Democrats are eager to recapture the House, and perhaps even the Senate, in this November’s elections. They are banking in part on the customary midterm pendulum swing and in part on backlash against President Donald Trump’s unhinged, cult-like governing style (despite the ineffectiveness of this strategy throughout several election cycles). They also hope to reclaim their reputation as the party of the working class.

As a lifelong labor activist, I am gratified whenever people in electoral politics say they want to uplift the American worker. But I admit some skepticism—particularly since both major parties spent a generation or more embracing the neoliberal consensus that the government should surrender to giant multinational corporations and their wealthy executives and investors. Working people are not stupid; they know most prominent Democrats and all pre-MAGA Republicans advanced an agenda that eviscerated worker interests at home and sent tens of millions of jobs abroad. (Many unions, especially those in manufacturing, opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement when George H.W. Bush negotiated it and when William J. Clinton signed it.) Public frustration and outrage have shaken politicians’ commitment to neoliberalism (rhetorically, at least), but will it be replaced by a program that advances the real interests of the people who rely on their own labor to make ends meet?

Now that he is back in office, Trump has abandoned any pretense of being pro-worker. He has stripped a million federal employees of the right to bargain collectively, gutted overtime rules and other workplace protections, crippled the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and deprived millions of working people of health and food benefits. He is proud and loud about protecting artificial intelligence from effective regulation just as employers start using it to mow down thousands—and ultimately millions—of jobs. Will the Democrats offer a real alternative for working people?

Some Democrats seem to be focused on the performative—searching for candidates who project non-elite “authenticity.” You know, candidates who know how to operate power tools and who drink beer from plastic cups. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great to run candidates who actually work for a living, but that’s not a comprehensive strategy. Working people want—and demand—actual change in how our leaders govern, not just how they look on TV (or TikTok). If the Democrats fail to articulate and deliver a legitimately pro-worker agenda, working people will continue to look elsewhere—perhaps voting for “none of the above.” (Note that, although the 2024 presidential election was proclaimed to be about the survival of our nation and its sacred values, more eligible voters stayed home than voted for either Trump or former Vice President Kamala Harris.)

Congress has failed to adopt legislation to enable workers to build their own power because workers do not have enough power to force Congress to do so.

Just as slick candidate packaging is not enough, the same is true of hollow “messaging.” Working people—like most voters—are tired of promises that bloom just before Election Day and wither right after. To represent workers effectively, elected officials will have to take political risks and challenge the power of the corporate elite, fighting for measures that tackle unaffordable healthcare, the housing crisis, and the vast (and growing) inequalities of wealth and income.

This seems so obvious it raises the question of why elected officials have ignored working voters’ real interests for so long. Here’s the key: Politicians will only stand up to corporate interests and press for meaningful pro-worker change if working people have enough leverage to force them to do so. For the past several decades our elected leaders chose a neoliberal path because the giant multinational companies and the ultra wealthy had the power to demand it—and working people did not have the countervailing power to resist it and to advance their own interests. It is no coincidence that the pro-corporate political consensus arose at precisely the same time that union membership plummeted in the United States. Although public approval of unions is as high as it has been in decades, the percentage of working people who are actually represented by unions is near an all-time low: about 10% of all workers and less than 6% in the private sector.

As the great United Auto Workers union leader Walter Reuther said, no one gives you anything you’re not strong enough to take for yourself. Working people need to build, or rebuild, the power to insist that politicians act in their interests, not just those of the corporate elite. Here’s a concrete example at the heart of building worker power: One of the reasons unions are so small now is that federal labor law has failed to protect workers’ right to organize and to engage in collective bargaining. There are plenty of great ideas for reforming US labor law. The Employee Free Choice Act, first introduced in 2006, would have streamlined the way the NLRB governs union organizing efforts. Opposition from pro-business senators (including some Democrats), together with the threat of a GOP filibuster, doomed it—even when Barack Obama was in the White House and the Democrats controlled both chambers. The Protect the Right to Organize Act, or “PRO Act,” would have addressed a whole range of structural and substantive problems with US labor law. It did not make it to full floor votes even when the Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate in 2021.

Why did Congress fail to adopt either of these essential bills, even when Democrats were in power? Because elected leaders—including Democrats—did not feel political pressure or fear political fallout. It’s like a Zen koan: Congress has failed to adopt legislation to enable workers to build their own power because workers do not have enough power to force Congress to do so.

Bottom line: If we want the Democrats, or the Republicans, or any political party to enact a political agenda that effectively addresses the real concerns of working Americans, we must build a movement that enhances and applies the power of working Americans. Unless and until we create a larger, stronger labor movement, politicians will not feel enough pressure to do the right thing for working people. Leverage is how politics work, and we should act accordingly. We should roll up our sleeves and get busy organizing in the workplace so we can assert real influence in the halls of government.

President Trump is facing backlash, even within his own party, for his plan to establish a $1.8 billion slush fund funded by U.S. taxpayers to compensate his political allies, including January 6 Capitol rioters. Government largesse and welfare are OK when you’re the beneficiary!

The post Sin It To Win It appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

This should not be a news flash to anyone, but the Trump Administration is out of control when it comes to war (and many other things, like ruining the economy, our judicial and electoral systems, as well as the landscape of the nation’s capital). Congress needs to do its job and reign in the executive branch. In the next few days, the House of Representatives needs to, ahem, represent the interests of the American people and vote in favor of two War Powers Resolutions, on Iran and Lebanon.

The first should be a no brainer. Congress has come close, several times now, to passing an Iran War Powers Resolution, and it was poised to pass in the House two weeks ago, before Republican “leadership” twice postponed the vote. They can’t keep kicking the can down the road forever, with even some of Trump’s loyalists on Capitol Hill expressing increasing frustration with the illegal, deeply unpopular US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran. A vote on US Rep. Gregory Meeks’ House Concurrent Resolution 86 is expected Wednesday, and it should pass, putting the House on record as opposing Trump’s and Netanyahu’s war. It would also send a strong signal of opposition to any supplemental funding bill to pay for the war.

Two weeks ago the Senate advanced its version of an Iran War Powers Resolution, Senate Joint Resolution 185, on a procedural vote, and it may proceed to a final vote this week, and if not, it should soon. Both the House and Senate votes will likely be close, and mostly along partisan lines. Assuming they do pass, Trump would probably veto the measures, and there likely would not be anywhere near the two-thirds votes required in both chambers to override the veto. Still, Congress would be on record opposing a war it did not authorize, and representing the will of its constituents rather than weapons contractors making a killing, literally and figuratively, off these wars.

In Trump’s first term, Congress passed War Powers Resolutions to stop US involvement in the Saudi Arabia-United Arab Emirates war in Yemen. While Trump vetoed those resolutions, both the Saudi and UAE governments understood they could no longer count on the US to continue its support in refueling, intelligence and targeting information, leading to a ceasefire, a sharp drop in hostilities, and an improvement in the dire humanitarian crisis in Yemen.

Meanwhile, US Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Delia Ramirez (D-IL) have introduced a Lebanon War Powers Resolution, House Concurrent Resolution 84, which is expected to be voted on Thursday.

Since March 2nd, Israel has killed nearly 3,500 people and wounded over 10,000 in its air campaign and invasion of Lebanon. The United States has engaged in the command and coordination of Israel's offensive without authorization from Congress — a violation of Section 8(c) of the War Powers Act of 1973 — including Trump directly "green lighting" or "prohibiting" Israel's actions at different junctures. The US and Israel are also deeply operationally integrated and share intelligence regarding Israel's Lebanon campaign, raising further questions about unauthorized US participation in the war.

PLEASE TAKE ACTION—make one phone call via the Congressional switchboard at 202.224.3121 to your USRepresentative, with these two asks:

• Support H. Con. Res. 86, the Iran War Powers Resolution
• Support H. Con. Res. 84, the Lebanon War Powers Resolution

Lastly, regarding Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s lust to overthrow the government of Cuba, there will be War Powers Resolutions in both Houses of Congress to prevent what would be another catastrophic, illegal war of choice.

In all of these cases, Congress would merely be asserting its Constitutional authority, assigned to the legislature, not the executive branch, over the grave decision to send US troops to war. So this should be easy, but it never is, and without pressure from voters, the war machine runs more or less on auto-pilot. We cannot let that continue.

"You’re fucking crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.”

According to Axios, this is what Donald Trump said to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in “an expletive-laden call” earlier today.

Trump also accused Netanyahu of ingratitude since Trump had helped keep Netanyahu out of jail. At the heart of the matter was Trump’s frustration with Netanyahu not caving to his demands to cease bombing Lebanon, as Israel’s aggression risked jeopardizing Trump’s diplomacy with Iran.

The story has understandably been met with considerable skepticism. After all, there is a long and well-documented pattern of American presidents privately expressing anger and frustration with Israeli prime ministers while publicly standing shoulder-to-shoulder with them and continuing to support their policies.

Take Joe Biden as an example. In late December 2023, Axios reported that Biden’s frustration with Benjamin Netanyahu had become so intense that he abruptly ended a phone call with the Israeli leader, reportedly concluding the exchange with the terse remark: “This conversation is over.” Yet in practice, Biden remained firmly aligned with Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza.

Two months later, NBC News reported that Biden had repeatedly referred to Netanyahu as an “asshole” in private conversations with aides and donors. But even as he vented his exasperation behind closed doors, Biden continued to arm Israel lavishly and shield it from mounting diplomatic and political pressure at the United Nations. The gap between private frustration and public policy could hardly have been more striking.

According to Bob Woodward’s 2024 book War, Biden’s frustrations became intensely personal during the Rafah dispute and Biden told an associate: “That son of a bitch, Bibi Netanyahu, he’s a bad guy. He’s a bad f***ing guy.” No policy change followed.

There are plenty of other examples.

There are, however, a few important counterexamples—particularly from Trump’s second term—that suggest the Axios story is not entirely implausible. (Indeed, the report would have been far more difficult to believe had Axios claimed that Trump told Netanyahu, “Everybody loves you.”)

On June 24, 2025, after Israel and Iran had agreed to a ceasefire following their twelve-day war, Israel almost immediately violated the agreement, infuriating Trump. Before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House, Trump delivered an unusually blunt and public rebuke, declaring that Israel and Iran “don’t know what the f*** they’re doing” and adding that he was “really unhappy with Israel.”

The outburst was not merely rhetorical. Trump reportedly intervened directly with Netanyahu, after which Israel halted its planned escalation and the ceasefire held for several months. Ironically, however, Trump himself would restart the conflict in February 2026, after sustained pressure from Israel and its supporters in Washington.

Another notable episode came after Israel bombed the Qatari capital, Doha, killing a Qatari security guard and jeopardizing Qatar’s role as a key mediator in the Gaza negotiations. In an extraordinary and arguably unprecedented move, Trump arranged a phone call from the Oval Office and had Netanyahu apologize directly to the Qatari Emir.

When Netanyahu later denied that he had apologized, the White House responded by releasing a photograph from the Oval Office showing Trump holding the phone while Netanyahu appeared to be reading from a prepared script. A Qatari diplomat was also present in the room, observing the apology as it unfolded.

The only comparable example that comes to mind is from 2013, when Barack Obama pressed Netanyahu to apologize to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan over the Mavi Marmara flotilla raid. Even then, however, the apology took place privately. By contrast, the Qatar episode was so unusually public that the White House itself effectively documented Netanyahu’s compliance.

None of this, of course, proves that the Axios story is true, but it suggests that it may not be as implausible as some may otherwise believe. What is also plausible, however, is that Trump will once again fail to sustain the pressure and, by that, allow for Netanyahu’s potential retreat to prove temporary.

This post originally appeared at Parsi's substack page.

California voters are clearly hungry for change. The real question now is whether Democrats are willing to confront the corporate interests and entrenched systems standing in the way of it.

