments. It is a day when many of us in the LGBTQIA+ community choose to share our true selves with our loved ones, our community, our co-workers, and the world. And it serves as a reminder of the progress that has been made and how fortunate we are that so many can now feel comfortable to live openly and out loud.

After centuries of battles, whether that be on the streets outside Stonewall or in the courtrooms across our country, it is comforting to know that the efforts of our elders have helped to create a society where more people feel comfortable enough to live as their authentic selves.

Yet, the progress that we see today can, if we are not paying careful attention, belie the reality that our communities—and the progress we've made—continue to be under attack. Coming out is a deeply personal choice—a choice that becomes more difficult without cultural acceptance, and without the promises of security and protection we have increasingly begun to expect. But these hard-fought protections are, sadly, now being stripped away by the anti-DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) movement and its pressure campaign pushing employers to backtrack on their commitment to inclusivity.

Now is the time to prove you respect your LGBTQIA+ employees as people, and that their personhood is not a fad that can be easily discarded when there is pushback.

Across the country we have been seeing a concerning trend of companies, both large and small, scaling back or eliminating their DEI commitments out of fear. One key measure of that is the number of companies withdrawing from participation in the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Corporate Equality Index, a long-time and widely used measure of companies' commitment to respecting the rights of their LGBTQIA+ employees. To maintain the progress we've made, it is important that we recognize and push back on these attacks.

National Coming Out Day was created in 1988 to commemorate the first anniversary of the 1987 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. Inspired by the visibility of that event, the day was meant to encourage individuals to live openly and make themselves visible at home, at work, and in their local communities—demonstrating the strength of the LGBT movement and promoting acceptance. By 1993, the National Coming Out Day organization had merged with the Human Rights Campaign Fund. HRC's Corporate Equality Index later grew from this sentiment and was developed to push for a world where gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer employees could be out at work without facing discrimination in hiring or on the job. This was a crucial tool for LGBTQIA+ employees at the time of its creation, and it still stands as an important resource for the community to this day.

When companies like Ford, Harley-Davidson, and Lowe's —all targeted by ultra-conservatives to sow division and fear—withdraw from participating in the Corporate Equality Index, they undermine a tool that has driven substantial progress for LGBTQIA+ employees over the past two decades.Today, the index is as crucial as ever. It's not just about acceptance or branded pride parade swag; it's about creating an environment where everyone—regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity—can thrive. And thriving requires that our laws and institutions guarantee that one's livelihood, healthcare, and chance for financial security are not put at risk by choosing to live openly and freely. LGBTQIA+ employees in many states are already feeling their human rights come under attack through hateful and discriminatory state laws. The last thing they need is to have their places of employment also turning their backs on them. How can individuals feel safe coming out when the very systems designed to protect them are under attack?

The rollback of DEI programs isn't just a moral issue; it's increasingly a legal one. Lawsuits have been filed against employers claiming that DEI initiatives that work to welcome and include people of color and LGBTQIA+ folks discriminate against white people and straight cisgender people. While these suits exploit existing tensions, they overlook an important fact—legal protections exist to support inclusive workplaces.

Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, employment discrimination in the United States on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity is illegal. This was made clear in 2020 with the Supreme Court's decision in Bostock v. Clayton County. This legal framework provides a foundation for companies committed to true inclusivity and is the starting point for them to showcase an authentic commitment to equality.

To the corporate leaders reading this, now is the time to stand firm and hold strong in your values. It's easy to support diversity in times of peace, but it's during times of challenge that true commitment is tested. Companies who were early allies in the fight for equality are still remembered and respected to this day. Now is the time to prove you respect your LGBTQIA+ employees as people, and that their personhood is not a fad that can be easily discarded when there is pushback.There are legal protections to ensure your commitment to the principles of equality and inclusion are bolstered against this wave of divisive political agendas. And it is your duty to ensure DEI is cemented into your institution's core values.

National Coming Out Day is a celebration of courage. It is a reminder of the progress that has been made possible by that courage, and that every person deserves the right to live openly without fear of retribution or exclusion. But this can only happen in an environment where safety and acceptance are firmly rooted in our laws and our institutions. This October 11, let's reaffirm our commitment to equality and stand up to this hateful and divisive anti-DEI rhetoric.

