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In this episode of “The TMI Show,” hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan dive into two pressing issues shaping the national conversation: President Donald Trump’s Ukraine peace plan and his escalating feud with Harvard University. The episode, set against the backdrop of recent geopolitical and domestic tensions, offers a sharp, no-nonsense breakdown of these developments, grounded in the latest news.

First, the hosts unpack Trump’s proposed peace framework for the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which has sparked global debate. The plan, discussed in London, would allow Russia to retain most occupied Ukrainian territories, including Crimea, while requiring minor withdrawals. Ukraine would not join NATO. Sanctions would end. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has publicly rejected ceding land, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s decision to skip a ceasefire summit signals U.S. frustration. With Putin open to talks but Zelensky resistant, the hosts explore the diplomatic tightrope and its implications for global stability.

Switching gears, the episode welcomes guest Sabrina Salvati to dissect Trump’s war on Harvard. Sabrina Salvati is a Boston-based leftist educator, activist, and host of the Sabby Sabs podcast, known for her incisive commentary on healthcare, education, and criminal justice issues. On April 18, the Trump administration accused Harvard of failing to report foreign donations, intensifying pressure after the university rebuffed demands for sweeping changes. Trump even called for revoking Harvard’s tax-exempt status, prompting defiance from other institutions like Columbia. Salvati joins to contextualize this clash, examining its roots in Trump’s broader push against academic autonomy.

The post TMI Show Ep 123: “Trump Wants Peace in Ukraine & War with Harvard” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

In April of 2020, one of us was navigating reentry during a global pandemic, while the other was working to implement the largest-ever cash assistance program specifically for people returning from incarceration. With the publication of groundbreaking research, five years later, we know that cash assistance has a positive impact on public safety. It’s time to scale this proven strategy to California’s recidivism challenges.

Karina:

I grew up in Los Angeles, where 1 in 3 children grow up in poverty. Despite a loving mother, I was placed in the foster care system at an early age—a system known to be a pipeline to incarceration. During my third pregnancy I was incarcerated, and I spent the next three years trying to figure out how I would support my family when I got out. With no savings and limited resources, I had no idea how I would get back on my feet.

Without any support for essentials like food, rent, or even a cellphone, the challenge of rebuilding a life is insurmountable.

The pandemic forced employers to go remote. I didn’t have access to a computer or money to buy one, and I didn’t have a clue on how I would afford housing. My kids have pulmonary issues, and I couldn’t see or live with them without risking exposure.

While incarcerated, I learned about the Returning Citizens Stimulus (RCS), a first-of-its-kind initiative launched by the Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO). RCS offered financial support to people returning from incarceration. I received $2,750 in installments over two months after my release.

RCS cash made all the difference because getting and keeping a job right out of prison was nearly impossible. I applied to a job at a warehouse known for hiring justice-impacted people. I was fired on my day off because of my time in prison. For people like me this experience is commonplace. Without any support for essentials like food, rent, or even a cellphone, the challenge of rebuilding a life is insurmountable.

RCS covered my immediate needs, such as new clothes, transportation, and I could pay off my restitution. It even allowed me to take my kids out for a meal for the first time in three years. Today, I’m a member of CEO’s policy and advocacy team, where I’ve been able to use my story to advocate for direct cash assistance.

Sam:

In April 2020, when many justice-impacted people, like Karina, were locked out of government support, CEO—being one of the largest reentry services providers in the nation—conceived of and implemented RCS. The program delivered $24 million in direct cash payments to over 10,000 people returning from incarceration.

Research nonprofit MDRC’s most recent independent evaluation of the RCS program in Los Angeles and Alameda counties found that RCS reduced parole violations by nearly 15% for up to a year after enrollment with noteworthy statistical significance—meaning we can be almost certain it was the cash assistance that drove the outcomes. Parole is a costly and punitive system that accounts for 27% of all admissions to state and federal prisons and costs the U.S. over $10 billion annually.

Programs like RCS prove that a small investment at a critical time can lead to transformational change—for individuals, for families, and for entire communities.

Programs like RCS don’t just improve lives—they reduce unnecessary incarceration and save public funds. A short-term financial intervention had long-term impacts on reducing both violent and technical parole violations. It’s simple: When people have the resources to succeed, they don’t cycle back into the system.

Prop 36 is primed to roll back California’s progress in reducing its incarcerated population. More people are likely to go to prison, and less money will be directed towards reentry. The need to invest in solutions proven to halt the revolving door of incarceration have never been more necessary. California has already implemented direct cash assistance before and has a whole host of organizations ready to put it in action once again.

The governor and lawmakers must renew funding for Helping Justice-Involved Reenter Employment (HIRE). This program, set to sunset this fiscal year, has already distributed more than $500,000 in needs-based payments to justice-impacted people across the state, pairing cash support with pathways to good jobs.

Programs like RCS prove that a small investment at a critical time can lead to transformational change—for individuals, for families, and for entire communities.

Karina:

RCS offered me agency to determine my own career path. I could provide for my family while also pursuing a fulfilling job. As someone who was able to build a life through RCS, it is my responsibility to push for programs, like HIRE, that will have a lasting and significant impact on the future of my city, my state, and people returning home.

Picture this: You’re a kid in New York City living in the South Bronx and you have asthma. While friends go outside to play, you stay behind, worried that an asthma attack could send you to the hospital. Your neighborhood is surrounded by three highways and five bridges, with 300 trucks driving by every hour spewing toxic pollution. Unfortunately, this is common for many children in the lower income areas of the city who face disproportionate air pollution. Children in the South Bronx face a 17% asthma risk, over double the national average. In 2016, asthma-related ER visits were over six times higher in New York City’s low-income areas.

Neighborhoods like the South Bronx and Harlem are uniquely vibrant, but their problem with pollution is not unique as over a third of us—39% of the country—live in areas with failing air quality grades. Despite this clear public health crisis, the Trump administration is actively dismantling solutions to reduce these transportation emissions that disproportionately harm low-income communities and communities of color.

Traffic, industrial activity, and other sources create Particulate Matter 2.5 (soot) pollution. In NYC, soot contributes to 2,000 deaths and 5,150 emergency visits and hospitalizations for respiratory and heart disease each year.

Increased emergency room visits, cancer rates, and even premature deaths are the consequences of our current economic system and policies that pollute our communities, schools, workplaces, and places of worship. Traffic, industrial activity, and other sources create Particulate Matter 2.5 (soot) pollution. In NYC, soot contributes to 2,000 deaths and 5,150 emergency visits and hospitalizations for respiratory and heart disease each year. For people of color this risk is greater as they are 2.3 times more likely than white people to live in a county with failing air quality grades. Our freight system, which moves the goods we all rely on, creates especially dangerous “Diesel Death Zones,” that harm primarily low-income and communities of color. Freight trucks and buses make up less than 10% of the vehicles on U.S. roads, but are responsible for more than half of the soot and nitrogen oxide emissions from the transportation sector. Decades of racist zoning decisions, weak environmental and public health protections, and other discriminatory policies have resulted in a dirty transportation system that overwhelmingly hurts our communities.

The reality is not hopeless: The electrification of personal and freight vehicles, the expansion of mass transit, and other strategies can expand affordable transportation options, reduce air pollution, and save lives. Electrifying trucking and transitioning our grid to clean renewable energy would result in over $1.2 trillion in public health benefits and an 84% decrease in deaths from diesel emissions by 2050. With public transit expansion, we could further reduce emissions and lower transportation costs for families. Currently, low-income families spend around 30% of their salary on transportation, but with transit expansion we could save residents in urban areas an average of $2,000 per year. This would also open up options for those unable to drive and save 84,000 lives from traffic fatalities by 2050. The bottom line is that transitioning to cleaner vehicles and improving public transit makes us healthier and more connected, reduces emissions driving climate change, creates jobs, and boosts the economy.

For decades, WE ACT for Environmental Justice has advocated for and advanced equitable, clean transportation regulations and investments at the city, state, and federal levels. In New York, our initiatives, including the successful Dirty Diesel campaign, helped reduce emissions from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s (MTA) bus fleet by 95% citywide. At the Federal level, WE ACT and the “Clean Air for the Long Haul” cohort worked with the Biden-Harris administration and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to update federal regulations to reduce pollution from vehicles. We also advocated passing the largest ever investments for climate justice, which provided long-needed funds for decarbonizing transportation through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), as well as to advance landmark executive orders. After decades of advocacy, the Biden-Harris administration finally began moving toward a holistic approach to center environmental justice.

Freight trucks and buses make up less than 10% of the vehicles on U.S. roads, but are responsible for more than half of the soot and nitrogen oxide emissions from the transportation sector.

Today, this progress is under threat as the Trump administration and Republican allies are determined to attack environmental justice and dismantle these policies. On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14154 “Unleashing American Energy,” which called to repeal the “Electric Vehicle (EV) Mandate.” The term “EV Mandate” conflated several federal and state regulations that curbed vehicle emissions. Under the false banner of protecting consumer choice, the administration aims to undo protective emissions regulations, despite pleas from even automakers not to do so. In addition, the administration has rescinded memos that directed state transportation agencies to take into account environmental justice in transportation planning. Most viciously, the administration illegally froze funds for programs like the Clean School Bus Program, established under IIJA, which supports school districts in transitioning to clean, zero-emission buses. This threatens the health of children and families, and puts school districts in a difficult position.