That is one reason a growing number of progressives, labor organizers, climate activists, and anti-corporate advocates are rallying behind Tom Steyer despite longstanding discomfort with billionaire politics.

At first glance, that coalition can feel contradictory. Progressives have spent years warning, correctly, about the dangers of concentrated wealth and billionaire influence in American politics. Many still believe that billionaires should not exist in a healthy democracy.

So why are so many anti-corporate organizers increasingly rallying behind one now?

The question is not whether candidates are perfect vessels for progressive ideals. The question is whether they are willing to pick the right fights.

Because politics is ultimately about conflict. It is about who is willing to challenge concentrated power, which interests candidates are willing to confront, and whether they are prepared to pursue structural change instead of simply managing decline.

The question is not whether someone benefited from broken systems. The question is whether they are willing to confront the systems that produced their own power in the first place.

And increasingly, Tom Steyer appears to be the only major candidate in California's governor race openly escalating conflict with the monopolies, corporate interests, and institutional failures driving the state's affordability crisis.

That matters because California is not entering a traditional election environment.

Recent polling suggests Xavier Becerra is increasingly likely to secure one of the two spots in California's top-two primary. Whether voters like it or not, that reality changes the strategic conversation.

At a moment when voters are demanding structural change, Becerra increasingly represents continuity politics. He has struggled to articulate a meaningful critique of the status quo or explain what he would fundamentally do differently than Gavin Newsom.

The question facing many progressive voters is no longer simply which candidate they prefer. It is whether a candidate willing to challenge concentrated power, monopoly interests, and entrenched systems will make it into the general election at all.

That matters because Steve Hilton is running aggressively as an anti-establishment change candidate. If Democrats allow this race to become a contest between a candidate associated with continuity and a Republican claiming the mantle of disruption, they risk ceding the language of change to the right.

You cannot defeat a change candidate with a status quo candidate.

You need a competing change agent.

Steyer is increasingly positioning himself as one.

What makes this politically significant is not simply that he uses progressive rhetoric. Plenty of candidates do that. What matters is that he is embracing policies that directly confront concentrated wealth and monopoly power, including support for single-payer healthcare, a billionaire tax, breaking up utility monopolies, lowering energy costs, expanding public education, and building affordable housing at scale.

Those are not symbolic positions. They are direct challenges to entrenched systems of political and economic power.

And increasingly, many progressives believe the clearest indicator of that conflict is not who Steyer is. It is who is lining up against him.

When utility monopolies, fossil fuel interests, anti-tax billionaires, and major corporations begin mobilizing against the same candidate, voters should pay attention.

That does not mean progressives suddenly agree with everything about Tom Steyer or billionaire politics generally. It means many recognize that political alignment matters more than biography alone.

The question is not whether candidates are perfect vessels for progressive ideals. The question is whether they are willing to pick the right fights.

For many progressives, supporting Steyer is not about abandoning skepticism toward wealth or power. It is about recognizing that in moments of deep public frustration, the most important political question becomes who is actually willing to confront the forces making life increasingly unaffordable, unstable, and unequal.

That is the uncomfortable reality reshaping this race.

The question facing California voters is no longer whether the state needs change.

It is whether a candidate willing to fight for that change will still be standing when the general election begins.

As the American Israel Public Affairs Committee confronts a changing political landscape, one in which support for Israel has become a liability, powerful voices are coming to the defense of AIPAC and its hold on American democracy.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is one such voice. He addressed the issue in an interview with Politico. Questioned whether the pro-Israel lobby had become a dividing line in the Democratic Party, Shapiro lamented what he described as the "weaponization" of criticism directed at AIPAC, saying it was being "used cynically by some to try and silence certain voices." Pressed on whether he meant critics were erasing the distinction between opposition to AIPAC and opposition to Jewish donors, he said yes. Shapiro is recasting the lobby's scorched-earth tactics against politicians who do not toe the line on Israel as an attack on Jews and their right to political participation. That framing makes criticism of AIPAC appear suspect before the substance of the criticism is addressed.

He is not alone. Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), confronted at a town hall over $4.5 million she had taken from "pro-Israel lobbies," objected that the figure lumped ordinary Jewish donors in with the lobby. This was problematic, she said, "Not just as an elected official," but "as a Jew." In The Washington Post, the columnist Matthew Schmitz gathered statements like these into a thesis: that criticism of Israel has curdled into hostility toward Jews themselves, and that the Democratic Party is turning on a community that has been part of its coalition for a century.

Although a problematic charge, it is deserving of a serious answer. The charge conflates criticizing a political lobby with attacking the Jewish people. This conflation is convenient for the defenders of AIPAC. To see why, start with what AIPAC does.

The existence of antisemitism does not make AIPAC immune from criticism, any more than the existence of anti-Muslim bigotry would make Saudi lobbying immune from scrutiny.

AIPAC does not have to single-handedly decide an election to shape its outcome. Its power lies in changing the conditions under which the election is fought. The organization describes itself as working to "help elect Democrats and Republicans" who support the US-Israel relationship and to "defeat detractors" of that relationship. Its formal PAC gives directly to candidates, while its affiliated super PAC, United Democracy Project, can raise and spend unlimited sums through independent expenditures. In the 2024 cycle, AIPAC and United Democracy Project spent $95.1 million, more than double their 2022 spending. United Democracy Project spent almost $9.9 million to defeat Jamaal Bowman and nearly $4.8 million to install George Latimer in his place, a level of outside money The New York Times called unprecedented for a single House race. It spent more than $5.2 million against Cori Bush and another $3.3 million for Wesley Bell, who beat her.

By 2026 the same machinery had crossed party lines, and this time it left no doubt about what it was for. In May, Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie, a seven-term incumbent, lost his primary after pro-Israel groups spent roughly $9 million to defeat him, part of more than $32 million that made it the most expensive House primary in American history, surpassing the record set against Bowman two years before. AIPAC did not hide its hand. It congratulated the winner for "defeating anti-Israel incumbent Thomas Massie" and declared that "being pro-Israel is good policy and good politics." An organization whose stated mission is to silence dissent over Israel policy took a victory lap after defeating a dissenter. This is not representation but political enforcement.

That is the record the conflation obscures, because it points to a distinction Shapiro and Slotkin would rather we not draw. There is a difference between a lobby that advances an industry or community's interests and a lobby whose signature work is to destroy the people who dissent from it. The first is ordinary democracy; every group does it, and every group should be free to. The second is something else. A lobby that asks for its community to have a voice is making a claim every American can make. A lobby that vows to end any candidacy which crosses its red line on Israel is not asking for a voice—it is enforcing obedience and silence. AIPAC is the second kind, and no amount of talk about Jewish participation changes what its money does.

Here Slotkin's objection deserves a fair hearing, and then a harder look. She is right about one thing, and it matters: The $4.5 million figure she was confronted with came from a group that counts individual Jewish donors as lobby money. That is a crude metric, and her instinct to reject it is correct. Treating every Jewish donor as AIPAC is exactly the conflation worth refusing. However, she used the softness of that one number to wave away the entire subject, and the subject does not depend on that number. United Democracy Project's independent expenditures are not estimates pulled from a donor tally. They are filed with the Federal Election Commission. Nearly $10 million to defeat a single congressman is not a Jewish donor being smeared. It is a documented political operation, and in a democracy, it is fair game.

Slotkin then offered her own analogy, and it is more revealing than she intended. Plenty of groups do the same thing, she said—"a Pakistani-American group, or whatever group." Exactly so. And if a Pakistani-American group spent $95 million in a single cycle to end the careers of politicians who crossed it, that spending would be criticized too, loudly and by name—and no one would call the criticism anti-Pakistani bigotry. That is the tell. The objection to AIPAC was never that Jews organize, donate, or advocate; Americans of every background do, and should. The objection is to what this particular organization spends its money to accomplish. AIPAC is not being challenged because it is Jewish. It is being challenged because it uses organized money to enforce a narrow pro-Israel line in American politics. Strip away the identity framing and you are left with a plain question about political power—which is the question its defenders are working so hard to avoid.

The conflation cuts both ways, and the second cut is the dangerous one. Slotkin is right that lumping every Jewish donor into "the pro-Israel lobby" is crude and potentially ugly; Jewish donors are not AIPAC by definition. But the reverse move is just as serious, and it is the one AIPAC defenders rely on: treating any criticism of AIPAC's political spending as though it were an attack on Jewish identity itself. The first error mistakes ordinary Jews for the lobby. The second dresses the lobby up as ordinary Jews. That second move gives AIPAC an exemption no other lobby receives—it lets a bare-knuckle political operation spend like a political operation and then, the moment it is criticized, takes cover as a vulnerable civic organization.

The pro-AIPAC defense generally leans on ugly examples—candidates who have made reckless comments, activists who slide from criticism of Israel into something darker, a political culture where antisemitism plainly exists. None of that should be denied, and a thesis about an entire party should not be built on a handful of fringe figures either. But none of it answers the central question. The existence of antisemitism does not make AIPAC immune from criticism, any more than the existence of anti-Muslim bigotry would make Saudi lobbying immune from scrutiny.

Bigotry is real. So is political power. A serious argument must be able to recognize both at once. AIPAC is not merely participating in democracy; it is using concentrated money to discipline the boundaries of acceptable speech on Israel, while its defenders try to collapse that political critique into ethnic or religious hostility.

After a new scientific paper advanced a climate modeling framework that replaced an old extreme climate scenario with a less severe one, President Donald Trump posted to social media that climate scientists had admitted to being “WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” But it wasn’t a science mistake. It was a communication one.

Climate scenarios are not predictions. They are tools to understand how the climate would respond to different human actions, from rapid emissions cuts to current policies to backsliding into more fossil fuels. The most extreme widely-used pathway, called RCP8.5, studied a world with no climate policy and exceptionally high fossil fuel use through the rest of the century. Though always meant as an unlikely outlier, RCP8.5 has become far less plausible after a decade of accelerated clean energy deployment, to the point that this new paper proposed replacing it in future research. That should have been a climate win: Humans avoided the worst pathway and scientists revised models accordingly.

That this story could be so easily recast as scientific failure should be a wake-up call for science communicators. For years, journalists have favored alarm over nuance and problems over solutions, leaving the public poorly equipped to understand how uncertainty works or how climate action has improved future prospects. Without that context, every averted disaster can be mistaken for proof that the danger was made up at the outset.

Contrary to the president’s post, this pathway revision did not originate at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It came from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), which convened an international group of scientists to devise an updated set of climate scenarios for future study. The group didn’t just toss RCP8.5. It published a new framework that removes implausible outliers at both extremes, includes more pathways where the world uses carbon removal technologies, and centers human emissions decisions more explicitly. In a news release, the IPCC clarified that CMIP is not under their umbrella, though the research will likely appear among the tens of thousands of studies analyzed for the IPCC’s next major report.

RCP8.5 is not wrong science. Rather, science provided a map of perilous futures, people changed course, and the map refreshed accordingly.

Yet in addition to Trump, the New York Post and Daily Caller falsely presented this shift as an IPCC scandal. The New York Times and Washington Post also implied in their headlines that scientists got something wrong. These framings defy the logic of climate scenarios. Scenarios are not future predictions. Rather, they consider several possible human actions and study how the climate system would respond to each.

The uncertainty in these scenarios is a feature, not a bug. To scientists, uncertainty does not mean knowing or not knowing, but rather how well something is known. In the case of a climate model, scientists know pumping more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will warm the planet, but they cannot know exactly how much humans will emit; how strongly clouds, water vapor, surface reflectivity, and other feedbacks will amplify or dampen additional warming; or how oceans, forests, permafrost, and other natural systems will absorb or release carbon as the planet changes. Knowing this, scientists use ranges, error bars, assumptions, and confidence levels to communicate what a model can and can’t assert.