If you were a rich Wisconsinite striving to get even richer and you had little regard for intellectual honesty or the well-being of your fellow citizens, you would agree with Sen. Ron Johnson’s remarks at last month’s Senate Finance Committee hearing.

Otherwise, you’d find the senator’s views troublesome, to say the least.

I was a witness at that hearing. Johnson asked me to agree with him that having both an income tax and an estate tax is double taxation. As politely as I could, I pointed out that the income tax and the estate tax are two different taxes. The senator’s argument is no different than saying it is double taxation if an average American, after paying tax on her wages, pays federal excise tax at the pump when she purchases gas.

Unless and until Johnson’s face replaces Roosevelt’s at Mt. Rushmore, I’ll go out on a limb and say we should stick with the tax structure Roosevelt advocated.

Johnson undoubtedly knows better. America has had both an estate tax and an income tax for over a century now. They’re two different taxes. One is an income tax; the other is an excise tax on the transfer of substantial wealth. The specific purpose of the estate tax was to limit the size of America’s largest dynastic fortunes, lest we slip into an aristocracy. The lead advocate for the estate tax, President Teddy Roosevelt, recognized the necessity for both taxes: “The really swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size,” Roosevelt observed, “acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means.” Therefore, Roosevelt, a Republican like Johnson, advocated for both a “graduated income tax on big fortunes,” and “a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.”

At the hearing, Johnson was speaking in support of keeping one of the worst loopholes in the tax code, a provision commonly known as stepped-up basis. It allows the untaxed gains on the investment assets of mega-millionaires and billionaires to escape income taxation entirely, as long as they hold those assets until death. Jeff Bezos, for example, would avoid income tax on over $100 billion of gain on his Amazon shares were he to hold those shares until his death. And if ultra-rich Americans ever need cash, they don’t need to sell highly appreciated assets. Instead, they can borrow against the assets. It’s a strategy known as buy-borrow-die.

Johnson’s true goal isn’t really protecting the ultra-rich from double taxation, though. He actually wants to protect them from any taxation. That’s what the Death Tax Repeal Act of 2023, a bill Johnson and 41 other Republican senators have sponsored, would do. If that were to become law, Mr. Bezos, or any other billionaire, could pass his billions to his inheritors free of both estate tax and income tax on all those previously untaxed gains.

Unless and until Johnson’s face replaces Roosevelt’s at Mt. Rushmore, I’ll go out on a limb and say we should stick with the tax structure Roosevelt advocated. And that requires closing the stepped-up basis loophole.

At the hearing, Johnson did not limit his shilling for the ultra-rich to the stepped-up basis issue. While purporting to be concerned about income inequality, Johnson advocated for proposals obviously intended to benefit his rich benefactors and, worse yet, himself. Were it up to him, for example, our tax law would “index out” inflationary gains. Here’s how that would work for Johnson and his fellow real estate moguls: Say Johnson purchased a property for $10 million with $2 million in cash and an $8 million loan, using the property’s rental income to make the loan payments. Now, say inflation ran at 4% for 10 years and Johnson’s property kept pace. Under his plan, he’d be treated as if he paid $14 million for the property. And if he then sold the property for its $14 million value? He’d have no income tax to pay, but after paying off the loan, he’d have a $4 million profit. Yes, $800,000 of that profit would be attributable to inflation, but the other $3.2 million would be real profit, and it would escape tax entirely if Johnson has his way.

Johnson’s efforts to “address inequality”—yes, he really presented it this way at the hearing—aren’t limited to opposing stepped-up basis reform and advocating for indexing for inflation. He also insists that he and his rich patrons not be taxed on their massive investment gains until they sell assets so they have the “wherewithal to pay.” That would allow the country’s ultra-rich to continue to benefit from the tax-free compounding of their investment gains using the buy-borrow-die strategy. When you do the math, even when the ultra-rich sell long-held investments before they die and pay tax on their gains, the effective annual rate of tax on the growth in their wealth can be less than 5%. With Johnson’s plan to “index out” inflation added to his staunch support of buy-borrow die, that effective rate would be even lower.