Instead of making our health a priority, the administration has chosen to delay progress in order preserve a pollution-producing and car-centric status quo. Actions violating the U.S. Constitution, rule of law, and sound science, along with ignoring the needs of everyday people, have become hallmarks of this administration. Now, Trump and his allies are attempting to illegally remove California’s right to lead in the clean transportation transition by repealing the state’s waivers to regulate vehicle emissions. The administration is also interfering in NYC’s efforts to curb emissions and to fund the MTA’s public transportation through congestion pricing.

Right now, we need our elected officials to stand up for their constituents, for clean air, and for our future. Vulnerable communities across the country bear the overwhelming majority and heavy toll of air pollution, economic struggles, and worsening extreme weather driven by the climate crisis. Our leaders should address these issues, not make them worse to serve the interests of polluting industries.

We have the opportunity to clean up our dirty transportation sector, address and reverse decades of discriminatory policies, and better our lives. Children with asthma; families; and residents of the South Bronx, Harlem, and communities nationwide deserve clean air and fair, accessible transportation. The Trump administration and allies are pushing to shift us into reverse; instead, we must protect our clean transportation progress and drive positive change forward.

Much to my astonishment, some voters thought Donald Trump might be a “peace president.” I never bought it, so won’t outline the case for such magical thinking here, but his major increase already excessive U.S. weapons transfers to Israel as it continues its illegal genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, and recent, contradictory statements by Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio regarding working to end Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine, or throwing in the towel on diplomacy, should by now have disabused anyone that Trump is a consistent peace advocate.

In the wake of his and Elon Musk’s taking a sledgehammer to all manner of government programs, in both domestic and foreign policy, there is real concern more countries than the current nine—the U.S., Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea, which are all upgrading their nuclear arsenals, at an exorbitant opportunity cost to be paid in unmet human and environmental needs—might decide to build their own nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, the view is one of unpredictability, rather than stability, coming from Washington. That should frighten us all. So Donald Trump looks now to be more of a Proliferation President than a Peace President.

In an interview last fall with Fox News personality Sean Hannity, President-Elect Donald Trump stated, “nuclear weapons are the biggest problem we have.” Were he prone to reflection and self-accountability (admittedly a laughably far-fetched notion), Trump might admit he exacerbated the problem in his first term in office.

Trump petulantly pulled the U.S. out of the multilateral Iran anti-nuclear deal, which had effectively capped Iran’s nuclear program well short of the ability to produce The Bomb. Now his administration is exploring a new agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear program, and/or threatening to bomb Iran if it doesn’t agree to whatever he proposes. To Trump’s credit, he recently told Israel not to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, which it would need U.S. military assistance including in-air refueling to do, though Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hasn’t given up on the idea. The world, already aflame in too many places, holds its breath.

Moreover, Trump ditched the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, and the Open Skies Treaty. He infamously threatened North Korea with “fire and fury” before embarking on failed, bizarre bromance summits with Kim Jong Un. Just last week the U.S. flew nuclear capable bombers over North Korea on the birthday of its founder, Kim Il Sung. The North Korean government understandably viewed the U.S. war drills with South Korea as a “grave provocation” and threatened unspecified retaliation. Meanwhile, nuclear weapons and overall Pentagon spending soared, under Biden and now Trump, to over $1 trillion per year. Weapons contractors could not be happier, but for the rest of us, the state of world affairs is beyond alarming.

After four years in which former President Joe Biden did little to correct these problems, the world faces Trump anew with considerable trepidation. Might he reverse course and embrace an historic opportunity to halt the new arms race and pursue nuclear cuts? He can’t just be trusted to do so, though perhaps his ego (desire for a Nobel Peace Prize?) and whatever strange symbiotic authoritarian relationship he has with Russian President Vladimir Putin might factor in. Trump is planning a military parade in Washington on his birthday in June, and wants to build Golden Dome, a Star Wars-type missile defense system over the U.S., which again might well spur other countries to increase their nuclear weapons in order to overwhelm such a system, whether it would work to protect the United States (highly unlikely) or not.

Regardless, history shows us that progress toward peace, disarmament, and enhanced global security for all only happens with sustained public pressure. It can’t be left only to capricious politicians. The wild card of Trump aside, there needs to be a two-track strategy to advance an anti-nuclear, pro-disarmament agenda.

On the one hand, those who have realistic ideas about increasing world peace need to continue advocating prudent steps to reduce the nuclear danger via international disarmament diplomacy; rejecting Sole Authority for any president to launch a nuclear first strike; declaring a No First Use of nuclear weapons policy for the United States, regardless of who is in the White House; cutting funding for the New Arms Race (the estimated $1.7 trillion over thirty years “nuclear modernization” scheme, especially the Sentinel Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, which doesn’t work and is absurdly over budget, and other new nuclear weapons systems); and building support for the UN’s Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

On the other hand, while President Trump is unpredictable—and could possibly leverage several factors to pursue nuclear weapons reductions with Russia, China (very doubtful), and possibly other states—the Dr. Strangeloves in the “defense establishment” are pushing hard for the possible resumption of full-scale nuclear weapons explosive testing, which the U.S. has eschewed since 1992, and possibly exceeding New START deployment limits of 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads for both Russia and the U.S. That treaty, the only one remaining that limits U.S. and Russia’s deployed nuclear arsenals, is set to expire February 4, 2026, with no talks to extend or improve it ongoing. The Nukes Forever crowd propose increasing funding for and accelerating new nuclear weapons systems and warhead factories, and limiting congressional oversight while streamlining approval for such unproven programs, and more.

Anyone who cares about U.S. and global security needs to oppose, and in some cases work to pre-empt, such steps toward the nuclear brink. Stopping any move to resume nuclear weapons testing might well be key to reviving broad domestic and global opposition to nuclear weapons.

A clear eyed analysis shows Trump has never shown genuine interest in peace except for possible political gain. Then there is his bizarre bond with his tyrannical counterpart, Vladimir Putin, at the expense of Ukraine's (and Europe's) independence. This Trump-Putin relationship, along with Trump's fanciful yet terrifying imperialist goals (including possible conquest of Panama, Greenland, Gaza, and maybe Canada) and the high stakes economic, political and possibly military competition with China, make him seem much more militaristic than pacific.

So those expecting Trump to be a Peace President are likely to be sorely disappointed. The rest of us should remain vigilant and advocate opportunities for real progress toward peace and disarmament.

Harvard University is under the worst assault by the U.S. government since the McCarthy era, but other Ivy League schools and state universities are also sitting in the crosshairs. Harvard is especially newsworthy for the breadth of the attack on its administration, faculty and programs, but other prestigious public and private universities have been put under the federal government microscope. This national blitzkrieg against higher education was kicked off by campus demonstrations blamed on antisemitism and the apparent unwillingness or inability of college administrators to protect Jewish students from harassment.

At Columbia University, it did seem that university administrators were slow to recognize the need to confront pro-Palestinian demonstrators who harassed Jewish students in various ways, including obstruction by protestors of students’ access to classrooms and demonstrators’ expressions of hateful racist and religious sentiments. On the other hand, when Columbia and other universities did make sincere efforts to crack down on rowdyism threatening to campus operations and culture, media and government criticism only intensified. The half-life of Ivy league college presidents began to resemble the longevity of postings on Tik-Tok.

The most recent U.S. government demands on Harvard University and others go well beyond concerns about antisemitism, however. There is clearly an underlying bias in the Trump administration toward Ivy League and other universities that are supposedly teaching uncritical liberal political ideologies and suppressing free speech on the part of conservatives. These allegations of liberal bias in higher education are not new, but the Trump administration has demanded what amounts to ideological audits of campus curricula, together with executive orders demanding the disbanding of offices promoting diversity, equity and inclusion across the government and in federally funded colleges and universities.

Has any other democratic country declared war on its own higher education system?

The assumptions on which the current war on higher education is based deserve closer scrutiny. For example, the argument that universities are both excessively antisemitic and too liberal contradicts what we know from research on political attitudes within and outside of higher education. Antisemitism is most apparent in small towns and rural areas and among far-right groups, including neo-Nazis, promoters of the supremacy of the “Aryan race” and others who are detached from any connection to mainstream political thinking. College faculty liberals are the least likely to appear among persons committed to antisemitic biases, compared to other occupations and to the general public. Nor is there any evidence that a majority of American college students have antisemitic or other ethnic, national or religious biases.

Instead, universities have been buffeted by two forces in politics outside of the college classroom and halls of Ivy: intense polarization of political discourse; and online radicalization of some individuals within and outside of higher education. The combination of polluted political discourse and digitally driven radicalization has swamped efforts by college administrators to find a resolution to conflicts involving two competing political objectives. Those competing objectives are free speech as protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, on one hand; and, on the other, the desire to protect students and others from campus harassment that interferes with learning and denigrates a person instead of critiquing an idea.

This balance between competing objectives can be difficult to define in particular conflict situations. How far can free speech and purportedly peaceful demonstrations go before they cross the line into harassment, intimidation, or destruction of property that is unacceptable in an academic community? There is no abstract solution: each case is unique. That is why universities have established elaborate procedures for fact-finding and adjudication of allegations of student misconduct according to academic standards and, when necessary, possible violations of law. Professors, administrators, and student representatives spend a considerable amount of time sorting out these things on campuses across the country.