Like scientists, journalists seek the truth. However, journalists must hit far shorter word counts with far tighter deadlines. As such, they prefer hard facts and snappy quotes from authorities to convey information. They may see “uncertainty” as describing something unknown and thus irrelevant, not realizing how this thought process diverges from scientists'. Editors even less familiar with the topic may use the most conflict-charged framing or the scariest number in a range when they write headlines, favoring clicks over accuracy.

Typically, these issues are not nefarious. But when articles imply a scientific model was wrong when it was merely updated to reflect new data, they sow unfounded distrust in science and create space for climate disinformation.

In this case, changed human behavior is the new data point. When the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, the world was projected to warm by nearly 4°C, not much better than the RCP8.5 nightmare scenario. Today, based only on current policies, that projection is down to 2.6°C. While that trajectory still presents major cause for concern, these improvements are substantial, drastically reducing the risk of reaching several tipping points this century including East Antarctic glacier collapse, northern permafrost collapse, and a West African monsoon shift.

If journalists want audiences to trust science, they must tell the whole story: the danger, the uncertainty, the progress, and the paths forward.

That progress comes largely from the fact that solar costs have fallen about 90%, onshore wind about 70%, and batteries by more than 90% in the last decade, now routinely besting fossil fuels on price. Several other clean technologies have emerged and scaled, many businesses have adopted more sustainable practices, and thousands of climate policies have been enacted globally. With these achievements, what was once a plausible outlier in RCP8.5 no longer makes sense as the upper bound for climate scenarios.

Had Americans encountered frequent climate solutions reporting over the past decade, scientists setting aside RCP8.5 would have made complete sense. Yet solutions journalism remains a growing but still niche practice. Many editors worry solutions stories could look like advocacy, garner less readership, or fail to qualify as news. Evidence demonstrates the opposite: Audiences view, share, and trust solutions stories more than problem stories, and climate solutions stories specifically increase readers’ self-efficacy relative to problem-oriented alternatives.

Journalists play an essential role in showing which solutions are driving progress, where they fall short, and how best practices can be replicated. Without that news, audiences are more likely to believe climate deniers were right than understand that substantial climate progress has been happening for years, just without the sustained attention it merited.

None of this reduces the urgency of climate change. A 2.6°C world would still be incredibly costly, unjust, and catastrophic. But urgency without context leaves communities unable to assess risk and recognize which actions work. RCP8.5 is not wrong science. Rather, science provided a map of perilous futures, people changed course, and the map refreshed accordingly.

If journalists want audiences to trust science, they must tell the whole story: the danger, the uncertainty, the progress, and the paths forward. Otherwise, every hard-earned climate win risks being twisted into a scandal.

Within national mythology, California is understood to be a progressive haven—with a ruling Democratic Party passing strong regulations, ever-higher taxes on the wealthy, and supporting unions to its heart’s desire.

Unfortunately, this is far from accurate. The Democratic Party may dominate California politics, but the wealthiest state in the union no longer leads the way with innovative laws and regulations, let alone serving the interests of working people, the poor, and the middle class.

Yes, California still has a progressive income tax, the nation’s highest gas taxes, relatively strong environmental regulations, and the world’s greatest public university system—but these are legacies of bygone eras. The story of the last 20 years of single-party Democratic rule is far less inspiring (unless you’re a Silicon Valley oligarch).

Now, as progressives are making significant gains across the country, revitalizing the Democratic Party in the process, the California party remains dominated by a caste of perennial incumbents committed to neoliberal centrism that, at best, generates incremental change.

Rest assured that progressives on the ballot are part of a national movement that understands that the Democratic Party has bifurcated into a vibrant progressive wing and an increasingly sclerotic moderate establishment.

Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. Once Democrats started winning supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature, corporations and big money interests stopped wasting their time courting Republicans. They focused their lobbying on Democrats, and to great effect. California’s Democratic Party, and its leading figures, are more beholden to big business and wealthy donors than almost any state Democratic Party. This, in turn, means Democratic incumbents accrue huge campaign war chests for their re-election.

The result is a more conservative party, one that is out of sync with the electorate. Want evidence? Ask yourself how many members of the Squad have come from California? The answer, of course, is zero. Yet all public opinion polling shows that the California electorate is decisively more progressive than the national average.

It’s true that Reps. Ro Khanna and Lateefah Simon are Squad adjacent, and a few others are solid progressives—but given that California represents about 20% of the Democratic Caucus in the US House, the state’s delegation is on balance middle-of-the-road.

This disconnect—between the political beliefs of Californians and the policies supported by their elected representatives at the national, state, and even local levels—is a major barrier to the necessary transformation of the Democratic Party into a force able to vanquish the fascist-authoritarian GOP before it consolidates power and brings down the curtain on American democracy.

Simply put, the American public increasingly understands that the status quo ante of neoliberal policy, which has organized the country’s economy since the 1980s, produces one result: ever-increasing wealth inequality. The Democratic Party must break from the economics of the Clinton and Obama administrations. The Democratic base and the general public want policies that boost the lives of working Americans, just as they want a sane foreign policy and an honest democracy. They want progressive policies.

Today June 2, 2026, in California, voters have an opportunity to alter American history by electing progressives up and down the ballot. This will transform the largest state Democratic Party, bringing it back in sync with the sentiment of the state’s population so that it can lead in the development of a new 21st century social justice compact.

There are many progressive champions with a real chance of victory today—and in the general election runoff on November 3. To start, there is a clear choice at the top of the ticket: Tom Steyer for governor.

Steyer is one of three viable candidates, two of which will make the runoff. In the best circumstance, the two democrats, Steyer and Xaiver Beccera, will take first and second—a result that will translate into more Democratic victories across the state in November. However, MAGA-supporting Republican Steve Hilton still looks likely to disrupt that result. So, it’s essential to vote, and get everyone you know to vote for Steyer by 8:00 pm PT today.

Admittedly, it sticks in the throat to be supporting a billionaire, but the simple truth is that Steyer will pursue a transformative progressive policy agenda. In contrast, Xavier Beccera, who 20 years ago seemed a sincere progressive, long ago redefined himself as an establishment Democrat. Becerra is committed to maintaining Gov. Gavin Newsom’s policies that have left California stranded with the nation’s co-equal highest poverty rate, an affordability crisis that makes New York City residents blush, and a pronounced failure to lead on environmental and social policies in the manner the world expects of California.

Tom Steyer, by contrast, supports a billionaire’s tax, meaningful living wage legislation, aggressive incentives to re-boost green energy production (and film production too), and, most tellingly, a single-payer universal healthcare system for everyone in the state. A top-two finish by Steyer will guarantee a powerful debate about the direction of the state over the next five months

Beyond the governor’s race, in nearly every US house district, state assembly, and senate race, and significant city and local elections, there are strong progressive candidates challenging the dominant California Democratic Party mainstream—many of whom are poised to advance to the November runoff. Still, it’s worth noting that this has been a very confusing election season due to redistricting (and the chaos of the governor’s race), such that down-ballot candidates have had a difficult time attracting adequate attention. But rest assured that progressives on the ballot are part of a national movement that understands that the Democratic Party has bifurcated into a vibrant progressive wing and an increasingly sclerotic moderate establishment. Please do the necessary research to learn who the progressives are in your district.

So far, it’s been a very good year for progressives—let’s continue the momentum tomorrow in New Jersey, Montana, Iowa, New Mexico, South Carolina, and the largest state and soon-to-be truest bastion of progressive public policy, California.

Not least because I was 12 years old, the Bicentennial festivities felt very different from this year’s 250th birthday celebrations for the United States. This being America, commercialization was inevitable—everything was red, white and blue and was official whatever of the shindig. Overall, though, 1976 was a non-partisan affair despite being an election year following a major scandal.

No one seemed to think it should be otherwise.

Aside from the flood of Bicentennial quarters that began turning up in our change, my main interaction with the event was a junior high school field trip to Cincinnati to visit the Freedom Train, which carried notable historical artifacts but not the blockbusters I was hoping for. The Louisiana Purchase is no Declaration of Independence!

Decline was baked into the event. The train barely made it to my hometown of Dayton, whose passenger rail lines were shutting down and beginning to rust away alongside the factories that used to employ my neighbors.

America was not in awesome condition. The Vietnam War had ended a year earlier with the humiliating fiasco of the withdrawal from Saigon. Gas rationing and the OPEC crisis were fresh memories, and inflation stubborn enough to call for “WIN” (Whip Inflation Now) buttons. The president, Gerald Ford, hasn’t even been elected; the Michigan congressman had emerged, like Peter Sellers in “Being There,” from the wreckage of Watergate. In short succession we had witnessed the ouster of the vice president, then the president, and then Ford’s pardon of his disgraced predecessor, which confirmed dark suspicions that the fix is always in and the big fish never get caught. He was presiding over an impressive run of getting nothing through the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress.

And crazy women kept trying to kill him.

But it wasn’t all sour. The war was over. Criticism of the president cast him as a well-meaning, bumbling goof who couldn’t chew gum without tumbling down a flight of stairs. Though unfair, it was good-natured by today’s standards.

Most importantly, the constitutional system had worked, albeit belatedly. Republican leaders had finally abandoned Nixon, putting country above party. Nixon himself had respected political tradition enough to resign rather than subject us to protracted impeachment proceedings. Jimmy Carter, the affable, grinning Georgian who was crafting a new moderate Southern governor strategy for the post-liberal Democrats, was nailing down the nomination and exuding an irresistible optimism.

The main event was the arrival of tall ships from around the world—talk about inclusive!—with one even from the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War in New York Harbor, followed, naturally, by a nationally televised fireworks display for the ages.

The tonal contrast with the Semiquincentennial celebration centered around July 4, 2026, couldn’t be more stark.

It isn’t just a sense that the American empire is beyond mere decline but actually circling the drain, a broad-based lack of expectation that this country will ever again strive to build great things. Our exceedingly partisan president, who makes clear every day in his online and verbal communications that he does not consider half of the population of the United States to be loyal Americans, is determined to impose his personal mark on the event in a way that would never have crossed the minds of Ford or even the imperious Nixon: a triumphal arch in Washington, a $250 bill and commemorative coin both bearing his face, Trump passports, and a political rally to open his “Freedom 250” fair dedicated to the ideology of his branch of the Republican Party.

As in 1976, there will be fun—for a certain kind of American, the downscale kind Trump considers to be his supporters: a UFC cage match on the White House lawn in conjunction with Trump’s 80th birthday on June 14th, plus a NASCAR-style race through the nation’s capital and around its monuments. It’s fun for the whole family, if your family is white, male, old, and lives in a red county in a red state.

Fifty years ago, the emphasis was unity. “Each of us, of every color, of every creed, are part of our country and must be willing to build not only a new and better nation but new and greater understanding and unity among our people,” President Ford urged.

This year’s theme is exclusion, beginning with the Washington Mall national prayer rally led by Trump on May 17th—taxpayer-funded—emphasizing to everyone who is not an evangelical or at least a Protestant Christian that separation of church and state is dead and that we are “One Nation under God”—Trump’s version of God, who approves of emoluments, wars of choice, and not attending church.

For a showman who obsessed over the attendance at his first inauguration in comparison with that of his predecessor, it’s curious that Trump has chosen to throw a party to which at least half the country isn’t invited.

65% of Republicans plan to celebrate. Only 37% of Democrats do.

Though it’s impossible to quantify buzz or excitement, I doubt even the most avid MAGA supporter will argue that we as a people—even if you only include Republicans—are excited about what ought to be a momentous occasion, marking a quarter of a millennium as a new and different kind of nation-state. Far more people are talking about the FIFA World Cup, even if it’s to complain about how ridiculously expensive, and poorly planned it will be.

If anyone compares, Ford will beat Trump on the headcount.