There’s no need to guess about whether Johnson believes he’s advocating for good tax policy or is simply carrying water for his billionaire backers (and himself). The record is clear. In 2017, Johnson pushed hard for the so-called “pass-through deduction,” which allows owners of limited liability companies and subchapter S corporations to pay a 20% lower rate of tax on their income. He even threatened to withhold his vote for former President Donald Trump’s tax package unless the pass-through deduction was increased. In 2018, according to reporting by ProPublica, the pass-through deduction generated tax deductions of over $117 million for Dick and Liz Uihlein, the owners of Uline, and over $97 million for Diane Hendricks, the owner of ABC Supply Co. In 2022, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Hendricks and the Uihleins contributed at least $22.5 million to Wisconsin Truth PAC, a Johnson-supporting super PAC which spent $24 million on ads attacking Johnson’s 2022 opponent, Mandela Barnes.

Those massive contributions were entirely rational, in a depressing way that reeks of corruption. In 2018 alone, Hendricks and the Uihleins saved just under $80 million in tax as a result of Johnson’s handiwork. His efforts to continue the pass-through deduction past its scheduled 2025 expiration date could net them about $1 billion over the next decade. That $22.5 million they spent on Johson’s 2022 senate campaign may be categorized as a campaign contribution. But when $22.5 million has the potential to enrich you to the tune of $1 billion, it smells a lot more like an investment. And a highly profitable one; the kind only billionaires experience.

With Washington filled with politicians like Ron Johnson, we need more patriotic millionaires. A lot more. To paraphrase our Vice Chair, Stephen Prince, we need more wealthy Americans to step up and say that while they like being rich, they recognize that our tax system has been rigged in their favor for far too long. And we need more politicians fighting to unrig our tax system, not rig it further. We’ll never change the mindset of Ron Johnson and his ilk. The only way to fix this mess is to elect politicians who will outvote them.

The famous rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel, was once asked by a journalist why he, as a religious leader, had come to a demonstration against the war in Vietnam. Heschel answered: “I am here because I cannot pray... Whenever I open the prayer book, I see images of children burning from napalm”

Now, as we approach this evening's Yom Kippur, the day when Jews traditionally reflect on the past and repent, I see the horrifying photos of Israeli and Palestinian children, women and men, who have been killed over the past year. The images of the dead and the brutal way in which they were killed, haunts me and I feel called to pray through protest as Rabbi Heschel once did.

The first anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel was just five days ago and tonight we will remember the over 1100 Israelis who were killed, the 247 who were taken hostage, and the 97 Israelis still held as hostages in Gaza. It is not new for Jews to mark tragedies. But, this year, for the first time in more than 3,000 years of Jewish history, Jews will observe Yom Kippur as Israel continues a year long attack on Gaza that the International Court of Justice ruled is plausibly a case of genocide. Scholars like Raz Segal and Omer Bartov, and Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on Occupied Territories, agree.

“Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods.” —Rabbi Heschel

I was raised in a passionately Zionist community in Apartheid South Africa. My father was a leader of the Jewish community and the Judaism that I learned from him, in my Jewish Day school, and my Zionist youth movement, inspired deep loyalty to Israel no matter what decisions its leaders made. Despite this, I began to question Zionism. In 2003, I was one of the founders of Rabbis for Human Rights North America. In that role, I learned first-hand about the systemic injustice of daily life in Palestine, by trying to stop Israeli home demolitions. I also learned from Israeli and Palestinian activists about the Nakba, when thousands of Palestinians were displaced from their homes in 1948.

Today, I know that I’m complicit in Israel’s war as both a rabbi and an American. However I am not alone. All Americans are implicated in today’s atrocities. The United States has sent more than 50,000 tons of armaments and military equipment to Israel since October 7th. More than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed. Recently, reports of mass terror, rape, and abuse in Israeli detention centers have been added to the list of war crimes and atrocities. Israel has also destroyed schools, mosques, cultural centers, libraries, important historical heritage sites and more throughout Gaza.

As Americans, we must face the truth of our complicity with this horror. And, like Rabbi Heschel we must take bold action to end it, instead of simply praying for change. As Heschel said, “Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods.”

In the wake of October 7, I have followed Rabbi Heshel’s example, and prayed through protest, at several actions organized by Rabbis for Ceasefire and If Not Now. Here are four suggestions for how we can all take action in this new year: 1) Educate ourselves about the history of the Palestinian people, especially about the Nakba in 1948. 2) Support calls for an immediate ceasefire. The violence on both sides endangers everyone. 3) Demand an immediate arms embargo to end the supply of American bombs that have enabled the genocide. 4) Support a negotiated settlement that guarantees freedom, equality and justice for all who live in Israel and Palestine.