On the other hand, government intrusion into the micromanagement of universities or, even worse, into the contents of courses and curricula, will almost always be counterproductive to student learning and to academic excellence. One reason that the United States prevailed in the Cold War was the creation of strong partnerships between the U.S. government and higher education, especially with regard to basic and applied research in science and engineering. The list of research breakthroughs promoted by federal funding of colleges and universities included not only technologies and discoveries that improved our quality of life, but also contributed to our national defense. American experience in the 20th century showcases the fact that education is our first line of defense.

Will this successful past be repeated in the present century, or will we chase our scholars and scientists into a fugitive relationship with elected and appointed government officials? Has any other democratic country declared war on its own higher education system? Finally, one notes with interest the number of prominent conservative politicians with Ivy League academic degrees: including the current President and Vice President and not a few Republicans in the U.S. Congress and in the Trump administration. Somehow, they survived the allegedly biased experience of an Ivy League education.

A society that jails peaceful students for protesting or writing essays signals a chilling collapse of freedom. Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian Columbia University graduate, was arrested by ICE in March 2025 for leading pro-Palestinian protests, despite holding a green card. Transferred to a Louisiana detention center, he faces deportation for vague “foreign policy risks,” sparking outrage over free speech suppression. Similarly, Yunseo Chung, another Columbia student, had her green card revoked and was detained for participating in anti-war demonstrations, highlighting a pattern of targeting activists. At UCLA, Badar Khan Suri, an Indian postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown, faced detention after DHS accused him of Hamas ties for his protest involvement, with no clear evidence. These cases reveal a democracy fraying, where dissent invites punishment. Will silence become complicity?

The post First They Came for the Grad Students appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

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In this compelling episode of DeProgram, hosts Ted Rall and John Kiriakou tackle three pressing issues dominating U.S. policy: Iran’s nuclear talks, the State Department’s drastic overhaul, and chaos at the Department of Defense.

The discussion on Iran centers on recent U.S.-Iran negotiations in Rome, with senior negotiators set to reconvene on April 26, amid Tehran’s insistence on peaceful nuclear intentions and U.S. threats of military action if talks fail. They explore how Saudi Arabia’s defense minister’s visit to Tehran reflects regional tensions.

The State Department segment examines a draft executive order, reported by The New York Times, proposing to eliminate Africa operations, shut embassies, and cut bureaus on climate, human rights, and democracy by October 1, sparking panic among diplomats despite Secretary Marco Rubio’s “fake news” dismissal.

Finally, the hosts address the Pentagon’s turmoil, highlighted by a report of a former aide’s op-ed calling it “total chaos” under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, citing leaked texts on Yemen airstrikes and firings of top staff like Dan Caldwell and Darin Selnick. Rall and Kiriakou dissect these events with their signature clarity, questioning U.S. policy motives and systemic flaws. DeProgram challenges listeners to see through mainstream narratives, offering incisive analysis on Iran’s talks, the State Department’s restructuring, and the DoD’s disarray, making it essential listening for understanding global power dynamics.

The post DeProgram: Iran Nukes, State Dept Shakeup, and Pentagon Pandemonium appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Earlier this month, Donald Trump signed four executive orders aimed at revitalizing the U.S. coal industry. Once the world’s top producer, U.S. coal output has dropped dramatically over the past few decades, becoming a symbol of the disillusionment and anger around deindustrialization that remains the lifeblood of Trump’s MAGA movement.

Trump justified the orders by citing national energy security—China is now the world’s top coal producer—and rising electricity demands due to the growth of AI and electric vehicle production. He also claimed, erroneously, that coal is “cheap” and “efficient.”

But beyond policy, Trump’s invocation of coal taps into something deeper. It’s not just about energy. It’s about memory. Coal represents a symbol of “better days” in the minds of many Americans who live outside the Beltway or coastal blue cities. And nowhere does this resonance strike more clearly than in Northeastern Pennsylvania (NEPA)—once a bastion of hard anthracite coal mining, where hundreds of thousands of impoverished European immigrants arrived in the 19th and early 20th centuries to work the mines, including my own family from southern Italy.

To many on the left, Trump’s talk of coal is laughable—an empty promise rooted in a vanished world. But underneath the nostalgia is something profoundly real. Trump’s coal rhetoric taps into a collective memory where coal once formed the bedrock of community and identity—a memory that has been relentlessly mocked, even as it continues to shape political reality.

As Ben Bradlee Jr. wrote in The Forgotten: How the People of One Pennsylvania County Elected Donald Trump and Changes America, “They feel like everyone’s punching bag, and that their way of life is dying.” This is where the MAGA movement began. It’s also where my family’s story began, in Luzerne County, which Bradlee profiled. It’s a region shaped by defiance, resilience, and a submerged identity that still burns. The people who feel drawn to Trump aren’t simply imagining something lost—they’re remembering something true, even if buried beneath contradiction.

That history shines light on a host of modern-day issues, with messages for Trump supporters, his detractors, and the oligarchic class—including Trump himself.

These miners weren’t reading Marx—they were reading each other.

Trump supporters, for instance, might be surprised to learn just how radical coal country once was. In the late 1800s and early 20th century, anthracite coal country was no place for docility. Mining was brutal—likely the most deadly job in America. In NEPA alone, an estimated 35,000 men and boys died in the mines. Deaths occurred nearly every day, often in multiples. Thousands more lost limbs to falling rock or their eyesight to fire and pit blasts.

Mine owners often subcontracted operations to middlemen, suppressing wages and pitting workers against each other. This system opened the door to mafia influence and entrenched political corruption. Yet labor militancy in the region was fierce. Militant Irishmen known as the Molly Maguires bombed and assassinated mine bosses when demands were ignored. Later, socialist and anarchist movements like the IWW—the “Wobblies”—won mass support. Wildcat strikes were common.

At times, less ideologically driven groups like the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) led massive, coordinated shutdowns of anthracite production, threatening the nation’s winter fuel supply and prompting presidential intervention. These miners weren’t reading Marx—they were reading each other. And when someone got too close to power, they got thrown out.

There are also important lessons here for the left. Many, if not most, of the region’s immigrants weren’t considered white by the dominant culture. When a New York journalist came to profile NEPA miners, he described them emerging from the pits “blacker than any Africans,” covered in soot, and questioned their fitness to vote. African Americans, for various reasons, never settled in large numbers here. The population was almost entirely of European descent—yet racial identity in these places wasn’t black, white, or brown. It was sooty gray.

Italians, Irish, Slovaks, Lithuanians—none of them were white yet. Their pain wasn’t legible to elites then, and in many ways, it still isn’t. As historian Thomas Dublin has noted, “The story of American immigration is writ large in the region.” Nearly two dozen ethnic groups worked the mines, each considered their own “race.” The federal Dillingham Commission ranked them by desirability, with “South Italians” often dead last. In towns like Pittston, where my family settled, this dynamic boiled over in 1908, when two thousand Anglo-American residents marched to burn down the “Italian Colony” and lynch Italian suspects in a crime. It was a race riot.

And yet, in this complex setting, Italian immigrant leaders were often the ones fighting mafia infiltration and resisting subcontracting schemes that aligned criminal groups with mine owners.

This complex history contradicts simplistic liberal narratives that view coal nostalgia as simply being about privileged white workers clinging to lost supremacy. These workers weren’t privileged—they were the bottom rung. It wasn’t just about jobs, but about the tight bonds that came with them. Historians like John Bodnar have written about the “family economy,” where work, responsibility, and emotional support were shared across generations. Defiance wasn’t just ideological. It was communal. It was familial.

These bonds created a kind of psychic shield against brutal exploitation—a lived memory of solidarity that today’s institutional left fails to connect with. Democrats speak the language of policy and representation, but they don’t speak to this emotional grammar. To many in NEPA, Trump isn’t just about God or guns—he represents a feeling of protection, a yearning for a world where people looked out for each other.

It’s worth remembering, too, that this region was once held as a strategic asset by the industrial titans of the day—people like J.P. Morgan. And yet, coal country never celebrated the mega-wealthy. Trump today evokes a past in which people like him—the owners, the brokers—were squarely seen as the enemy. If he truly wants to channel the spirit of coal country, he should recall that when people here sensed a rat or a traitor, they threw the bums out.

In 1928, after a string of bombings and assassinations tied to mafia-mine owner collusion, Pittston’s mayor William Gillespie issued a warning that might as well serve as a metaphor for the region writ large: “The conditions that prevail in Pittston now might be looked upon as a volcano. It is not ejecting lava or smoke at present… but the fire is not extinguished. There is bitterness. There is hatred existing there to a greater extent than most people realize.”

But also love. And also community. And to whatever extent Trump, his supporters, and his critics fail to recognize the depths of this memory—they are playing with fire.

Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum quickly embraced news earlier this month of the misleadingly named “de-extinction technology” introduced by bioscience engineering company Colossal Biosciences. The premature and misguided celebration by Secretary Burgum, among many others, glosses over real, present-day conservation concerns and threatens progress to recover real species teetering on the edge of extinction.

Genetic technology to recreate long extinct species that will live the rest of their lives in captivity, held as curiosities for exhibition and publicity stunts, cannot be viewed as the solution to human-caused extinction.

Rather than celebrating emerging and untested technology attempting to recreate animals that have long since been extinct, our focus must be on the real, present-day conservation concerns and threats to existing species facing extinction. Our research efforts, conservation dollars, and legal tools should be focused on restoring and preserving the species currently on the ground and in need of help.