This will be a tacky affair, one that reflects and further divides an already bitterly polarized electorate. Strip mall meets used car lot at the corner of “Idiocracy,” except that the movie’s wrestler-porn star prez cared about actual problems affecting people.

For both the president and for us, however, it will be difficult to match the low bar set by the first Centennial in 1876.

The main event for the 100th was an exhibition centered in Philadelphia that showcased American industry and innovation, like the first telephone and the importation of bananas, to which no one could object. It pointed the way to the future with a speech by Susan B. Anthony in favor of women’s suffrage. In a country of 46 million people, there were 10 million visitors, making it a huge success.

Sadly, that triumph was quickly forgotten in the catastrophic 1876 presidential election that found Democrat Samuel Tilden defeating Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. Northerners refused to accept the results, tainted as they were by extreme fraud in several states, because the Democratic Party had been seen as the party of the South during the recently concluded Civil War. So Congress passed the Compromise of 1877, which reassigned electoral college votes to Hayes, making him president. Tilden stepped aside in exchange for ending Reconstruction in two remaining states, leading to the brutalization of Southern Blacks after the withdrawal of Union occupation troops.

If Trump gets his way, the midterm elections will similarly be such a disgrace that the hot mess he is making of the Semiquincentennial will soon be forgotten as well.

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas.”)

 

The post America’s Bleak 250th appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The results that began to surface around 5:30 pm Sunday May 31 of this year in the first round of the Colombian presidential elections left many perplexed, as Abelardo “El Tigre” de la Espriella, won an uncanny number of votes, 10,359,902 as of this writing, over 670,000 votes above the front-runner Ivan Cepeda and his vice-presidential partner Aida Quilcué, with 9,687,508 votes. Paloma Valencia and her running mate Daniel Oviedo came in a distant third, much weaker than expected with 1,639,421 votes. Sergio Fajardo, the perennial symbolic centrist candidate, came in with 1,008,864 votes. The blank vote came in fifth with 406,955 votes, while Claudia Lopez, the neoliberal former Bogotá mayor, scrounged 225,480 votes, just above Santiago Botero’s 206,128. Mauricio Lizcano came in eigth with a handsome 53,839 votes. The remaining 50,000 votes were shared among a handful of remaining candidates.

Ivan Cepeda questioned the results shortly after the first round was called: “There is a discrepancy that we want to verify with respect to the electoral results. This isn’t just any old discrepancy. We are talking about 885,000 people or ID numbers.” He added, “There is information that indicates atypical votes from an undetermined number of tables. [...] Let us emphasize that only when the commission analysts clarify this discrepancy clearly and rigorously, will we share our conclusions on the results of this election.”

The electoral commission is required to clarify the situation within 72 hours. Similar concerns were raised after the March primaries and congressional elections, when 600,000 votes were recovered by Cepeda's party after they flagged irregularities, leading to 20 additional congressional seats.

Out of approximately 24,000,000 votes cast in the first round, the challenge will be how to get the 3 million or so votes in play, while also mobilizing new voters for the second round. Paloma Valencia, formerly the chosen successor of Alvaro Uribe, has already endorsed Uribe’s new horse (tiger?) Abelardo de la Espriella for the second round of the race, presumably giving him close to 11,000,000 votes for the second round. However, Valencia’s running mate, Daniel Oviedo, has indicated he will not support de la Espriella. Where his nearly 1,000,000 voters from the march primaries will align remains uncertain. He was a kind of neoliberal semi-progressive centrist before aligning with the heiress of the paramilitary political tradition in Colombia. Ironically, Valencia, in her attempt to appear centrist, seems to have lost more votes to de la Espriella than she gained from Oviedo. In the immediate aftermath of the first round results, Sergio Fajardo was coy about where he would try to direct his million-plus votes. If they were to go to Cepeda, he would be in striking distance of de la Espriella. Claudia Lopez’s votes would be an additional boost to whomever she endorses, while Santiago Botero’s 200,000 votes will likely go to de la Espriella, due to his narrow political profile as a businessman accused of domestic violence.

In the background, questions lurk about US intrusion, after threats made by President Trump and Colombian-born Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) toward Colombia as a whole if they vote the left back into office.

In 2022 Gustavo Petro won 8,542,000 votes in the first round, more than 2,000,000 votes behind the combined right-wing frontrunners, Rodolfo Hernández and Federico Gutiérrez. In the second round, he increased his vote count to 11,281,013, an increase of more than 2,700,000 votes from the first round. This means the focus over the next three weeks will be on turnout, beyond the jostling and backroom negotiations for support from the rest of the first-round candidates. Whoever can increase their turnout more dramatically will be the victor, assuming a clean election.

Abelardo de la Espriella is a Jekyll and Hyde character construction: imagine Alan Dershowitz wrapped up in the Batman comic book version of The Joker, in a bipolar bind with billionaire Bruce Wayne.

Of the current right-wing authoritarian archetypes, de la Espriella fits neatly between the evil clown, represented by President Donald Trump and Argentinian President Javier Milei, and the sadistic heir represented by presidents Nayib Bukele and Daniel Noboa (and Trump) in El Salvador and Ecuador (and the US), respectively. You could also say he is a non-senile version of Rodolfo Hernandez, the “outsider” right-wing real estate tycoon candidate who “surprised” the right-wing establishment by coming in second for the first round of the 2022 elections, which Petro ultimately won.

De la Espriella became wealthy while representing the dregs of Colombian high society, paramilitaries, cocaine capos, money launderers, pyramid schemers, mass murderers, and the like. In the carefully produced image de la Espriella has cultivated over the course of the campaign, he flaunts his lavish lifestyle, always with a twist of misogyny, while promising Nayeb Bukele-style policies, including persecution of the left, 10 new maximum security prisons, and Mileiean cuts of 40% of the public sector.

The pattern set by Trump in the US, Milei in Argentina, Bukele in El Salvador, Noboa in Ecuador, and now Asfura in Honduras, seeks to replicate itself with de la Espriella in Colombia.

Ivan Cepeda is a philosopher and politician, whose father was assassinated in 1994 as a senator for the Union Patriotica during a genocidal purge of the left-leaning political party by the same mafia elite that de la Espriella made his name defending. Cepeda has spent much of his time as a congressman, revealing the crimes of de la Espriella’s forebear, ex-president and paramilitary boss Alvaro Uribe, and aligning with popular President Gustavo Petro’s political economic program, which has initiated the process of land restitution to victims of Colombia’s decades-long civil war, and raised minimum wages in a country with the fifth most extreme wealth disparity on the planet. That is down from the third most extreme wealth disparity Colombia claimed leading out of the previous (Uribista) Duque administration into the Petro administration.

Cepeda recognizes that the road out of extreme wealth inequality requires the long-term continuity of a political project that makes solving this most fundamental of socioeconomic problems its top priority. Cepeda’s proposals build on the groundwork laid by the Petro coalition, seeking to expand public education and healthcare, while continuing the redistribution of land to millions of Colombians displaced by decades of the armed conflict promoted for so many years by Uribe and his mafia.

In the background, questions lurk about US intrusion, after threats made by President Trump and Colombian-born Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) toward Colombia as a whole if they vote the left back into office. The recordings released by HONDURASGATE and Red Diario of former Honduran president and convicted drug and weapons trafficker, Juan Orlando Hernandez, paint a picture of a US-Israel backed plan to topple left-wing governments in the region, with a particular focus on Colombia and Mexico, to pave the way for mafia states to ensure easy access by US and Israeli multinational corporations to oil and gas and key minerals for the construction of their rapidly expanding techno-fascist infrastructure.

On May 26, Department of Homeland Security General Counsel James Percival issued a memo directing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, attorneys within the Office of the Principal Legal Advisor to develop “anti-fraud policies” designed for “robust enforcement.” This effort “should include enforcement against immigration attorneys filing false asylum claims in immigration courts.”

In a press release, Percival further added: “Protection claims like asylum are intended to cover unique and narrow circumstances, but it is standard practice for immigration attorneys representing illegal aliens to assert that virtually every illegal alien is going to be persecuted or tortured in his or her home country. Historically, ICE has depended on the discipline of immigration judges and the enforcement of criminal fraud laws to deter this conduct, but ICE has its own tools. Now, thanks to this directive, ICE attorneys have greater authority to enforce the law and stop the abuse of our asylum system by illegal aliens and attorneys.”

Despite these accusations, however, there is no evidence of widespread asylum fraud occurring. As the National Immigration Forum explains, there are two departments responsible for adjudicating asylum cases: the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR). While each department has a dedicated fraud detection and prevention division, neither releases regular data on the number of cases terminated or investigated for fraud.

What limited data is available does not support the Trump administration’s case whatsoever. For instance, according to a 2015 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, “The number of USCIS asylum terminations for fraud has decreased in recent years, from 103 in fiscal year 2010 to 34 in fiscal year 2014.” During that span, USCIS terminated asylum for a total of 374 individuals due to fraud, while granting asylum to 76,122 individuals.

Going after immigration attorneys is another step toward dismantling the immigration court system and stripping noncitizens of any legal protection.

The Catholic Legal Immigration Network reports that USCIS issued 892 Notices of Intent to Terminate (NOITs) asylum status between 2009 and 2020, according to data they obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Of those issued NOITs, Notices of Continuation of Status were granted in 231 cases. Only 562 cases were terminated due to “fraud in the application.”

It is also worth noting that most asylum requests are denied. This does not mean, however, that those people did not have a legitimate fear of being persecuted or harmed in their home country. Because of regulations imposed by the Trump administration and other precedents, it is incredibly difficult for those fleeing domestic abuse, gender-based violence, police violence, and gang violence to win asylum. Even cases that would have been approved in the past are now ending with deportation orders.

What is occurring here is simply another instance of President Donald Trump weaponizing allegations of fraud to target and undermine an institution he dislikes. Whether it’s elections, Medicaid, Social Security, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Democrat-run cities, or immigration, Trump insists, without evidence, that widespread fraud is occurring at unprecedented levels. That baseless accusation then becomes the pretext for a wildly illegal abuse of power. All the while, the actual rampant fraud being committed by the Trump administration is swept under the rug.

Going after immigration attorneys is another step toward dismantling the immigration court system and stripping noncitizens of any legal protection.

Already in the past year, Trump has fired over 100 immigration judges out of roughly 750 that were in place when he returned to power. The majority of those fired were appointed under Democratic administrations, had previously worked as attorneys defending immigrants, and granted asylum at higher rates than those who kept their jobs (46% compared with 15%). The administration’s new hires, by contrast, have granted asylum in approximately 6% of cases.

Notably, in August 2025, the Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a rule allowing “any attorney,” including those with no prior experience in immigration law, to serve as temporary immigration judges. The same week, the Pentagon authorized 600 military lawyers to serve six-month terms as temporary judges. As Kyra Lilien, a former immigration judge who was abruptly terminated in July 2025, noted: “Firing expert, high-performing, effective judges and replacing them with inexperienced temps does not make the courts more efficient or achieve any goals of systemic reform. It is simply destructive.”

Amid this purge of immigration judges, San Francisco’s immigration court, which handled the third-largest number of asylum cases in the nation, was forced to close on May 1, 2026. This is no accident. Between 2019 to 2024, almost 75% of petitioners were granted some form of relief by that court compared with 43% nationwide. This disparity, however, is not due to fraud, but rather reflects the incredible work of California’s vast pro-immigrant organizations and pro bono or low-cost legal services. Their efforts continue to ensure that most noncitizens across the state have access to legal representation at their hearings.

More than 117,000 cases previously handled by the San Francisco court are now being relocated to a courthouse in Concord, about 30 miles away from the city. However, because of firings, the Concord court is, at the time of this writing, down to four immigration judges and one supervisor.

These firings will continue. Any judge who resists Trump’s mass deportation regime will be removed and replaced with someone who won’t. In recruitment ads, the DOJ and DHS openly encourage applicants to “become a deportation judge.”