As the Palestinian journalis Ahmed Moor writes, “Hope for the future, such as it is, is fixed in a vision that requires the end of Jewish supremacy in Palestine.” May our prayers on this Yom Kippur be in the streets. May we end the genocide and advocate for equality, freedom, justice, and safety for all who live in Israel/Palestine.

After U.S. President Joe Biden was shuffled off stage on trumped-up charges of senility, I started thinking seriously about the weaponization of old age in our world. Who gets credit for old age and who gets the boot?

At 86, I share that affliction, pervasive among the richest, healthiest, and/or luckiest of us, who manage to hang around the longest. Former President Donald Trump is, of course, in this same group, although much of America seems to be in selective denial about his diminishing capabilities. He was crushed recently in The Great Debate yet is generally given something of a mulligan for hubris, craziness, and unwillingness to prepare. But face it, unlike Joe B., he was simply too old to cut the mustard.

It’s time to get real about old age as a condition that, yes, desperately needs and deserves better resources and reverence, but also careful monitoring and culling. Such thinking is not a bias crime. It’s not even an alert for ancient drivers on the roads. It’s an alarm for tolerating dangerous old politicians who spread lies and send youngsters to war, while we continue to willfully waste the useful experience and energy of all ages.

Once you’ve accepted that you’ll look, feel, and be treated differently in old age, you’re also ready to accept the fact that you can be the master of your attitude and response.

We have to weaponize old age for good causes. We have to shake a mindset that allows us to warehouse people because their presence is an inconvenience while covering up for those with money and power. Out of shame or guilt or that feeling of elder helplessness, even smart old people all too often go along with arbitrary cut-off dates. I remember my dad, at 75 and retired, inveighing against the “dead wood,” especially in his field (education) that blocked progress and discouraged young energy and innovation. By 75, he maintained, people were sliding downhill, which was his way of justifying being shelved himself. He became increasingly depressed and listless, not because he was too old but because he had been made to feel useless.

Then, at 76, he was given the chance to help other old people with their tax returns and, ultimately, their confrontations with local government. He promptly perked up and became an active advocate for elder rights until his accidental death at 100.

My old friends and I talk constantly about our aging, how to suffer it, outwit it, gang up on it, or even strategically give in to it. We’ve decided that nobody in power is doing anything meaningful about it because, beyond exploitive eldercare, they haven’t figured out how to turn a profit.

Meanwhile, the really rich coots like Rupert Murdoch, at 93, are still tomcatting around and fussing with succession plans, while Warren Buffet, at 94, is cagily toying with his billions to avoid inheritance taxes.

Those old boys are anything but role models for me and my friends. After all, they’ve been practicing all their lives how to be rich old pigs, their philanthropy mirroring their interests, not the needs of the rest of us. In my pay grade, we’re expected to concentrate on tips from AARP newsletters on how to avoid telephone scams and falls, the bane of the geezer class. And that’s important, but it’s also a way of keeping us anxious and impotent.

Those Falls

This screed isn’t just the product of my stewing over old age. An incident in the parking lot of a big box store on the day after The Great Debate set me off.

Here’s what happened: An elderly man in the car beside mine stepped out of the driver’s seat, lowered his cane to the concrete, and pitched over flat on his face. His wife immediately ran to him from the passenger’s seat. I got there next, phone out, and asked her if I should call an ambulance. She was adamant: No! Within two minutes there were six of us, including four elderly gents, helping him turn himself over and sit up. There was no blood on his face, just one skinned kneecap.

He shook off attempts to help him stand, looking angry, humiliated, and embarrassed. I finally rolled a shopping cart next to him and he used it to clamber to his feet. Even with his cane planted on the concrete, he still seemed shaky, but he got right back in his car with his wife and hurriedly drove off. The rest of us looked at each other and wordlessly drifted away.

I then sat in my car trying to sort out what I had just experienced. On the one hand, the quick response of a largely elderly crew was thrilling proof that we were still up for the game, that we could still help each other. But I found the embarrassed, almost hostile response of the fallen man—and the wife who obviously knew what he wouldn’t stand for—discouraging. Why hadn’t he acknowledged our desire to help him? Why had he driven off so brusquely without even checking himself out?