Genetically altering an animal to mimic one long-extinct species costs millions of dollars that could have been invested to prevent the extinction of over 1,600 species currently identified as endangered.

Instead, politicians vilify the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and claim we can Frankenstein our way to the future where nothing is natural but instead born out of a petri dish and raised in a man-made ecosystem.

If Secretary Burgum and the administration truly believed in wildlife conservation, they would not be opening massive swaths of our public lands to logging, drilling, and mining, nor would they be eliminating regulations critical to safeguarding endangered and imperiled species.

The ESA, a bipartisan federal statute enacted in 1973, has saved 99% of species listed under the law from the brink of extinction, yet has been chronically underfunded for years, starved of the resources it needs to achieve full recovery for imperiled species.

Genetically altering an animal to mimic one long-extinct species costs millions of dollars that could have been invested to prevent the extinction of over 1,600 species currently identified as endangered. In just the past few years, Colossal Biosciences raised over $430 million, enough to fully implement the ESA.

Meanwhile, representatives in Congress, like Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), are directly targeting laws that prevent wildlife extinction, including the ESA.

Rep. Boebert’s recently introduced bill, misleadingly named the “Pet and Livestock Protection Act,” would eliminate ESA protections for wolves in the lower 48 states. This bill does not protect pets and livestock; instead, it harms wolves and ignores both science and the courts, which have repeatedly affirmed that wolves need federal protections.

Rep. Westerman’s bill, the ESA Amendments Act of 2025, would make it more difficult to list species under the ESA, fast-track the elimination of protections for endangered species before they are ready, and remove scientists from the decision-making process.

Make no mistake, these bills and efforts by the Trump administration to kneecap the ESA and other federal conservation laws will undo 50 years of wildlife conservation success and put America’s imperiled wildlife at greater risk of extinction.

LIVE 10 am Eastern & Streaming Afterward at Your Convenience:

In this episode of “The TMI Show,” hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan welcome Dr. Reese Halter, a renowned conservation biologist, to mark Earth Day with a deep dive into the state of the global environment. Airing live at 10 AM Eastern and streaming 24/7 thereafter, the discussion confronts pressing ecological challenges drawn from recent developments. The trio examines the alarming surge in global temperatures, with 2024 confirmed as the hottest year on record, driven by relentless greenhouse gas emissions. They explore the intensifying climate crises—devastating wildfires in Canada, catastrophic flooding in Spain, and unprecedented coral bleaching events threatening marine ecosystems.

Dr. Halter brings insight into the accelerating loss of biodiversity, spotlighting the collapse of insect populations critical to pollination and food chains. The conversation also tackles the plastics crisis, with microplastics now pervasive in human tissues and remote Arctic ice, posing risks to health and ecosystems. Recent policy shifts, including rollbacks on U.S. environmental protections and debates over renewable energy subsidies, frame a heated discussion on political barriers to sustainability. The episode doesn’t shy away from solutions, delving into innovations like carbon capture technologies and rewilding initiatives, while questioning their scalability. With Ted and Manila’s incisive commentary and Dr. Halter’s expertise, the episode unpacks whether humanity can pivot toward a greener future or if entrenched interests will prevail. This urgent, no-holds-barred conversation challenges listeners to confront the planet’s precarious state and consider actionable steps forward.

The post TMI Show Ep 122: “Happy Scary Earth Day” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

In Los Angeles, one of the wealthiest cities in the world, a city responsible for producing the images of style and happiness that are propagated around the globe, there are 40,000 people living on the street. Even its wealthy neighborhoods were not safe from the disastrous wildfires of 2025. These problems are the result of an economic system that puts profits over human and environmental needs; a political system that allows money to impact outcomes; and a cultural system dominated by unregulated tech monopolies and other forms of corporate-controlled media.

While the technology is available to replace dirty energy with clean in the time we have left to stabilize the world at 1.5°C, many governments continue to subsidize fossil fuels at higher rates than they subsidize renewable energy. Levels of inequality are increasing both between the Global South and Global North and within countries all around the world. Living standards in the Global North are going down. One of the reasons for this is the corrosive nature of inequality. As long as a society tolerates high levels of inequality, it will contain high levels of social conflict. As people come to resent the existing social order, some turn to reactionary forms of ethno-nationalism.

All around the world voters feeling a sense of precarity have chosen to elect leaders such as former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and U.S. President Donald Trump. People’s faith in the future and sense of security are so under threat that in many places around the world, there are epidemic levels of anxiety and depression. California, one of the richest places on the planet with a two-thirds Democratic majority, has not figured out how to build a livable state. The global rise of right-wing nationalism is the symptom of a disease, rather than its cause.

We are at a crossroads in human history. We will either figure out how to share, or we will tear apart the fabric of the world that supports us. At this crucial moment we need to choose between a world based on reactionary nationalist sentiments and political power plays by the fossil fuel industry and other reactionary forms of capital, or we can figure out how to fairly share the resources we have and learn to live together in healthy relationships with nature. It is time to build a world based on relations of solidarity.

The Deep Roots of the Current Crisis

The forces that are tearing apart the fabric of our world are part of a global set of practices that have developed over the past 500 years that allow people and companies to pursue profit for its own sake without regard for the needs of others. Over those centuries, destructive practices based on capitalism, slavery, colonialism, and particular forms of patriarchy have been woven into the ways that politics, economics, and culture function.

Since its beginning capitalism has been challenged by those it has harmed: from slave revolts and anticolonial rebellions all around the world, to the Levelers and Diggers in capitalism’s original home of England, who opposed the privatization of land. And from capitalism’s beginning there have also been those who fought to get a greater share of the spoils of the system for working people. Unions have fought for better working conditions and wages from employers. Reformers have fought for the state to operate in ways that shifted the balance of power toward the interests of people and the environment.

In many European nations, accords between capital and labor were reached early in the 20th century as the result of strong labor movements. Those accords led to social democratic forms of capitalism, where living standards were kept high, and social safety nets were created, as states managed to regulate businesses while also allowing them to flourish and remain politically powerful. As inequality has increased and governments have been decreasingly able to deliver satisfying lives under these accords, many European nations have seen support for mainstream parties decline and support for right-wing nationalist parties rise.

If a new accord between capital and labor is not likely to be established any time soon, our best hope is to work to build a social world based on principles of solidarity.

In the U.S., after the immiseration and social turmoil of the Great Depression, a similar accord was reached between capital and labor, where businesses were regulated by the state, living standards were somewhat protected, and wages rose. This accord lasted until it was challenged by former President Ronald Reagan, whose began his administration in 1980 by firing striking air traffic controllers. Since that time, the U.S. has seen a steady erosion of protections for workers, regulations to protect the environment, and living standards. The Depression-era accord was broken, and the U.S. has seen a steady decline in living standards ever since.

One could imagine a situation in which a new accord was established, and a detente could be reached again between the working class and capital. As the world falls further into chaos and people’s lives become more precarious, the old accords that were established between capital and labor are no longer holding. While it is possible that rational capitalists who want a stabilized system will come to the rescue and create a new accord, that outcome is highly unlikely, for several reasons.

One reason it is unlikely is the climate crisis. Clean energy is being installed at a rapid rate, and it is transforming lives in much of the Global South. Speeding the transition in ways necessary for our survival will require more regulations on polluting industries, and more government investments in infrastructure. And yet, the fossil fuel oligarchs continue to fight those changes tooth and nail, as seen in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. The fossil fuel oligarchy holds dominant power is the U.S., Russia, the Gulf States, and many powerful transnational institutions. It is not going to peacefully wander into the sunset as the transition away from fossil fuels undermines its power and profits. The fact that the survival interests of a livable planet are in direct conflict with the interests of that politically powerful sector make it difficult for other sectors of capital to come to a new accord to stabilize the system.

Another factor making a new accord unlikely is the political power of the technology oligarchs whose social media products are responsible for much of the current chaos in the world’s information ecosystems. Those oligarchs and their firms are fighting globally to maintain their ability to operate as monopolies, and are preventing more benign forms of social media from developing. They continue to refuse to limit the spread of forms of misinformation that led to massacres in many places including Myanmar. They allow Russian bots and other malign entities to spread disinformation in ways that help us get outcomes like the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Those tech oligarchs are increasingly flexing their political power. A new accord between capital and human society would require strong action to reign in those destructive forces.

A third factor making a new accord difficult is that in earlier periods, businesses functioned largely by making things that met people’s needs. Consumers got the products they desired, and in many parts of the world, living standards rose. In the past decades, capitalism has entered a vampiric phase, where finance capital extracts profits while doing less to create things that meet people’s needs and desires. This has led to the rich getting richer without creating rising living standards as a by-product, as in happened in earlier phases of capitalism.

As inequality increases all around the world, a variety of social ills follow in its wake, as Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson write in The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. These range from obvious ones such as increased crime rates, to less obvious ones such as teen pregnancy, and a tendency for social cohesion to fall apart. Lack of social cohesion can then lead voters to put authoritarian leaders into power who promise to give them a sense of stability as their worlds fall apart.

Solidarity

Rather than trying, under these difficult circumstances, to reestablish a new accord with the exploitative systems that dominate our world, the time is ripe to dig deeply and try to uproot those systems at their cores. That will involve building alternative ways of meeting our needs, fighting against the structures that support the current system, and rethinking our understanding of our social world. If a new accord between capital and labor is not likely to be established any time soon, our best hope is to work to build a social world based on principles of solidarity.