At the same time, Trump is taking additional steps to maximize the number of removal orders being issued by the courts. As part of removal proceedings, individuals are required to attend “master calendar hearings”—these are brief, preliminary hearings wherein a judge formally notifies the person of the charges against them and provides them with a schedule for future hearings.

Noncitizens are now being scheduled for master calendar hearings consisting of 100 or more people at a time. These “mega masters” are largely made up of people without any form of legal representation whose original hearing was scheduled for 2027, 2028, or 2029. In February 2026, dozens of Somali migrants also had their hearings abruptly rescheduled for later that month and the next.

The goal here is simple: When someone does not appear for their hearing, regardless of the reason, a judge can issue an in absentia removal order that allows ICE agents to detain and deport them. The Trump administration is fast-tracking these cases, providing immigrants and their attorneys little to no notice, in the hopes that most will miss their hearings and a judge—whether out of fear of losing their job or loyalty to Trump—will move to deport them.

In short, the Trump administration’s overhaul of the immigration court system prioritizes cruelty and deportations over justice and the people’s right to due process.

This must end. Immigration judges should not fear losing their job for doing the right thing. Immigration attorneys should not be subject to federal investigations for helping their clients. Meaningful reforms must be implemented both to solve the problems Trump has created and the ones that predated him.

Such reforms include: first, guaranteeing that every noncitizen has access to a publicly funded attorney.

Second, ensuring that the asylum process is fair and consistent across the nation. As it stands, asylum acceptance and denial rates vary significantly from judge to judge and from court to court, effectively making the asylum process into a lottery. For instance, a 2017 Reuters report documented the nearly identical stories of two Honduran women who were targeted by gang violence due to their activism. One was granted asylum by the now-closed San Francisco court, while the other was denied their request by a court in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, immigration courts must be removed from the executive branch. This is a necessary step to protect due process and stop the abuses being enacted by the Trump administration.

Ultimately, everyone, regardless of immigration status or whatever Trump believes, deserves to be treated with dignity and have their rights respected.

America’s farmers are in big trouble. Despite the recent politically timed purchase of 12 million metric tons of US soybeans by China, after months of cancelled or stalled sales, the market remains volatile and uncertain. China now publicly favors cheaper Brazilian soybeans, and US soy exports to China have fallen to their lowest level in more than two decades.

The decline of this important market compounds other struggles farmers like me are facing, including falling commodity prices and rising costs. The number of farm bankruptcies remains troublingly high.

But there’s a solution that can help farmers lower their costs and reduce dependence on volatile foreign markets, while producing cheaper, cleaner energy for all Americans. It’s called agri-energy, and it offers a viable pathway to both food and energy independence.

American farmers were hurting long before the tariffs were put in place. Despite record yields, farming accounts for less than 1% of the American GDP and we have now entered an agricultural trade deficit.

When small farmers are forced to “get out,” our land is typically sold to large farm corporations, to real estate developers, or, God forbid, to the Dollar General corporation.

Any healthy economy relies on diversity, but we put all of our eggs into the corn and soy baskets long ago. Corn and soy are the top two agricultural commodities produced in the United States. This means that any shift in global markets—like the current trade war—can leave farmers with full silos and empty bank accounts.

Now, we’re scrambling to figure out how to recover our investments when we’ve already put so much money, time, and generational resources into these monocultures. Our yields might be excellent, but with corn and soy prices declining sharply relative to production costs, that may not matter much.

The Trump administration’s “solution” is to provide assistance to farmers in the form of relief checks and subsidies, which is akin to putting a Band-Aid on a bleeding femoral artery. Might look okay for a minute, but it’s not going to stop the flow (in this case, the flow of bankruptcies and foreclosures).

What we need to do is start focusing on whole-systems approaches. That’s where agri-energy comes into play.

Agri-energy, also known as agrivoltaics or dual-use solar, involves growing crops or grazing livestock under solar panels, allowing farmers to double dip on their land. By leasing their land for solar energy production, farmers get a nice bumper crop each year—with lease payments averaging $1,000 or more per acre. It’s consistent, reliable income that’s not dependent on the global commodity market.

Because solar leases are long—20 to 30 years or more—there’s more predictability and stability in this kind of setup than perhaps any other agricultural model. If a farmer is ready to lease his land and get out of farming entirely, agri-energy allows for another farmer to manage that land in his place. That’s the case for our family farm—we receive payment from the solar company for vegetation management services on other sites.

On a broader scale, practices like rotational grazing (typically the go-to on solar farms) improve soil quality and leave the land healthier than it was prior to the solar farm’s installation. The animals benefit, too, from improved forage and shade, reaching heavier finishing and weaning weights at a lower cost to the farmer. This, too, we’ve seen firsthand on the solar farms we graze.

Rethinking how we use the land means American farms can stay in business, producing food and energy that remains local while we invest back into our communities.

Some worry that agri-energy will take good land out of agriculture. But the reliable income from solar leases can actually keep farmers on the land. This is especially important for small farmers like me who were once told to “get big or get out.”

When small farmers are forced to “get out,” our land is typically sold to large farm corporations, to real estate developers, or, God forbid, to the Dollar General corporation. Remember: Prime farmland doesn’t remain farmland if it’s not farmed.

If we really want to reduce our reliance on global trade, agri-energy—not tariffs—may be the silver bullet we’re looking for.

This is my last article for TomDispatch. For over a decade, Tom Engelhardt has given me a platform to write about pretty much anything that grabs my—I’ll admit it, easily attracted—attention. It’s been a wonderful partnership for me, offering not just a place to publish, but a chance to think, talk, and often argue with the best editor I’ve ever worked with.

A rarity in the age of Internet insta-publishing, TomDispatch subjects every article to the scrutiny of three separate proofreaders. Not for Tom the misplaced apostrophe or the confusion between “their” and “they’re.” Unlike The New York Times in a May 12, 2026 headline, no article appearing in TomDispatch would ever go rogue and ask the question, “Did the Fifth Circuit Go Rouge With Its Abortion Pills Ruling?” (The face of the copyeditor who let that one pass should have looked as if some blusher had been applied.)

While over the last 12 years, I’ve written about a wide variety of subjects, a number of themes stand out to me for their recurrence: racial justice, war (and US military misadventures), and the insistence of women on claiming our humanity. Mostly, I’ve tried to reflect the many ways that we human beings continue to struggle for a good life in a just world, despite all the forces ranged against us. More than once I’ve had recourse to a sentiment frequently attributed to the Reverend Martin Luther King (though it didn’t originate with him): the idea that the arc of the moral universe is long, but invariably bends toward justice.

One Recurrent Theme

A couple of weeks ago, I had a conversation with a woman I’d met a few times before. She’s a Black veteran in her 90s, the newish lover of an old friend of mine. We were reflecting on the fact that so much of what we’ve fought for in our lifetimes—civil rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights—has been all but demolished in the first year of Donald Trump’s second term. “People died for those victories,” she said to me, “and now they’ve been undone so fast.”

After all these years, it feels like the arc of the moral universe is bending not toward justice, but in the opposite direction, toward inequality and fascism, nationally and globally.

It was the Sunday after the Supreme Court finished dismembering the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) with its decision in Louisiana v. Callais. That prolonged judicial murder by the Roberts court began with its 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which snuffed out a key provision of the VRA. Prior to Shelby County, jurisdictions identified in the VRA as having a history of suppressing the vote in Black, Latino, or Native American communities had to obtain federal “preclearance” before changing their voting laws. In the Shelby decision, however, the court’s conservative majority held that the passage of time had made such preclearance unnecessary, because voter suppression was no longer a problem in such places. In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously described that position as “throwing out your umbrella in a rainstorm because you’re not getting wet.”

As the Brennan Center for Justice put it 10 years later, it was clear that Ginsberg had been right—that it was still raining in the Southern states. “The effects of the ruling were immediate. The same day, Texas officials announced that they would implement the nation’s most restrictive voter ID law, which had previously been blocked in the preclearance process.” In fact, “without that ‘preclearance’ regime, the revival of discriminatory tactics was immediate: In the last 10 years, at least 29 states have passed 94 laws that make it more difficult to vote, particularly for communities of color.”

Then, in its next major attack on the VRA, the court gave two of Arizona’s laws its stamp of approval. As I wrote in 2022, a year earlier, a court that was by then already significantly shaped by Donald Trump “issued a ruling in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee upholding Arizona’s right to pass laws requiring people to vote only in precincts where they live, while prohibiting anyone who wasn’t a relative of the voter from hand delivering mail-in ballots to the polls. The court held that, even though in practice such measures would have a disproportionate effect on non-White voters, as long as a law was technically the same for all voters, it didn’t matter that, in practice, it would become harder for some groups to vote.”

Now, in 2026, the court has essentially finished the job with its decision in Callais, which allows states to redraw their voting maps to eliminate majority-minority districts. Not a month later, Southern states (including Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Tennessee) have rushed to redistrict. Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, and Texas are likely to follow suit between now and the 2028 general election. As The Guardian reports, Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center, observed that “this is a five-alarm fire for Black representation in the south.”

I’m glad that congressman and civil rights hero John Lewis didn’t live to see this day.

It turns out that white racism has been a consistent theme of my writing for TomDispatch, which is hardly surprising, given what a constant reality it’s proven to be in 21st-century America (especially in the Trump years). In 2025, I described how the Department of Government Efficiency’s decimation of the federal workforce constituted a direct attack on the Black middle class, and especially Black women. In “No More Dog Whistles,” I wrote that, under Trump, “racism isn’t just the subtext, it’s the text.” A decade earlier, I was examining race and police violence in my home city of San Francisco, which had seen a spate of police murders of Black and Latino residents. And so it went, and so it still goes.

The Ethics of War, Torture, and Terrorism

That subhead is actually the title of a college course I used to teach. It’s also been the focus of my “scholarly” work since the 9/11 attacks shocked the world and pushed the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney administration over to “the dark side.” My first piece for TomDispatch described how, a decade and a half after the 9/11 attacks and the launching of the Global War on Terror, the United States was still torturing people. President Barack Obama might have closed the CIA’s infamous black sites—its global chain of secret torture bases—but the practice continued, including at the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Subsequent articles of mine covered torture here at home, including at police stations and in our jails and prisons.

Now, we’re seeing a new kind of black site: hundreds of Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers, many already established, some still in the planning stage, strung out across the country as our own American gulag archipelago. And like the Soviet gulag, some of those sites are intended not just as holding pens, but as labor camps. As Public Citizen reported this month, “Working for $1 a day in the government’s so-called Voluntary Work Program (VWP) while detained is the only option available to earn any money for the more than 60,000 immigrants held in hundreds of active detention centers across the United States by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.” It seems that the program is “voluntary” in name only, as it’s the only way detainees can get money for basic hygiene items like toothpaste, and because refusal risks retaliation, such as being placed in solitary confinement.

I’ve labeled such centers “black sites” because, like the ones run by the CIA during the “war on terror,” they remain opaque to ordinary US citizens—or even many members of our federal and local governments. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which administers the ICE detention camps nationwide, has made a show of not permitting local officials or members of Congress to enter them. Like the CIA’s black sites, those camps represent an elaborate version of homeland security theater, designed to remind Americans of just how dangerous unauthorized immigrants supposedly are, as evidenced by how harshly DHS must treat them. They function both as a direct form of repression and as a warning to the rest of us about what could happen to anyone who resists the Trump regime. In that sense, such concentration camps (for that’s indeed what they are and what I’ve called them) are very much like another tool of repression, institutionalized state torture, about which (some years ago) I wrote a book called Mainstreaming Torture.