And why should he have felt so obviously mortified by a common accident? Because it was such a marker of old age? Why hadn’t the rest of us, me included, tried to be more persuasive about helping him? Were we too inappropriately understanding of old age’s sense of vulnerability, weakness, helplessness? The seeming diminution of manhood? Would a woman have acted differently?

I then mentioned it to a woman—my wife Lois and she promptly asked me, “Did it remind you of your fall?”

How had I forgotten that?

Just last winter, while walking the dog, my legs had slid out from under me on my icy driveway. I was suddenly flat on my back. I thought about inching down the driveway to a fence where I might be able to pull myself up. It would be a long trip, but…

A voice suddenly boomed out behind me. “You alright?”

“I’m fine, thanks,” I said as cheerily as I could.

“Yeah, right. It’s Jim Read.”

The local chief of police! I felt embarrassed. Strong hands boosted me up, guided me down the driveway to safe ground, and frisked me for broken bones. I barely had a chance to say thanks, before he was back in his patrol car, pulling away.

A few months later I ran into him. He shrugged off my thanks, as if he either didn’t remember my fall or considered it too commonplace to dwell on.

Role Models

Those incidents stay in my mind as symbolic of how routinely we oldsters shrink from confronting our vulnerabilities. And then I thought about two people I had once known and one I still see who faced them head-on

My prime role model, my dad, helped form my attitude toward aging and, in my own old age, he—or at least his memory—lives with me still. Above all, he taught me not to be afraid of the whole process. The second crucial figure—remember for years I was a sports reporter for The New York Times—was New York Yankee and then New York Mets manager Casey Stengel who showed me how aging could be used, for better and for worse. And my current inspiration, the 95-year-old artist Jules Feiffer, continues to offer me a blueprint for having a late working life. What they’ve all taught me is this: Once you’ve accepted that you’ll look, feel, and be treated differently in old age, you’re also ready to accept the fact that you can be the master of your attitude and response.

I met Stengel in 1962 at the first spring training of the New York Mets. He was then 71 years old, incredibly old to the 24-year-old sportswriter Robert Lipsyte. (And remember that “old” started much sooner then.) He was bitter at having recently been fired after a long and historic winning career with the Yankees. “I made the mistake of getting old,” he would tell me.

It does seem that old age almost always arrives at a bad time and it’s hard to kick the bad guys in the butt when you can’t raise your knee.

Most sportswriters readily accepted the decision of the Yankees and treated Stengel as a comical figure, too old to manage effectively. They wrote him off as “the ol’ Perfesser” and his rambling monologues as nonsensical “Stengelese,” when all conversation with him required was careful attention. (Mind you, I’m not innocent here. More than 60 years later, I still cringe at descriptions in articles I wrote then of his “pleated face” and scuttling, crab-like gait.)

Stengel could be cruel. One spring, he called a press conference and trotted out the two least talented rookies in training camp. He regaled the sportswriters with predictions about their potential and how they represented the future of the brand-new Mets. National and local press and TV outlets featured them. A few days later, they were cut from the team and never heard from again, corollary casualties of Casey’s revenge on the media.

At the time, I felt sorry for those young players. But even as one of the victims of his nasty prank, I couldn’t help appreciating how he had used our ageism against us. We swallowed his story. After all, how could that old coot bamboozle us?

But there was another side to Casey. That same first season with the Mets, on a muggy night in Houston during pre-game batting practice, I watched him respond to a middle-aged man, dragging a sullen-looking teenage boy, who beckoned from the stands. “I wonder if you remember me, Case,” he said, mentioning his name. “I pitched against you in Kankakee.” (He was referring to a pre-World War I minor-league team in Illinois at the start of Stengel’s long playing career.) The teenager kept trying to pull his father away.

Casey read the situation. He said, “The old fireballer himself. Why I was sure glad when you quit that league, I never could hit you a-tall.” Casey kept talking until it was time to manage the game.

The man and the boy returned to their seats, grinning, shoulders bumping. When I caught up to Casey, he just shrugged and then admitted he had no memory of who the man was.

Later, I told the story to one of the “Stengelese” sportswriters and he suggested Casey had staged the scene to impress The New York Times’ soft-hearted, liberal rookie reporter. “You should write that,” I responded. “It’s another way of looking at him, proves he’s still pretty sharp.”

“It’s not what the fans and the editors want,” the older sportswriter said. “They like the nutty old-fart stuff. It sells.”