The term solidarity is a call to unite across differences to advocate for a common set of interests. It often means standing up for the needs of others, not in the form of charity, but in the form of building social relations that work for others, or stopping destructive forces such as wars, or social practices that lead to poverty, in the name of building a world based on healthy forms of interdependency.

The movements emerging to protect immigrant rights, to protect democratic institutions, to fight against the fascist takeover of our government can all be part of a movement to build a better world.

In every part of the world there are examples of people managing resources in ways that build solidarity. They are creating community gardens, community land trusts, time banks, and credit unions. They are finding ways to support and promote sharing, gift giving, and caring for one another. They are building networks of socially oriented enterprises. They are developing models to spread. They are working to transform the context in which these enterprises take place to foster their growth and increase their impacts.

Moving to a world based on principles of solidarity involves building that new world from within the belly of the old. We need to challenge the dominant structures that uphold the old order, while simultaneously building and living in viable alternatives, and rethinking how we understand the nature of our shared social world. We need to fight, build, and rethink.

The accords established to stabilize many countries early in the 20th century were the results of tremendous work by people organizing in trade unions and broad-based social movements. Unfortunately, the current crisis comes at a time when trade unions are not as strong as they have been in some periods in the past. And yet union power is developing as are a wide range of oppositional social movements. The movements emerging to protect immigrant rights, to protect democratic institutions, to fight against the fascist takeover of our government can all be part of a movement to build a better world. As we do all we can to stop the current onslaught against a livable world, we should also keep in mind our broader vision of a world that works for all of us, including the natural systems on which our lives depend.

A woman flees devastating personal loss and finds herself at the base of towering redwood trees in Northern California. There, she persuades two botanists to let her climb hundreds of feet above the forest floor into a hidden world that transforms her perspective—and her life. This isn't the latest adventure film or bestselling memoir. It's Redwood, Broadway's unlikely hit musical that's bringing attention to one of nature's most overlooked but critical ecosystems.

Many of us working in forest conservation and restoration management were delighted when it opened on Broadway. When a musical drives sold-out audiences to stand and cheer for characters climbing into a forest canopy, it creates a cultural moment that conservation science alone never could—bringing vital attention to something that most Americans never think to look up and notice.

As a child in the 1960s, I wandered among ancient redwoods, craning my neck upward in wonder, while my parents worked to establish Redwood National Park. My father, Edgar, who would later receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his conservation work, and my mother, Peggy, who wrote about redwoods and the need to protect them and lobbying President John F. Kennedy's administration to do so, taught me that what made these giants special wasn't just their massive trunks but the entire living forest system from roots to crown. Those early lessons helped shape my life's work because what happens hundreds of feet above the forest floor matters more than most realize.

The more people recognize the vital role and wonder of forest canopies, the more momentum we build for their restoration and protection.

These aerial systems represent nature's overlooked masterpiece—a complex world scientists call the "eighth continent." Redwood canopies host biodiversity found nowhere else. Leather-leaf ferns create massive mats—up to the size of cars—that can store 5,000 gallons of water per acre, keeping forests cool and moist during summer droughts. The dense foliage also captures fog moisture that sustains the entire forest below while creating microclimates that buffer against climate extremes.

Canopies contribute to the entire forest system, linking the top to the bottom of the forest. Dust captured in the abundant foliage of ferns and huckleberry plants combined with accumulated organic matter forms rich "aerial soil" that becomes the foundation for entire sky-high communities. Rare lichens, wandering salamanders, and small mammals thrive in this elevated habitat, maintaining delicate ecological balances. From these heights, the benefits cascade downward: Canopy cover shades streams, cooling water for salmon and other temperature-sensitive aquatic species, integrating the entire forest system from treetop to riverbed into a single, interconnected climate buffer.

Yet this hidden world faces a crisis. Only 5% of old-growth redwood forests remain and have intact canopy ecosystems. Young, secondary forests that are constantly harvested lack the structure—and are not allowed time to develop—to support these rich, diverse aerial worlds. Only the largest, oldest trees—many hundreds of years old—host these critical ecosystems, and they're increasingly rare.

But hope is taking root in innovative restoration work. Working with Cal Poly Humboldt's professor Stephen Sillett and research associate Marie Antoine, we have begun transplanting fern mats, collected from the forest floor after winter storms, into the tallest trees in secondary redwood forests we conserve and manage, rebuilding canopy ecosystems from scratch. Working in our Van Eck forest near Fieldbrook, California, we've nurtured these ferns and then "planted" them hundreds of feet high in trees that will remain permanently protected. These specially selected trees are designated as "Potentially Elite Trees" (PETs)—the giants of tomorrow. Individual old trees are a lot like the oldest elephants in a herd; they contain the wisdom and resources to help an otherwise young forest function as an old forest, just as those old elephants guide their herds. And, we continue to harvest timber on these forests—on average a million board foot a year—while restoring the structure and function of old forests.

Now, we are expanding our efforts, adding huckleberry to our plantings to support new sky gardens. This patient approach creates homes for birds, salamanders, and countless insects, jump-starting processes that would naturally take centuries.

Redwood captures an essential truth: Forests are not just timber resources. They're living systems with lessons to teach us about building resilience in an uncertain future.

The Broadway experience provides audiences a glimmer of what happens when people encounter these giants in real life—and that's critically important. The more people recognize the vital role and wonder of forest canopies, the more momentum we build for their restoration and protection. But awareness must translate to action.

As debate rages on the role of federal forests and the need to protect their old and mature forests, there is also a major opportunity for action on private forests, where landowners' decisions will endure beyond a political cycle. For private forests, working forest conservation easements offer a proven path forward—providing landowners financial incentives to conserve and manage for older forests, develop complex structures, and designate future "PETs" that can support the function of old forests. This can transform forest recovery from centuries-long waits to achievable timelines within human lifespans.

Recent sweeping cuts to the National Park Service and U.S. Forest Service workforce threaten our old forests. Rangers and scientists do more than protect and research forests—they guide visitors to witness these majestic ecosystems firsthand. These cuts, applied "like an ax rather than a scalpel", endanger both the health of our forests and the transformative experiences for the public. When people stand beneath ancient trees and look upward, they understand viscerally why these forests and their canopies must be protected.

Protecting and restoring these overlooked canopy ecosystems has never been more urgent as climate change accelerates. Broadway's spotlight on redwoods helps us understand why what happens above our heads matters so much for our future below. When audiences gasp as Idina Menzel spins and embraces that massive trunk, they glimpse not just theatrical magic but a vision of what we stand to lose—and what we must fight to restore and preserve. The living world above demands our attention, protection, and active restoration—not just in California's iconic redwoods, but in every forest ecosystem on Earth.

Since the day U.S. President Donald Trump took office, his administration has relentlessly pursued an agenda that puts the profits of his billionaire allies above the well-being of the American people and our environment.

Trump’s strategy seems clear: Do so much damage so quickly that no one can focus on one issue for long before something else draws attention away.

Yet Earth Day reminds us that our public lands, wildlife and, climate are priorities among the flurry of broad and harmful executive actions.

Wildlife Under Siege

The latest in Trump’s onslaught of attacks on our environmental protections came just days ago with a proposed rule change on endangered species.

Trump wants to gut the very core of these protections: preserving crucial wildlife habitat, even though habitat destruction is the primary driver toward extinction for most animals. Instead, Trump would limit what it means to “harm” endangered species to killing or hunting animals directly.

Endangered species rollbacks are just one of far too many Trump orders and actions that chip away at hard-fought protections for people and the planet.

If Trump gets his way, logging, mining, drilling, developing, or polluting the lands where animals live or breed wouldn’t be considered “harm” to imperiled wildlife. With such reckless action, we could lose endangered species like grizzly bears entirely, while species that have bounced back because of these protections—including bald eagles—could head back toward extinction again. It’s just not possible to protect animals and plants from extinction without protecting their natural home.

This comes after Trump already cut funds to life-saving international elephant and rhino conservation programs and fired thousands of workers across federal agencies who ensure endangered species are protected throughout the country.

Endangered species rollbacks are just one of far too many Trump orders and actions that chip away at hard-fought protections for people and the planet.

Attacking Science

Trump’s attacks on science and efforts to tackle climate change began on day one of his presidency, when he moved to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris agreement, an international treaty to limit climate-warming emissions.

Trump escalated his war on science with a plan to defund crucial NASA research and climate science. Trump forced the removal of government websites that map climate, pollution, and offer environmental justice resources.

Then Trump took steps to revoke the government’s basis for tackling climate change, a finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and the environment.

Without leadership from the White House, we will have to rely on state leaders to take action on climate change.

Chopping and Burning Natural Resources

Trump’s greed is on full display with his efforts to expand and prioritize oil, gas, coal, mining, and logging operations on public lands.

Trump just unleashed the chainsaws on our national forests with a goal of ramping up logging and road building on public lands. This will pollute the drinking water of 180 million Americans and clear the forests that many wildlife species need to survive. Cutting down older, fire-resilient trees will also make wildfires worse.

The Trump administration declared a so-called “emergency situation” in 59% of our national forests. This is a phony declaration concocted to reduce protections against industrial logging and offer up about 112 million acres of national forests to become timber. Instead of majestic landscapes, we’ll be left with more flammable clear-cuts, polluted waters, and extinct species.