Another continuity between the Bush torture program and today’s ICE concentration camps is the outsourcing of the work of imprisonment and interrogation to private contractors. In the “war on terror,” private contractors—operatives from private outfits like Erik Prince’s oft-renamed Blackwater—engaged in such “interrogations.” Today’s ICE centers are also run by private contractors: the country’s two main for-profit prison companies, the GEO Group and CORE-Civic. The latter is responsible for the infamous Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas. ICE cemented its status as a public-private partnership in May 2026 when David Venturella was appointed its acting director. He left a job at GEO Group to take the post (after leaving ICE to join GEO in the first place). Some things are beyond irony.

War! What Is It Good For?

Other war-related themes have recurred in my writing for TomDispatch. I’ve written about US military interventions in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. And now we’ve witnessed perhaps the ultimate pointless intervention—Trump’s war on Iran, which, if it doesn’t end up frying us all, seems likely to wreck the world economy and plunge millions into starvation.

When unpiloted aircraft were still new, I wrote about how the Obama administration had used drones for assassinations in places like Yemen. Today, we’ve become jaded by their use—and by extrajudicial killings in general. Now, there’s hardly a journalistic ripple when the Trump administration sinks yet another tiny boat allegedly carrying drugs—and occasionally just carrying fish—in the Caribbean Sea or Eastern Pacific Ocean. Almost 200 people had died that way by the first week of May 2026.

I’ve long thought that liberation is sort of like an imprisoned genie: Once it escapes, it’s awfully hard to get back in the bottle.

The exponential rise of artificial intelligence has refueled a discussion I entered back in 2022 with an article on LAWS (lethal autonomous weapons systems). The United States has been pursuing its dream of deploying an “automated battlefield” since the Vietnam War. One major AI company, Anthropic, seems to have taken itself out of the running to assist the Department of Defense (still its name, despite Trump’s proclamations to the contrary) in fully automated kill decisions. However, Peter Thiel’s Palantir will undoubtedly be happy to step in to fill the spot. It has, after all, already been helping Israel in its genocide in Gaza. Palantir will likely be ready as well to assist in another realm Anthropic refused to enter: using AI for mass domestic surveillance. After all, this is what its flagship program, Gotham, is for.

It’s All About Hatred of Women

I didn’t grow up in a religious household. My father, though raised in an Orthodox Jewish home, had abandoned most religious practice by the time he and my mother got together. She was a lapsed Episcopalian, so I suppose it’s not entirely weird that I call myself a nice Jewish girl who goes to an Episcopal church. The point is, there was no reason for me to be praying as a six-year-old, but I often did, asking God to let me wake up the next morning as a boy. As second-wave feminists used to say, I didn’t envy the penis. I envied what it could get you: opportunity, freedom, and most of all, respect.

I lived through the movement for women’s liberation, which saved my life. It brought me the right to control my own body; to decide if and when I would have sex; to decide if and when I would have children; to decide if and when—and whom—I would marry. In truth, I never wanted to do that last one, but the vagaries of US tax law made married life much easier than a California domestic partnership. Still, I used to wonder why my gay leaders thought the two things I wanted most in the world were to join the army and get married.

So, it’s not surprising that I’ve used my TomDispatch platform to write about feminist concerns like abortion rights, my own experience of abortion, and staring down misogyny in the aftermath of Trump’s second election victory. Now, of course, his administration is advised by men who want to repeal women’s suffrage and follow up on the Supreme Court’s rollback of Roe v. Wade with white natalist dreams like an end to no-fault divorce and restrictions on birth control.

A Simple Arc?

So much of what I’ve written about over the last 12 years is now at least as bad as it ever was and possibly significantly worse. We’ve lost so much with the rise of Trump. After all these years, it feels like the arc of the moral universe is bending not toward justice, but in the opposite direction, toward inequality and fascism, nationally and globally. And yet…

All over the country, people are indeed fighting back. Minnesotans inspired a nation with their resistance to an occupying ICE army. Local communities are mobilizing to try to keep energy-eating AI data centers and detention camps out. (Just recently, ordinary people in Florida forced the closure of the notorious Alligator Alcatraz detention center.) Millions have turned out for No Kings demonstrations. And maybe it was fear of a growing backlash that kept the Supreme Court from allowing Louisiana to outlaw the abortion medication Mifepristone. I’ve long thought that liberation is sort of like an imprisoned genie: Once it escapes, it’s awfully hard to get back in the bottle.

So, about that arc of the moral universe: Maybe it’s not a single curve but something more like a river winding its way toward a great ocean. Or maybe it’s like a sine wave on a slant. It has both peaks and valleys, and we’re definitely sitting in one of those valleys right now. Nonetheless, despite Donald Trump and all the other horrors of this century, I still believe that the essential human trajectory is upwards. We continue to widen the circle of beings that matter. We continue to become braver, and maybe even a bit wiser.

That’s been my story all these years and, dire as things seem today, I’m sticking to it.

There are moments when it feels like the president’s attention (as occasionally happens when we age) just keeps getting narrower and narrower—the things he really cares about (arch, reflecting pool, Kennedy Center, gilded horse statues) are all within a few miles of his home. He can barely be bothered to stay interested in the war he started in Iran; he’s more concerned with giving pretend tours of his imaginary ballroom. (“You come in, you have cocktails,” he explained to his daughter in law, interviewing him for Fox in true dear-leader fashion. “They they go through the door, in for dinner.”)

But the momentum behind the truly dangerous Project 2025 reordering of our society continues apace, even if—without Elon Musk to give it a face—we aren’t noticing. Late last week the White House announced plans for a major tightening of political control over research grants. Instead of relying on the advice of expert panels as to which research should be funded, as Kevin Bogardus explains:

One or more senior political appointees designated by their agency head must conduct “a pre-issuance review” of all discretionary grants, making sure they follow several principles, including to “demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.”

Since I enjoy making up new words (though surely someone has beaten me to this?) I’m going to call it “scilencing.”

The danger inherent in this should be entirely obvious. Jeff Mervis at Science interviewed a number of observers:

“What OMB [Office of Management and Budget] is proposing is not a reform of grants management,” Elizabeth Ginexi, a former program officer at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), writes in a Substack post. “It is a vehicle for complete political control of science… over every stage of the federal science funding lifecycle.” Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), a leading critic of the Trump administration’s research policies, calls the proposal “a dystopian move that would destroy what remains of merit-based review.”

This would be a bad idea in a reason-based administration. In one that believes medieval nonsense about public health and that is eager to deregulate chemicals and end efforts to clean the air, it’s downright lethal.

And there is no doubt where the impulse really originated. The science the Trump administration really hates is climate science, because it threatens the “energy dominance” that the White House has made its basic foreign and economic policy, not to mention the profits of the fossil fuel industry that has been such an attentive donor. It’s not the first time that GOP administrations have tried to stymie climate science. Everyone remembers James Hansen’s crucial 1988 congressional testimony that global warming was underway; fewer recall that when he returned to Congress the next year the White House tried to rewrite and soften the conclusions in his testimony. That was under George H.W. Bush; under his son, in 2006, the White House tried again to rein him in. As he told Andy Revkin, NASA officials

ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site, and requests for interviews from journalists.

Dr. Hansen said he would ignore the restrictions. “They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public,” he said.

Hansen was crucial enough—the Paul Revere of climate change—and senior enough that he was able to keep working and speaking. And the scientific research money kept more or less flowing. But now, in this new bureaucratic play, the Office of Management and Budget is trying to make sure that such independence (the single most obvious requirement for scientific advance) is a thing of the past. As John Timmer wrote at Ars Technica:

The result is a horror show for US science research. Not only is peer review made a secondary consideration, but the new rules would allow any federal agency to cancel any grant at any time based on the vague assertion that it isn’t in the “national interest.” The document would also ban any grants on a number of culture war topics, limit international collaborations, and block spending on things like publishing papers and attending conferences.

It is, in short, a recipe for how the government can finish the job of crippling American science.

This is not yet a done deal. There is a 45-day comment period for letting the government know what you think of their plan, and 41 of those days remain. Here’s the place to have your say.

I’m not, I must say, convinced they’ll pay great attention to the comments, so it’s also crucial to be letting your congresspeople know what you think about this attack on science. Congress has so far been able to save at least some of the things Russell Vought has sought to kill: indeed, word came this week that the NOAA budget will include money to keep the carbon dioxide observatory at Mauna Loa (aka the world’s most important scientific instrument) up and running. That’s a direct result of Congress hearing outcry, so let’s keep it up.

Remind them that real leaders actually want to know what science can tell them—case in point, the remarkable new movie, Pressure, which tells the story of how General Eisenhower listened to the new and unorthodox science of meteorology to guide his D-Day decision making (95% on Rotten Tomatoes, for those of you who like numbers).

That changes on this scale are possible is precisely what terrifies the fossil fuel industry, and in turn the Trump administration.

The good news, I suppose, is that on climate and energy the cat has largely escaped the bag. We do know what the problem is, even if the ramifications become more dire with each passing week. (Here’s a somewhat terrifying update on the prospects for this year’s wildfire season; meanwhile, Tom Harris has the new numbers on Antarctic melt.). And we know where the solution lies. Indeed, it too comes into clearer focus with each passing week. As I wrote earlier this year, the action in the next few years is going to be about batteries, and boy is that proving true. Bloomberg confirmed last month that 2025 was the first year the world installed more than a hundred gigawatts of battery storage, up 48% from the year before, and expected to grow another 46% this year.

South Australia held a big auction last month for “firm supply” across the territory’s electric grid. This is supposed to be the last place where fossil fuel is superior: always-on power. But all the low bids came from companies that wanted to (and now will) install big batteries. As Giles Parkinson reported:

It is yet another sign of the growing dominance of battery storage technology in Australia’s main grids (and off grid).

Big batteries have dominated other long duration storage tenders, particularly in NSW [New South Wales], were it has sidelined pumped hydro projects, and battery storage has been steadily sending gas peakers to the sidelines, particularly in the demand peaks they used to dominate.

Indeed, Australia is emerging as the test case for just how fast and furiously you can switch a grid to clean renewables. Even as its government continues to mine huge amounts of coal to send abroad, it’s providing a generous domestic subsidy for Aussies who want to put smaller batteries in their homes. And that, in turn, is underwriting a revolution on the grid. As Adam Morton and Petra Stock wrote this past week:

Nearly 60% of the household-scale battery capacity installed across almost 200 other countries this financial year will be in the southern continent, according to a recent analysis. Since July, about 415,000 have been connected—roughly 1 unit for every 25 Australian homes.

Previously, power prices would rocket in the evenings as gas-fired power—the most expensive form of energy generation on the Australian grid—was turned on to meet peak demand. With solar and wind now providing nearly half the electricity, and coal-fired power plants gradually closing, gas has been used to fill gaps after the sun sets.

But batteries are increasingly taking over that role. Total gas-fired generation was 24% lower across three months this summer compared with the year before. Tennant Reed, the climate change and energy director with the Australian Industry Group, representing more than 60,000 businesses, says it has “completely changed how electricity prices are formed.”

I hope you’ll go back and read the sentence I italicized in the last paragraph: the use of gas to create electricity dropped 23% in a year. This is much like what’s happened in California, where Mark Jacobson reports that the world’s fourth largest economy is using 60% less gas to produce electricity than it did three years ago. That changes on this scale are possible is precisely what terrifies the fossil fuel industry, and in turn the Trump administration.

Beginning one month from tomorrow, Australians, whether they have solar panels or batteries or none of the above, will get three free hours of electricity every afternoon from noon to 3:00 pm.

And the possibilities are everywhere. Canary Media’s Julian Spector wrote last week, a new global report shows that these so-called “firm renewables” (wind and sun coupled with batteries)

“has crossed the threshold of cost competitiveness with new fossil fuel generation,” in areas with plenty of sun or wind. “The central question is no longer whether firm renewables can compete on cost, but how quickly the structural conditions needed to realise their potential can be put in place across the diversity of markets and institutional contexts prevailing globally.”