The nutty old-fart stuff still sells—in the case of Joe Biden as a way to diminish, dismiss, or even demonize him. Soon after his debate debacle with Donald Trump, a stylish young editor at GQ asked me to write an old man’s take on the president’s situation, a welcome nod to experience. The first thing I thought of was how hard it is for any of us to give up what I call “the warm,” that cheering spotlight of attention. I thought of heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali, who I had ever so long ago covered as a reporter and how, in his final fights, he was humiliated because he couldn’t acknowledge getting older, losing strength and power, stuck as he was in the victory culture male’s sense of power and triumph, of never surrendering.

Biden must have shared that until he committed what functionally was political suicide, even if it was acclaimed as a selfless sacrifice.

My current inspiration, my friend and former neighbor Jules Feiffer, the famed Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, is seriously hearing- and sight-impaired and can barely walk. But he can still think, laugh, and draw. Every day.

Jules is one of those “shining examples”—especially after his first attempt at a graphic novel for middle-graders, Amazing Grapes, just got a rave review in The New York Times and tons of attention (“mostly because I’m so old,” he assured me). But it’s his spirit, often mislabeled as “youthful” instead of humane, that offers hope. Even as he admittedly struggles to hang on to what’s left of his Bronx-born American dream in the Age of Trump, he never gives up on himself or his ability to keep nudging his readers toward their own sense of possibility and change. His nearly completed next book—yes, there already is one!—will be an illustrated commentary on his (and our) strange times.

Okay, so where do I go from here? In fantasy, Dad, Casey, and Jules would make a fine team to deal with this increasingly disturbed and disturbing world of ours. If only. But how exactly do we put such a team together? We’re all short-timers, no matter how old we get, but we can’t let the bad guys wait us out. We need to treat old age as an identity and ourselves as part of an ethnic-style group deserving attention.

Yes, it does seem that old age almost always arrives at a bad time and it’s hard to kick the bad guys in the butt when you can’t raise your knee. And somehow the shining examples of individual super seniors like Dad, Casey, and Jules tend to remain just that—shining examples—rather than models for small-scale collective action.

But consider this my call to (old) arms. After all these years, haven’t we earned the right to be loud and obstreperous?

A Gang of Elders

As the former president of my town’s senior citizen organization let me tell you this: Old age is just a wrinkled extension of who you’ve always been, whether you end up frolicking in a golf cart at a luxury retirement community or waiting in semi-darkness for Meals on Wheels.

The board of my group was made up of a dozen oldsters who variously worked remarkably hard or were remarkably lazy, proved innovative or simply obstructive in distinctly alert or zombie-like modes—pretty much, I thought, as they must have acted all their lives. The nice ones could be passive, the mean ones relentless. Institutional memory was generally a good thing, but all too often presented itself as numbing anecdotage. Those seniors I dealt with then defined themselves by class, education, or economic position, but rarely age. Beyond creaky joints, treated with wry humor, and recommended doctors, old never seemed to be a shared identity.

Why not? Maybe because we didn’t have a clear social mission. The group’s main job was supporting—by fundraising and lobbying—the town’s senior services, mostly nutritional and logistical. We did that well, from buying an $85,000 wheelchair-accessible bus to renovating the local church kitchen that serves much of the food at senior events. But we could never get it together for the next major step—creating a political force. Maybe we could get seniors out on election day, but we couldn’t get them to vote for the candidates that might serve their immediate interests, much less help deal with climate change, water quality, community housing, medical and healthy food accessibility, and the like.

We couldn’t mount a resistance. We couldn’t recapitulate the spirit of the Gray Panthers, the group formed in 1970 to combat forced retirement, reform nursing home practices, and protect social security. Founder Maggie Kuhn said: “Old age is not a disease—it is strength and survivorship, triumph over all kinds of vicissitudes and disappointments, trials and illnesses.”

The Gray Panthers were created to be an intergenerational group although its energy came from the anger and experience of its older members. The Gray Panthers exist, working for peace and equal rights. Understandably it’s not a commercially sexy group and doesn’t get a lot of publicity. Still, in the age of Donald Trump, go join them anyway and remind the world that he is not what it means to be old, although statistically he would be our oldest president if the worst-case scenario occurs in November.

Or start your own club. Be a club of one. Register old people to vote and drive them to the ballot box. Don’t be shy. What have we got to lose? They can’t eat us, can they? Sharpen the end of your cane, affix spurs to the front of your wheelchair. Die trying.