Trump promised to “unleash American energy” by offering up our public lands for oil, natural gas, and coal extraction. He’s eliminating protections and rubber-stamping approvals without environmental review or air pollution permits for oil and gas processing facilities.

It seems nothing is too sacred or precious to sell off for parts. Trump could even open up the Grand Canyon area for uranium mining and is likely to eliminate at least two national monuments, the Chuckwalla and Sáttítla Highlands national monuments in California.

Gutting National Treasures

In addition to the weakening all of these protections, national parks, national monuments, and public lands have taken other major hits from Trump’s mass layoffs, office closings, and freezing funds. Trump has gutted all the necessary resources to keep these spaces functional, yet is still requiring the public to have access.

Our beloved parks can’t operate or remain open without the necessary staff and Park Rangers to keep visitors safe. Even when normally staffed, an average of 11 visitors die each year at the Grand Canyon alone. What will happen now as Trump is willfully putting visitors at risk?

Rising Resistance

Like Trump’s harmful environmental moves, many other administration actions are deeply unpopular. Trump’s approval ratings are only getting worse. So people are rightfully taking to the streets to peacefully oppose the administration’s damaging policies and to say “hands off!” our planet, our home.

Our organization is fighting back in court. We will use every legal tool at our disposal to halt the Trump administration’s implementation of these reckless environmental actions. State lawmakers should rebuff the dismantling of our environmental safeguards and protect their lands, wildlife, and our climate.

Americans who see the greed behind Trump’s actions can get out and peacefully protest this Earth Day and call on their congressional representative and senators to fight back and rein in this lawless administration. We can’t lose hope. Today, we build momentum and fight for a greener future.

President Donald Trump is again loudly complaining that the U.S. military bases in Asia are too costly for the U.S. to bear. As part of the new round of tariff negotiations with Japan and Korea, Trump is calling on Japan and Korea to pay for stationing the US troops. Here’s a much better idea: close the bases and bring the U.S. servicemen home.

Trump implies that the U.S. is providing a great service to Japan and Korea by stationing 50,000 troops in Japan and nearly 30,000 in Korea. Yet these countries do not need the U.S. to defend themselves. They are wealthy and can certainly provide their own defense. Far more importantly, diplomacy can ensure the peace in northeast Asia far more effectively and far less expensively than U.S. troops.

The U.S. acts as if Japan needs to be defended against China. Let’s have a look. During the past 1,000 years, during which time China was the region’s dominant power for all but the last 150 years, how many times did China attempt to invade Japan? If you answered zero, you are correct. China did not attempt to invade Japan on a single occasion.

You might quibble. What about the two attempts in 1274 and 1281, roughly 750 years ago? It’s true that when the Mongols temporarily ruled China between 1271 and 1368, the Mongols twice sent expeditionary fleets to invade Japan, and both times were defeated by a combination of typhoons (known in Japanese lore as the Kamikaze winds) and by Japanese coastal defenses.

Japan, on the other hand, made several attempts to attack or conquer China. In 1592, the arrogant and erratic Japanese military leader Toyotomi Hideyoshi launched an invasion of Korea with the goal of conquering Ming China. He did not get far, dying in 1598 without even having subdued Korea. In 1894-5, Japan invaded and defeated China in the Sino-Japanese war, taking Taiwan as a Japanese colony. In 1931, Japan invaded northeast China (Manchuria) and created the Japanese colony of Manchukuo. In 1937, Japan invaded China, starting World War II in the Pacific region.

Nobody thinks that Japan is going to invade China today, and there is no rhyme, reason, or historical precedent to believe that China is going to invade Japan. Japan has no need for the US military bases to protect itself from China.

The same is true of China and Korea. During the past 1,000 years, China never invaded Korea, except on one occasion: when the U.S. threatened China. China entered the war in late 1950 on the side of North Korea to fight the U.S. troops advancing northward towards the Chinese border. At the time, U.S. General Douglas MacArthur recklessly recommended attacking China with atomic bombs. MacArthur also proposed to support Chinese nationalist forces, then based in Taiwan, to invade the Chinese mainland. President Harry Truman, thank God, rejected MacArthur’s recommendations.

South Korea needs deterrence against North Korea, to be sure, but that would be achieved far more effectively and credibly through a regional security system including China, Japan, Russia, North Korea, South Korea, than through the presence of the U.S., which has repeatedly stoked North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and military build-up, not diminished it.

In fact, the U.S. military bases in East Asia are really for the U.S. projection of power, not for the defense of Japan or Korea. This is even more reason why they should be removed. Though the U.S. claims that its bases in East Asia are defensive, they are understandably viewed by China and North Korea as a direct threat – for example, by creating the possibility of a decapitation strike, and by dangerously lowering the response times for China and North Korea to a U.S. provocation or some kind of misunderstanding. Russia vociferously opposed NATO in Ukraine for the same justifiable reasons. NATO has frequently intervened in U.S.-backed regime-change operations and has placed missile systems dangerously close to Russia. Indeed, just as Russia feared, NATO has actively participated in the Ukraine War, providing armaments, strategy, intelligence, and even programming and tracking for missile strikes deep inside of Russia.

Note that Trump is currently obsessed with two small port facilities in Panama owned by a Hong Kong company, claiming that China is threatening U.S. security (!), and wants the facilities sold to an American buyer. The U.S. on the other hand surrounds China not with two tiny port facilities but with major U.S. military bases in Japan, South Korea, Guam, the Philippines, and the Indian Ocean near to China’s international sea lanes.

The best strategy for the superpowers is to stay out of each other’s lanes. China and Russia should not open military bases in the Western Hemisphere, to put it mildly. The last time that was tried, when the Soviet Union placed nuclear weapons in Cuba in 1962, the world nearly ended in nuclear annihilation. (See Martin Sherwin’s remarkable book, Gambling with Armageddon for the shocking details on how close the world came to nuclear Armageddon). Neither China nor Russia shows the slightest inclination to do so today, despite all of the provocations of facing US bases in their own neighborhoods.

Trump is looking for ways to save money – an excellent idea given that the U.S. federal budget is hemorrhaging $2 trillion dollars a year, more than 6% of U.S. GDP. Closing the U.S. overseas military bases would be an excellent place to start.

Trump even seemed to point that way at the start of his second term, but the Congressional Republicans have called for increases, not decreases, in military spending. Yet with America’s 750 or so overseas military bases in around 80 countries, it’s high time to close these bases, pocket the saving, and return to diplomacy. Getting the host countries to pay for something that doesn’t help them or the U.S. is a huge drain of time, diplomacy, and resources, both for the U.S. and the host countries.

The U.S. should make a basic deal with China, Russia, and other powers. “You keep your military bases out of our neighborhood, and we’ll keep our military bases out of yours.” Basic reciprocity among the major powers would save trillions of dollars of military outlays over the coming decade and, more importantly, would push the Doomsday Clock back from 89 seconds to nuclear Armageddon

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This story was originally published by Barn Raiser, your independent source for rural and small town news.

The preamble for the next war over water is here. Aggressive corporations are coming after the few remaining pristine places on Mother Earth—mainly on the land of Indigenous people. Nowadays, it’s not just Native people being targeted, it’s our allies.

Last month, two separate court decisions highlighted the repression being leveled on our Water Protector allies.

On March 19, a jury in Mandan, North Dakota, in Morton County, leveled a blistering $660 million verdict against Greenpeace for its part in the Standing Rock resistance against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Anyone who was at Standing Rock knows that Greenpeace was barely there, but they have a name, and Energy Transfer, the pipeline’s owner, made an example out of them. I was in the courtroom when the verdict came in. It was sickening.

When Energy Transfer sues people for so-called defamation, they send a clear message: If you stand up, you will be punished in a lawsuit.

On March 10, Marian Moore, a Water Protector who had participated at a gathering to pray for healing, had her charges reversed by a Minnesota Court of Appeals. Her story: Marian, 67, a long-human rights advocate and environmentalist, was the daughter of Paul Moore Jr., the Episcopal bishop of New York from 1972 to 1989 who had walked with Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement. In this century, Marian had been active in opposing Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline, which crosses northern Minnesota, on its way from Calgary, Alberta, to Superior, Wisconsin, on lands that are subject to Native treaty rights and through waters full of wild rice, an essential food to the Anishinaabe.

On January 9, 2021, Moore was among the more than 100 Water Protectors who gathered on state Highway 169 for a prayer ceremony near a Line 3 construction site in Aitkin County. For that, she caught three charges, including trespass on critical infrastructure (a gross misdemeanor), unlawful assembly and, rather redundantly, presence at an unlawful assembly (both misdemeanors). I was a witness in her defense.

In November, 2023, an Aitkin County jury found her guilty of gross misdemeanors and sentenced her to six months in county jail, but with a stay of execution for nine months, allowing her to appeal. “I had to not trespass on any Enbridge property and be law-abiding, or I would be in Aitkin County jail for six months,” she explains to me.

Six months seems like a long time for someone who stood on a state highway to pray, looked at a construction site, and left once a dispersal order was given. “I think they targeted me because I was friends with Indigenous people and [was] bringing money to the movement against the pipeline,” says Marian.

Meanwhile out in Morton County, Greenpeace is getting socked with that ridiculous verdict. $660 million is a lot of money for some folks who were barely at Standing Rock. Aitkin County, Minnesota, and Morton County, North Dakota, are trying to teach a lesson; or, more appropriately, through these cases, corporations are trying to stifle resistance and discourage allies.

How Does This happen?