China sets the bar with its shockingly low cost of firm renewables today.

IRENA [International Renewable Energy Agency] looked at 252 solar projects that went online there in 2024 and found that many of them could be augmented with extra solar capacity and batteries to deliver power cheaper than the $100-per-megawatt-hour benchmark for new gas-fired plants. Almost all the modeled solar-battery plants could beat that cost for firm clean power 90% of the time; even at the higher reliability threshold of 99%, nearly half the projects remained competitive, and the lowest cost was $46 per megawatt-hour.

And would any of this be, I don’t know, politically popular?

Beginning one month from tomorrow, Australians, whether they have solar panels or batteries or none of the above, will get three free hours of electricity every afternoon from noon to 3:00 pm. If you want to know why our government needs to shut up scientists and ward off engineers, that’s why.

Oh, they’re also trying to shut down the world’s central archive of disasters, which lets us learn from the past. I predict that will not slow the pace of trouble.

Have a question for Ted and/or co-host Jamarl Thomas? Join the hosts of “DeProgram” for a full hour of nothing but LIVE Q&A! Any topic, any question, goes—it’s up to you.

Q&A extras are every Monday and Wednesday at 12 noon Eastern time.

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Donald Trump looked at America’s 250th birthday and neurotically concluded that he’s the main attraction.

A celebration intended to honor the founding of the United States is rapidly being repackaged as a celebration of Trump himself: his movement, his grievances, his white supremacy, his misogyny, and his power.

Every new announcement, from the MAGA rallies to the vanity projects to the carefully choreographed spectacles on the National Mall and White House lawn, reinforces the same message: this is no longer about America turning 250. It’s about Trump making sure America spends its 250th birthday talking about Trump and the power of white men.

And if that sounds familiar, it should. Washington has seen this kind of political pageantry before.

The misogynists, racists, and fascists are taking over Washington, D.C. this summer, and the parallel to the massive Klan rally of August 1925, staged under another Republican president who declined to denounce it is the script.

On that August day a hundred and one summers ago, somewhere between thirty- and forty-thousand Ku Klux Klan members marched down Pennsylvania Avenue twenty-two abreast and fourteen rows deep, ending at the base of the Washington Monument. President Calvin Coolidge refused to condemn them.

Their version of America was defined entirely by exclusion: not Black Americans, not Catholics, not Jews, not immigrants, not organized labor, not anyone outside their narrow tribal vision of who counted. That night they burned crosses in Arlington while the band played “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “America.”

A century later, the same Mall is being prepared for the same kind of show, and the artists scheduled to perform are figuring it out and getting out as fast as they can.

Within forty-eight hours of the lineup announcement for what Trump’s people are calling the “Great American State Fair” on the National Mall, the Commodores, Martina McBride, Morris Day and the Time, Bret Michaels of Poison, Young MC, and Jodie Rocco of Milli Vanilli all put out statements saying they’d been misled, that nobody told them the event was a Trump-branded MAGA operation.

Young MC told Rolling Stone it was a bait-and-switch. The Commodores said their music has always been their voice and they wouldn’t lend it to a single political party.

Trump’s response was telling. He didn’t try to recruit new acts or apologize for the confusion. He went on his failing Nazi-infested social media site and demanded the whole concert series be scrapped, replaced with what he called “a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250.”

Then he announced he’d personally headline the June 24 opening ceremony himself. The mask came off in about seventy-two hours. The 250th anniversary of American independence has been openly converted into a Trump fascist-fest, and only white MAGA who love to see gladiators beat each other bloody and senseless need apply.

Louise and I lived in Washington during the Obama years, and we visited just about every monument the city has, sometimes more than once. We were invited to the White House, and walking up that long drive past the East Wing (which is now rubble) always felt like walking into something larger than any single president.

The Lincoln Memorial at dusk, when the reflecting pool went dark and the seated figure of Lincoln doubled itself on that still water, was the kind of place where Americans of every stripe stood quietly together and remembered who we were supposed to be.

That reflecting pool, finished in 1923, has held the gravity of Marian Anderson’s 1939 Easter Sunday concert when she’d been denied the stage at Constitution Hall because she was Black, and the gravity of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, and every quiet sunset visit by every family who came to the Mall to feel something solemn about this country.

Trump has now had that pool painted blue at a cost he claims is around two million dollars, the same shade you’d find at the kid’s pool in a discount motel. He calls it “American flag blue.” Right. He drove his motorcade across the wet coating before it set, climbed out, and held a press conference standing in the middle of the pool with his cabinet secretaries around him, and now we’re paying to repair that damage, too.

He told reporters the old gray stone was “never good.” That dark surface that turned itself into a mirror for Lincoln’s face for over a century, he claimed, was “never good.” The Cultural Landscape Foundation has sued to stop his desecration because the project skipped the federal review process that exists precisely to prevent a president from treating a national memorial like the patio renovation at one of his gaudy golf motels.

The June 24 event will be Trump in front of a crowd at the National Mall, hand-picked artists who didn’t pull out, and a brand of “patriotism” carefully scrubbed of anyone who might complicate the picture.

The “State Fair” will run sixteen days. Vanilla Ice and Flo Rida are still on the bill. Behind it all, Trump is preparing to host a UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House on July 4, the actual anniversary, with up to twenty-five thousand spectators watching men beat each other senseless in a cage on the same grounds where Lincoln walked. Dana White is producing. Ivanka is helping organize.

The Roman emperors understood the deal they were making with the public: bread and circuses, panem et circenses, the cheap grain and the gladiator games delivered together, because if you fed them and entertained them they wouldn’t ask awkward questions about the empire. Trump has inverted the formula. He’s keeping the circus and taking away the bread.

On July 4, 2025 — exactly one year before this 250th celebration he’s calling a birthday party — Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates will cut at the end of this year federal Medicaid spending by roughly $911 billion, along with $186 billion in cuts to SNAP, to fund their tax cuts.

— The American Medical Association estimates that 11.8 million people will directly lose health coverage.
— The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities projects that up to 14.9 million people could be put at risk by the byzantine work requirements alone.
— The Joint Economic Committee found that under the proposed cuts, 10 million children could lose their health insurance, one in eight kids in this country.
— At least two million children are estimated to lose food assistance under the SNAP changes.

All to pay for another massive tax cut for Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet.

Set those numbers against what Trump’s spending on the spectacle. The ballroom built atop the rubble of the East Wing has now climbed to $300 to $400 million and Republicans in Congress are trying to appropriate a billion dollars for it, presumably so Trump can keep all those “donations.”

The “Independence Arch” — what Washington has already nicknamed the “Arc de Trump,” planted at Memorial Bridge to block the view of the Arlington National Cemetery where American soldiers are buried — is projected at around $100 million, with $15 million of that already pulled from a taxpayer-funded endowment through the Office of Management and Budget.

The pool job is at least $2 million. The UFC fight on the South Lawn is whatever it costs to host twenty-five thousand people for a brutal cage match at the President’s residence.

We’re talking, conservatively, half a billion dollars or more in personal vanity projects from a president who just stripped a trillion dollars from the medical care of poor Americans and a couple hundred billion more from their food. All to glorify himself.

— At the end of this year, a single father in Ohio is going to watch his SNAP benefits drop by an average of $146 a month so Trump can paint a memorial pool the color of a Mar-a-Lago hot tub.
— A grandmother in Kentucky will lose Medicaid coverage so Trump can build a French-style triumphal arch with his name nicknamed onto it.
— A kid in Louisiana — one of the states hardest hit by the Medicaid cuts — will lose her health insurance so Dana White can promote a cage fight on the White House lawn.

Panem et circenses without the panem. Just the circus, paid for by the bread he ripped out of their hands.

The Founders fought a war to be done with this sort of obscenity. They fought to be done with kings who put their names on buildings, with sovereigns who treated national wealth as personal decoration, with rulers who staged spectacles to glorify themselves while the poor lined up at almshouses.

The whole point of the experiment that began 250 years ago this summer was that we wouldn’t have a man who lived in a palace and stamped his initials on the country.

The arch wasn’t supposed to happen. The ballroom wasn’t supposed to happen. The triumphal procession down a repainted Mall, with the music acts replaced by the leader himself in front of a hand-picked crowd, wasn’t supposed to happen.

The 1925 Klan marchers thought they’d reclaimed the country for the Confederacy. They had a Republican president who looked the other way, a sympathetic press in many regions, governors in their pocket from Florida to Oregon, and a self-image as the only “real Americans.”

Their movement collapsed within a couple of years because Grand Dragon David Stephenson was convicted of rape and murder and the scandal pulled the curtain back on what they really were. Epstein files, anybody?

The lesson wasn’t that fascist movements collapse on their own; it was that ordinary Americans, when they finally saw clearly what was being done in their name, refused to keep going along with it.

Call your representatives at the Capitol Switchboard, 202-224-3121, and tell them you want the Medicaid and SNAP cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act reversed before the scam “work requirements” hit on December 31.

Support the food banks in your community: they’re about to be overwhelmed when the SNAP cuts take effect this winter. And if you live anywhere near Washington this June, you can decide for yourself whether to be on the Mall while Trump turns the 250th anniversary of American independence into a MAGA pep rally with a cage fight chaser.

If this piece spoke to you, please share it widely and consider subscribing to the Hartmann Report. The work of pushing back against the spectacle, the silence, and the slow normalization of all of this depends entirely on readers who refuse to look away and who keep passing the word along.

The 1925 Klan marchers thought the Mall belonged to them. It didn’t then and it doesn’t belong to their heirs now.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.

Today we discuss:

• Graham Platner, whose contest in Maine is a key to Democrats’ hopes of winning the US Senate, sought to discredit reports that he had exchanged sexual messages with women outside his marriage. Can his candidacy survive?

•  Four detainees at the largest ICE detention gulag in the U.S. filed a federal lawsuit alleging human rights abuses, “horrific” conditions and “severe medical neglect” at the facility. “Detained people are regularly subjected to severe beatings or sexual harassment by guards; squalid living conditions; spoiled and inadequate food; no meaningful programming or recreation; inadequate access to basic hygiene products such as soap, razors or nail clippers, outbreaks of disease; and limited or no access to sunlight,” according to the complaint.

• Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark NJ, has imposed a curfew on the area surrounding Delaney Hall, the ICE detention gulag that has become a flashpoint in the debate over Trump’s mass deportation drive. The announcement comes amid a flare-up in tensions outside the centre, which is run by the private contractor GEO Group.

• In a surprisingly strong performance, right-wing outsider candidate Abelardo de la Espriella will face leftist candidate senator Iván Cepeda in a June runoff election to decide Colombia’s presidency, setting the stage for a battle over the country’s political future. De la Espriella won the most ballots with 43.74% of the vote, with Cepeda getting 40.90%, both falling short of the absolute majority required to win outright.

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President Trump repeatedly says he feels no pressure to make a deal with Iran, even though his war led to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz and the entire global economy hangs in the balance. Given how much he has personally enriched himself from the presidency, it’s not hard to see why he feels that way.

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The right to strike is under attack throughout the world, including in the United States. Labor strikes are currently forbidden or restricted in the majority of countries.

Now, in a landmark 43-page advisory opinion issued May 21, the International Court of Justice (ICJ, or World Court) has determined that the right to strike is protected under the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Convention No. 87 on Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise.

“At a moment when workers’ organizations face sustained attacks around the world, this opinion reaffirms that the freedom to withhold one’s labor is not a privilege granted by the powerful, but a fundamental human right grounded in international law,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said in a statement.

The ILO is the United Nations agency that sets global labor standards. It has 187 member states and has adopted 191 conventions since its founding in 1919. The ILO considers Convention No. 87 to be one of its 11 fundamental conventions.