While you’re at it just try not to fall. And if you do, let someone help you up.

“There would be much more violent weather – more storms, more droughts, more deluges.”

That prophecy isn’t from the Book of Revelation, but from a confidential 1989 Shell Oil memo the company commissioned to better understand what global warming could mean for their business in the decades to come.

Today, the sentence reads like a daily weather report. In the last few weeks, we’ve seen the devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene, a “deluge” that wiped out entire towns and sent homes and semi-trucks spiraling down rivers of mud, and now Hurricane Milton, one of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded. In Nepal, extreme flooding there has claimed over more than 200 lives and left parts of the capitol underwater. Meanwhile, the Amazon is facing its “worst drought on record,” further endangering what scientists have referred to as the “lungs of the world.”

“Civilisation could prove a fragile thing,” wrote the authors of the 1989 Shell memo. Indeed. As we’ve seen over the last few months, even supposed climate havens, like Asheville, NC, have been undone by extreme weather. We’ve entered an age where our civilization, no matter where we live, will likely be in need of constant upkeep and repair in the face of ever worsening climate disasters. Rebuilding our communities, and strengthening them for the challenges ahead, will be an ongoing struggle for generations to come.

For more than 70 years the fossil fuel industry has continued to rake in profits without paying a single dollar for the damage they knew their product was causing to our climate and communities.

Which raises the question: how are we going to pay for all of this? Early estimates put the damage of Hurricane Helene at over $200 billion and Hurricane Milton at $175 billion, astronomical figures that still can’t begin to calculate the cost of the lives lost and communities upended. That’s on top of the more than $150 billion a year the US government estimates Americans are already paying for extreme weather events. And that’s a low end estimate. According to a study released earlier this year in Nature concluded that the cost of climate damages to the global economy could reach $38 trillion a year by 2050.

Right now, those costs are coming out of one place in particular: our pockets. Even if your home hasn’t been washed away by a flood, you’re likely paying more for your home insurance due to others that have. Even if your farm hasn’t been wrecked by drought, you’re now paying more for your groceries at the supermarket. The dollars your town had set aside for a new school? They’re now being spent to rebuild roads or repair a bridge that got wiped out by yet another “100-year” flood.

Faced with these ever mounting costs, some local leaders are turning to a different solution: making polluters pay their fair share for the damage they’ve done. After all, that 1989 Shell memo isn’t the only example that fossil fuel companies knew exactly the consequences of the ongoing use of their product. As early as the 1950s, oil and gas companies knew about the dangers of global warming, but instead of warning the public and moving to clean energy, they went on to spread lies and disinformation to protect their profits.

Put another way, for more than 70 years the fossil fuel industry has continued to rake in profits without paying a single dollar for the damage they knew their product was causing to our climate and communities. Instead, they’ve very intentionally “externalized” those costs onto the rest of us, not only in the form of climate impacts, but in terms of our health, local environments, and more.

Now the bill is coming due. This May, Vermont became the first state in the country to pass a Climate Superfund Act that will make oil and gas companies pay into a fund that can be used for climate adaptation and disaster response. Five other states are debating similar legislation, including in New York, where legislators passed a climate superfund bill in June and are now waiting on Governor Kathy Hochul’s signature (last week, activists delivered more than 127,000 signatures to the Governor’s office demanding she stop dragging her feet and sign the bill into law). In September, Senator Van Hollen and Representative Jerry Nadler introduced a federal Climate Superfund bill that would collect $1 trillion from oil and gas companies to be used for relief and resiliency efforts nationwide.

The push for state and federal climate superfund bills is running in parallel to the now dozens of city, state, county, and Tribal governments who have filed lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry for climate lies and damages. These lawsuits could recoup even more money from oil and gas companies for damages, as well as uncover yet more evidence of their ongoing fraud and deception. In addition to these civil cases, some experts and attorneys are now proposing bringing criminal charges against oil companies for the “wrongful deaths” associated with extreme weather events (expect to hear more about climate homicide in the months ahead).

The devastation caused by Hurricanes Helene and Milton, and similar climate disasters around the world, demands more of a response than the “thoughts and prayers” offered by politicians still in the pocket of Big Oil. Recent polling shows that 70% of US voters support making oil and gas companies pay their fair share for climate damages. It’s time for our leaders to answer that call and make polluters pay.