Welcome to the New Order, the one where corporations are now considered legal “persons,” protected by law enforcement and the judicial system as they press the law’s boundaries and extract precious resources.

The entire trial against Greenpeace was shameful.

Here’s how it went: The law firm Gibson Dunn carefully picked Mandan in Morton County, an oil-friendly jurisdiction where Judge James Gion denied most important motions made by Greenpeace. Four motions to change the venue from Mandan were denied. Gion would not let Greenpeace tell the jury of Energy Transfer’s terrible safety record. According to a report by Greenpeace and Waterkeeper Alliance, the Pipeline Hazardous and Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) issued 106 safety violations to Energy Transfer and Sunoco between 2002 and 2018, including failures to conduct corrosion inspections, to maintain pipeline integrity, and to repair unsafe pipelines in a timely manner within five years.

What’s so sad is that the North Dakota jury couldn’t even stand up for the water, the land, and the people.

Greenpeace was not allowed to tell the jury that Energy Transfer’s identical federal lawsuit against Greenpeace was dismissed by a federal judge. The judge effectively limited defense evidence.

Gion would not allow live streaming, so if you wanted to “see justice” you had to go to Mandan. It’s said that justice is blind, and, in North Dakota, justice is literally blind and asleep. I saw jurors asleep while on duty in the court room.

“Greenpeace did not manipulate Standing Rock, but Energy Transfer has manipulated Morton County,” Janet Alkire, chairwoman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, said in a statement shortly after the verdict.

As I drove toward Bismark from my own reservation, White Earth, a verse from the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” stuck in my head: I went down to the County Courthouse to get my share of abuse. At least that’s how I sing it. I’ve had my share. That’s what it’s like being on trial in the Deep North, especially if you’re a Water Protector.

The chances for a Native person to get justice in North Dakota or northern Minnesota are probably pretty small. Native people represent a third of the people in jail in Becker, Hubbard, and Aitkin counties. Yet, we represent only 5.2% of the population.

Standing Rock Tribal Chairwoman Alkire was appalled at the state of justice in Mandan:

I take offense to the jury verdict… We expect more from North Dakota judges and members of the jury from our neighboring communities… Neither Greenpeace nor anyone else paid or persuaded Standing Rock to oppose DAPL… Energy Transfer’s false and self-serving narrative that Greenpeace manipulated Standing Rock into protesting DAPL is patronizing and disrespectful to our people. We understand that many Morton County residents support the oil industry… But we are your neighbors, and you should not be fooled that easily.

The lawsuit against Greenpeace is called a SLAPP suit, or Strategic Litigation against Public Participation. It is intended to silence opposition. There are anti-SLAPP laws in 35 states, including Minnesota. Fundamentally, this is a question of free speech. When Energy Transfer sues people for so-called defamation, they send a clear message: If you stand up, you will be punished in a lawsuit.

“To me, this is a freedom of speech case and freedom of association case,” attorney Sarah Vogel, a onetime assistant U.S. attorney and former North Dakota agriculture commissioner, told the North Dakota Monitor before the case went to trial. Vogel, who grew up in Mandan, said, “As residents of a small state without a whole lot of power, we’d better be able to speak up. Who knows? I mean, this time, it’s Greenpeace, but who will it be next time?”

The case in Aitkin County was a little different but had some of the same premises. The idea that “outside agitators” came and did not do nice things was a theme. Greenpeace fits that narrative for Energy Transfer, and Marian Moore, who is a striking six feet two inches tall, does not quite look like a local gal.

Trey Cox is Energy Transfer’s lead attorney from Gibson Dunn (the same law firm that brought us the Chevron Donziger verdict). Cox kept referring to Water Protectors as outsiders and paid protesters. One might wonder, where Energy Transfer is from? Certainly not from Mandan. They are from Texas. Where was TigerSwan, the private security company hired by Energy Transfer from? North Carolina. And where was Frost Kennels, the company whose employees unleashed dogs on Water Protectors, from? Ohio. In other words, mercenaries.

In Minnesota, remember that Enbridge is a foreign corporation from Canada, with big swaths of pipeline networks across our north country, including aging pipes and the dirtiest oil in the world that poses a major threat to the Great Lakes, repository of a fifth of the world’s freshwater. Yet, Enbridge received priority policy protection in Minnesota during the Covid-19 pandemic and was allowed to bring in 4,300 people to build Line 3 as a part of “essential industry” in the state.

These companies also want to censure and erase any mentions of their abysmal safety records. Energy Transfer has a multitude of fines for spills, and Enbridge has the two largest oil spills on the U.S. mainland to its name. In the North Dakota trial, Greenpeace could not bring up Energy Transfer’s safety record, while in Aitkin County, the judge did not allow Marian Moore to say “treaty rights” or allude to the Minnesota case where Anishinaabe Water Protectors’ charges were dismissed in September 2023, based on the treaty and cultural beliefs, and “in the interests of justice.”

The Pipeline to Curtail First Amendment Rights

The Trump administration intends to further criminalize Water Protectors, and certainly protests in general. That much is clear. This is on top of the more than 300 anti-protest bills introduced in state legislatures since 2017, according to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, 54 of which have been enacted and currently undermine the First Amendment right to freedom of speech and assembly.

Moreover, over the past half-century, a dangerous doctrine of “qualified immunity” has been hatched up, underwritten by the Supreme Court, to limit the ability of individuals to hold police officers accountable for violating their constitutional rights. Qualified immunity basically gives officers expanding impunity to injure, or even kill, civilians like Water Protectors.

In April 2024, North Dakota Federal Judge Daniel Traynor dismissed Sophia Wilansky’s case against North Dakota law enforcement on the grounds that law enforcement had “qualified immunity.”

Greenpeace was inspired by a story called the Rainbow Warrior, where people of all colors would come together to protect Mother Earth.

A blast from an “explosive munition” was leveled at her in the early hours of November 21, 2016. Law enforcement had constructed a barricade across Backwater Bridge on North Dakota Highway 1806 to prevent unarmed Water Protectors, including Wilansky, from using the road. Morton County Deputy Jonathon Moll, had positioned himself on the turret of a Humvee and fired a flashbang grenade from his 12-gauge shotgun, hitting Wilansky, nearly severing her hand and destroying almost all of the arteries, skin, tissue, muscles, nerves, tendons, and bone in her left forearm. “At 21-years-old, I lost the use of my arm because a police officer shot me from a gun turret with an exploding grenade at a protest. My life will never be the same, but I will also not be scared away from fighting for what is right,” Wilansky said in a Civil Liberties Defense Center media release on April 6, 2024. An additional statement read: “The doctrine of Qualified Immunity is repulsive in that it allows police officers to… shoot protestors with anything they want without repercussions.”

Yes, there will be appeals. Marian Moore won on appeal. And a Greenpeace spokesperson told Barn Raiser the nonprofit will appeal the verdict, but the timing and process of the appeal has yet to be determined.

But what’s so sad is that the North Dakota jury couldn’t even stand up for the water, the land, and the people. Instead, that jury gave a Texas oil pipeline company, founded by Trump-supporting billionaire Kelcy Warren, everything it wanted and then some. That was shameful. And, without that appeals court, an Aitkin County jury would have been content to let Marian Moore sit in the slammer.

Marty Garbus is a trial attorney who has represented, among others, Nelson Mandela, Leonard Peltier, Daniel Ellsberg, Lenny Bruce, Elie Wiesel, Cesar Chavez, and Vaclav Havel. Garbus is also a member of the Energy Transfer v. Greenpeace Trial Monitoring Committee, a group that followed the trial day in and day out. Here is what he said when the jury returned its shameful verdict:

In my six decades of legal practice, I have never witnessed a trial as unfair as the one against Greenpeace that just ended in the courts of North Dakota. This is one of the most important cases in American history. The law that can come down in this case can affect any demonstration, religious or political. It’s far bigger than the environmental movement. Yet the court in North Dakota abdicated its sacred duty to conduct a fair and public trial and instead let Energy Transfer run roughshod over the rule of law.

Greenpeace has very strong case on appeal. I believe there is a good chance it ultimately will win both in court and in the court of public opinion.

What to do? Stand our ground. Make the solutions. And keep working together.

In Minnesota, we call ourselves the Home Team, and we are many colors. Marion and thousands of others told their stories and faced a lot of police for the sake of protecting water. I, for one, am grateful to them, and the new work underway by groups like Rise and Repair in Minnesota that does multi-racial organizing work around climate justice.

Weweg bi azhe giiwewag. The snow geese return.

There is greatness in the flocks of birds returning to these lands of water. Each year, they return and remind us of the life that is here, a life which needs water. I am reminded that’s who I work for. Greenpeace was inspired by a story called the Rainbow Warrior, where people of all colors would come together to protect Mother Earth. Critics say the story wasn’t a real prophecy, but I see it happening today. People of all colors coming together to protect Mother Earth is a good story for epic times. Thank you, allies.

For centuries, legal systems around the world have treated Nature as property—something to be owned, exploited, and managed for human benefit. This anthropocentric perspective has led to widespread environmental degradation, climate change, and biodiversity loss.

However, a revolutionary legal framework is emerging: the recognition of the Rights of Nature. This paradigm shift moves beyond traditional environmental laws and acknowledges that Nature itself has inherent rights, much like human beings and corporations.