In 2023, the ILO asked the ICJ to settle an internal dispute about whether Convention No. 87 gives workers the right to strike, which is not specifically addressed in the convention. Although advisory opinions of the ICJ are not legally binding, many courts accept them as authoritative legal decisions.

The ICJ ruled in its 10-4 opinion that a strike “is one of the main activities engaged in and tools used by workers and their organizations to promote their interests and improve conditions of labour, thereby ensuring the effective exercise of the freedom of association protected under Convention No. 87.”

The Court found “that protection of the right to strike is encompassed in the protection of the freedom of association provided for in Convention No. 87.”

In reaching that conclusion, the Court considered provisions in two 1996 Covenants that contain relevant rules of international law regarding the right to strike. Both refer to Convention No. 87.

Article 8, paragraph 1 (d) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) expressly protects the right to strike, if it is exercised in conformity with domestic laws.

Article 22, paragraph 1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) provides for the right to freedom of association. The ICJ noted that for more than 25 years, the Human Rights Committee — which monitors the implementation of the ICCPR — has considered the right to strike to be encompassed in the protection of freedom of association.

Due to the high degree of overlap between the states parties to the ICESCR and ICCPR, and Convention No. 87, the ICJ determined there was a common understanding among them on the right to strike. The Court thus concluded “that an interpretation taking into account the relevant rules of international law contained in the ICESCR and the ICCPR indicates that the protection of the right to strike is encompassed in the protection of the freedom of association provided by Convention No. 87.”

No Right to Organize Without the Right to Strike

“For generations, working people have understood a simple truth: The freedom to join a union means nothing if you cannot withhold your labor when bosses refuse to listen. Now, the world’s highest court has affirmed that truth,” said Jeffrey Vogt, director of the International Lawyers Assisting Workers (ILAW) Network, which issued the call for the ILO referral of this case to the ICJ.

The ICJ decision “affirms decades of judicial precedent and what workers around the world know: there is no right to organize and bargain collectively without the right to strike,” Shuler said in her statement. “When workers are barred from taking collective action on the job, they cannot defend their rights and demand the workplace conditions and contracts they are owed. The freedom to join a union becomes an empty formality.”

“This is an important day for the International Labor Organization [ILO], and for its continued relevance in the world of work. However, the significance of this opinion extends well beyond the institutional context in Geneva,” the ILAW Network wrote in a statement.

The ICJ advisory opinion came “at a moment of acute pressure on the international labour rights system,” ILAW stated. “Across the world, the right to strike is under sustained attack — through restrictive legislation, expansive judicial interpretation of essential services, the criminalisation of trade union activity, and the use of dismissals, injunctions, and damages claims to deter collective action.”

Legal restrictions on the right to strike are increasing. In 2022, strikes were outlawed or stringently restricted in 129 of the 148 countries tallied by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), one of the six organizations with consultative status at the ILO Governing Body.

The ITUC, which represents 191 million workers in 169 countries and territories, is dedicated to trade union democracy and independence. It has regional organizations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The ICJ decision “is important not only for workers and trade unions, but also for governments and responsible businesses,” ITUC stressed.

This decision “will serve as a powerful interpretive tool before national constitutional and labour courts, before regional human rights bodies, and before the ILO’s own supervisory bodies,” ILAW noted. “It strengthens the hand of every worker and union challenging strike bans, broad essential-services designations, criminal sanctions against strikers, prohibitions on solidarity and political strikes, and the dismissal and blacklisting of workers who exercise this right.”

Ruling Will Affect Tens of Millions of Workers

In October, 18 countries and five international organizations, including the ILO, presented oral testimony before the ICJ, and other nations filed written contributions. The majority of participants supported the right to strike, which is guaranteed in most European countries.

Harold Koh, who represented the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) before the ICJ, told the judges that the case would “affect the real rights of tens of millions of working people around the world.” If the Court ruled that the Convention didn’t protect the right to strike, Koh warned, “National employer groups would contest the right to strike country by country, focusing first on nations with compliant courts, weak civil societies and ineffective media.”

Jeffrey Vogt worked with the legal team of the ITUC on the briefs and oral arguments presented to the ICJ. Vogt’s co-authored book, The Right to Strike in International Law, provided a legal roadmap for the case.

Vogt told Truthout that “the written view of the US (under the Biden administration) was to support the right to strike, albeit on narrower grounds than what we had argued. When the Trump administration came in, they withdrew the Biden era brief but fortunately did not appear for oral arguments and take a contrary view.”

“The decision deals with the right to strike in the abstract — does the convention protect it — but does not go into the modalities,” Vogt added. The Court wrote that its “conclusion that the right to strike is protected by Convention No. 87 does not entail any determination on the precise content, scope, or conditions for the exercise of that right.”

“That was a conscious decision,” Vogt noted. “We did not want the court to attempt to define the scope, especially since we believe that is the proper role of the ILO supervisory system.” Vogt said that “the ICJ gave ‘great weight’ to the views of the supervisory system, which is helpful.” And although “the ILO has supported secondary strikes,” in which workers strike in solidarity with other workers at a different employer, the ICJ decision didn’t opine on that specific issue.

The Right to Strike in the US

“The right to withhold one’s labor, inherent in the right to strike, belongs to all workers, but it has been restricted,” Jeanne Mirer, a labor lawyer in private practice working with the International Commission for Labor Rights, told Truthout. “Many unions have agreed never to strike while a collective bargaining agreement is in effect.”

Most private sector workers in the US have the right to strike under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Employees, including international and undocumented workers, cannot be fired or disciplined for participating in a lawful strike.

“Those exempted from the NLRA, such as agricultural and domestic workers, are not restricted in the right to strike but have no protections against discharge if they strike and do not have the power to prevent such retaliation,” Mirer added.

Some states have their own laws granting protection to domestic workers and 14 states guarantee farmworkers collective bargaining rights.

Railroad and airline workers are not covered by the NLRA, but they come under the Railway Labor Act, which has several limitations on the right to strike.

In recent years, Congress and the courts have narrowed the definition of “protected concerted activity” under the NLRA. Union membership is dropping. Nevertheless, strike actions in the US increased by almost 50 percent in 2022, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

In 2023, the US Supreme Court weakened the legal protections for striking in Glacier Northwest, Inc. v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters, making it easier for employers to sue unions in state courts. Only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, writing, “The right to strike is fundamental to American labor law.” She noted:

Workers are not indentured servants, bound to continue laboring until any planned work stoppage would be as painless as possible for their masters. They are employees whose collective and peaceful decision to withhold their labor is protected by the [National Labor Relations Act] even if economic injury results.

The NLRA’s protections for private sector workers don’t extend to public sector employees. “Public employees in the United States have been restricted in many ways from striking,” Mirer said.

Federal workers are legally prohibited from striking. Thirty-six states prohibit public sector workers from striking. Three other states that haven’t addressed the issue would likely outlaw public sector strikes as well. In the 12 states where strikes are not per se unlawful, various preconditions must be met before workers can engage in strikes.

The World Federation of Trade Unions, which played a decisive role in the creation of Convention No. 87 in 1948, applauded the ICJ’s decision:

[I]t is clear that the existence of a class-oriented and militant trade union movement is the essential, decisive, and irreplaceable factor to ensure that the right to strike, as well as conventions, collective bargaining, labor laws, and workers’ achievements, are not merely empty words on paper but are implemented in practice. The WFTU reiterates its call for struggle in every country, sector, and workplace to safeguard the sacred right to strike in practice.

“It is up to workers and their organizations to build on the ICJ decision to ensure the right to strike can be an effective tool to build worker power,” Mirer said.

This article was originally published at Truthout

At a time when the American public is expressing unprecedented levels of distrust in the Israeli government, Congress just proposed tying the US to the Israeli military more than ever before.

Buried in the House's version of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) released on Tuesday, is section 224, entitled “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative.” The provision would arguably do more to intertwine the US military with the Israeli military than the more than $200 billion (inflation adjusted) in military assistance Israel has received from the US since its founding in 1948.

Section 224 lays the groundwork for bilateral research and development, co-production of weapons, joint ventures, licensing agreements, and seemingly every manner of US-Israeli military-industrial complex cooperation. The US and Israel already work together heavily on missile defense, but this provision would greatly expand coordination to seemingly every area of defense tech, including AI, quantum, autonomous systems, directed energy, cyber, biotech, and many more. It also proposes “network integration” and “data fusion.” In other words, the US military’s data could soon be the Israeli military’s data.

If fully enacted, this proposal would provide a higher level of military-industrial integration than the US has with any other country in the world. To be sure, the US has worked closely with its NATO partners on co-production and shared supply chains, most notably via the Defence Production Action Plan. And, as the No. 1 arms dealer in the world, the US provides weapons to militaries across the globe. But that is mostly a one-way street, with the US providing weapons to foreign buyers who only occasionally make parts for those weapons themselves, as in the case of the F-35’s global supply chain.

The enormous gulf between what most Americans want and what the president is doing when it comes to Israel and what Congress is proposing here should not be ignored.

Section 224 would be a different beast entirely. It would fuse the US and Israeli defense sectors in multiple areas vital to the battlefields of the future, like autonomous systems and cyber. It would also bring extraordinary Israeli influence to the US beyond what it already has through the Israel lobby and its robust network of social media influencers. It would give the Israeli government the opportunity to greatly expand one of the most powerful levers of influence in US politics: jobs in the US. By expanding or starting new co-production facilities like it already has in Mississippi and Arkansas, the Israeli government could boast of providing jobs on US soil, thereby securing allies among members of Congress who represent the districts where those jobs lie.

The result could well be a US political system even more susceptible to the whims of an Israeli government that seemingly has no qualms about drawing the US into military conflicts in the Middle East.

This unprecedented level of US-Israeli military integration stands in stark contrast to the traditional aid model of defense cooperation, in which Israel already stood out as the top recipient of US military assistance. As laid out in a recent Quincy Institute brief, authored by Steven Simon, this shift from an aid model to a military integration model has troubling implications, namely:

The shift will strip away the political and diplomatic oversight mechanisms that make the relationship publicly accountable, moving it from a visible annual aid vote into the opaque machinery of defense acquisition, where oversight is limited and political accountability is minimal. The result would be a defense relationship that is simultaneously deeper and less transparent.

This all comes at a time when the Israeli military has repeatedly used US weapons in strikes that have violated international humanitarian laws in Gaza, and as Israel has repeatedly violated ceasefires (as has the US itself) in the Trump administration’s unnecessary war with Iran.

The enormous gulf between what most Americans want and what the president is doing when it comes to Israel and what Congress is proposing here should not be ignored. Just 30% of respondents to a New York Times-Sienna poll from mid-May believe President Donald Trump made “the right decision” to go to war with Iran, with 64% saying it was wrong. An Institute for Global Affairs poll released earlier this week dove even deeper into the American psyche when it comes to arming Israel, finding that “just 16% say the United States should keep supplying Israel with weapons without new restrictions. Thirty-eight percent want to stop supplying weapons entirely, and another 24% want weapons conditioned on how they’re used.”

Yet, mainstream leadership in both parties remains largely pro-Israel and continues to shape the base legislative text before amendments and broader congressional debate open it to the full body, as is the case with this NDAA provision.

Though slowly, tides within both parties are shifting as more and more members speak out against the growing divide between Israel’s actions and America’s interests. For example, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) wrote in The New York Times on Tuesday that, “the Democratic Party has provided reflexive and unconditional support to Israeli governments, even as their actions have increasingly undermined American interests and values.” On the Republican side of the aisle, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.) have openly decried the Israel lobby’s corrosive influence—a stance that may have, at least partially, cost both of them their seats in Congress.

What can other members of Congress who are concerned about Israel’s destabilizing actions do right now? Stop the Israeli-US military-industrial merger in its tracks. Lawmakers should reject Section 224 from the NDAA to avoid deep integration with Israel's military at a time when a growing number of Americans oppose Israel's actions in the region.