The Rights of Nature concept is based on the idea that ecosystems and species are not mere objects but living entities with their own inherent rights to exist, thrive, and evolve. This legal framework challenges the prevailing notion that Nature is merely a resource for human use and instead recognizes its intrinsic value. By granting legal personhood to rivers, forests, and other natural entities, governments and courts can ensure that these ecosystems have standing in legal proceedings.

By shifting from an exploitative to a respectful relationship with the natural world, humanity can ensure a healthier planet for future generations.

The movement gained global attention when Ecuador became the first country to enshrine the Rights of Nature in its Constitution in 2008. The document states that Nature, or "Pachamama," has the right to exist and regenerate. Similarly, Bolivia passed the Law of Mother Earth in 2010, reinforcing Indigenous worldviews that see Nature as a living system with rights. Since then, countries such as New Zealand, Panama, India, and Colombia have also granted legal rights to specific ecosystems, setting legal precedents that continue to inspire the global community.

Why should we grant rights to Nature, you might ask? Traditional environmental laws often fail to prevent ecological destruction because they are based on regulation rather than protection. Corporations and governments can exploit loopholes, pay fines, or simply weigh the financial cost of pollution against profit margins. The Rights of Nature framework, however, fundamentally shifts the legal system from one of ownership to one of stewardship.

One of the most compelling cases for this approach is the Whanganui River in New Zealand. In 2017, the New Zealand government recognized the river as a legal entity, granting it the same rights and responsibilities as a person. This decision was made in collaboration with the Whanganui iwi, the Indigenous Māori people who have long regarded the river as an ancestor. Now, legal guardians, including representatives from both the government and the Māori community, speak on behalf of the river in legal matters. This recognition has already influenced policy decisions related to conservation and sustainable water management. Similarly, in 2017, the High Court of Uttarakhand in India granted legal rights to the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, acknowledging their sacred and ecological importance. Although this ruling faced legal challenges, it sparked important discussions about environmental governance and the need for stronger protections for vital ecosystems.

Despite these victories, the implementation of the Rights of Nature faces legal, political, and economic challenges. Many governments and corporations resist this shift, fearing restrictions on industrial activities. Additionally, enforcement mechanisms vary widely, and some legal rulings remain symbolic without proper institutional backing. However, the movement continues to gain momentum. Local communities, Indigenous groups, and environmental activists are advocating for the recognition of Nature's rights as a crucial tool for fighting climate change and biodiversity loss. In the United States, cities such as Pittsburgh and Toledo have passed local ordinances recognizing the rights of ecosystems, empowering communities to challenge environmental destruction more effectively.

Ecuador has witnessed several groundbreaking legal victories that affirm Nature's rights. Among these, the 2021 Constitutional Court ruling on Los Cedros Reserve was historic: The court halted mining exploration in this biodiversity hotspot, recognizing that the rights of the forest and its species, including endangered monkeys and orchids, outweighed extractive interests. Similarly, in Intag, a region long defended by local communities, legal actions based on behalf of endangered frogs and the Rights of Nature have helped suspend mining operations that threatened primary cloud forests and rivers vital to both people and ecosystems.

Another notable case is Estrellita, a woolly monkey rescued from illegal trafficking. When authorities attempted to relocate her to a zoo, a judge ruled in favor of her individual rights as part of Nature—marking the first time an animal in Ecuador was granted such recognition. These cases underscore the growing power of constitutional rights when applied to real-life conflicts between conservation and exploitation. They also reflect the tireless advocacy of Indigenous peoples, environmental defenders, and legal experts who are reshaping the legal landscape to center ecological integrity and the interconnectedness of all life.

The Rights of Nature framework is more than just a legal concept—it is a cultural and ethical transformation. By shifting from an exploitative to a respectful relationship with the natural world, humanity can ensure a healthier planet for future generations. As this movement grows, it is essential for policymakers, legal scholars, and citizens alike to support and advance this revolutionary approach to environmental protection.

The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN) is a global network that has been at the forefront of the Earth Jurisprudence and Rights of Nature movement for the last 15 years, educating, upholding, and supporting its growth. With over 6,000 allies worldwide, GARN serves as a movement hub, connecting Indigenous leaders, civil society, lawyers, and advocates reshaping environmental governance.

Just in case I thought one couldn’t feel more forlorn right now, the word came this morning of the death of Pope Francis. It hit me hard—not because I’m a Catholic (I’m a Methodist) but because I had always felt buoyed by his remarkable spirit. If he could bring new hope and energy to an institution as hidebound as the Vatican, there was reason for all of us to go on working on our own hidebound institutions—and if he could stand so completely in solidarity with the world’s poor and vulnerable, then it gave the rest of us something to aim for.

I thought this from the start, when he became the first pope to choose the name of Francis—that countercultural blaze of possibility in a dark time—and when he showed his mastery of the art of gesture, washing the feet of women, of prisoners, of Muslim refugees. (Only Greta Thunberg, with her school strike, has so mastered the power of gesture in modern politics).

But he brought that moral resolve to the question of climate change, making it the subject of his 2015 encyclical “Laudato Si,” the most important document of his papacy and arguably the most important piece of writing so far this millennium. I spent several weeks living with that book-length epistle in order to write about it for The New York Review of Books, and though I briefly met the man himself in Rome, it is that encounter with his mind that really lives with me. “Laudato Si” is a truly remarkable document—yes, it exists as a response to the climate crisis (and it was absolutely crucial in the lead-up to the Paris climate talks, consolidating elite opinion behind the idea that some kind of deal was required). But it uses the climate crisis to talk in broad and powerful terms about modernity.

The ecological problems we face are not, in their origin, technological, says Francis. Instead, “a certain way of understanding human life and activity has gone awry, to the serious detriment of the world around us.” He is no Luddite (“who can deny the beauty of an aircraft or a skyscraper?”) but he insists that we have succumbed to a “technocratic paradigm,” which leads us to believe that “every increase in power means ‘an increase of “progress” itself’… as if reality, goodness and truth automatically flow from technological and economic power as such.” This paradigm “exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object.” Men and women, he writes, have from the start

intervened in nature, but for a long time this meant being in tune with and respecting the possibilities offered by the things themselves. It was a matter of receiving what nature itself allowed, as if from its own hand.

In our world, however, “human beings and material objects no longer extend a friendly hand to one another; the relationship has become confrontational.” With the great power that technology has afforded us, it’s become

easy to accept the idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers, and experts in technology. It is based on the lie that there is an infinite supply of the Earth’s goods, and this leads to the planet being squeezed dry beyond every limit.

The deterioration of the environment, he says, is just one sign of this “reductionism which affects every aspect of human and social life.”

I think Francis’s project for the Earth—a recovery of fellow feeling, with a special attention to the poor—is the only thing that can save us over time. But it will take time—obviously for the moment we’ve chosen the opposite path, as exemplified by the fact that JD Vance, scourge of the refugee, darkened his last day on Earth.

In the meantime, Francis was very much a pragmatist, and one advised by excellent scientists and engineers. As a result, he had a clear technological preference: the rapid spread of solar power everywhere. He favored it because it was clean, and because it was liberating—the best short-term hope of bringing power to those without it, and leaving that power in their hands, not the hands of some oligarch somewhere.

As a result, he followed up “Laudato Si” with a letter last summer, “Fratello Sole,” which reminds everyone that the climate crisis is powered by fossil fuel, and which goes on to say

There is a need to make a transition to a sustainable development model that reduces greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, setting the goal of climate neutrality. Mankind has the technological means to deal with this environmental transformation and its pernicious ethical, social, economic, and political consequences, and, among these, solar energy plays a key role.

As a result, he ordered the Vatican to begin construction of a field of solar panels on land it owned near Rome—an agrivoltaic project that would produce not just food but enough solar power to entirely power the city-state that is the Vatican. It is designed, in his words, to provide “the complete energy sustenance of Vatican City State.” That is to say, this will soon be the first nation powered entirely by the sun.

The level of emotion—of love—in this decision is notable. The pope named “Laudato Si” (“Praised be”) after the first two words of his namesake’s “Canticle to the Sun,” and “Fratello Sole” was even more closely tied—those are the words that the first Francis used to address Brother Sun. I reprint the opening of the Canticle here, in homage to both men, and to their sense of humble communion with the glorious world around us.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through all that you have made,
And first my lord Brother Sun,
Who brings the day; and light you give to us through him.
How beautiful is he, how radiant in all his splendor!
Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.

The world is a poorer place this morning. But far richer for his having lived.

Tomorrow — Tuesday, April 22nd — will mark the 55th anniversary of Earth Day. The power of those 20 million voices that came out on the streets on that first Earth Day decades ago led the U.S. to create the Environemental Protection Agency and the first generation of environmental laws addressing clean air, clean water, and the threat of toxics.

Fast forward to today. Under the “Our Power. Our Planet” banner, EARTHDAY.ORG, the global organizer of Earth Day, is calling on people from all walks of life to join in “Earth Action Day”—an effort to once again mobilize people power to tackle the current generation of environmental crises.

Last year was a disaster for the planet and its people. According to NASA, 2024 was the warmest year since temperatures began being recorded in 1880. In the U.S. alone, there were 27 climate and weather events resulting in at least a billion dollars of damage — second only to 2023 with 28 such events.

While a number of factors have contributed to the increase in these catastrophic events, research demonstrates that "human-caused climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of certain types of extreme weather that lead to billion-dollar disasters—most notably the rise in vulnerability to drought, lengthening wildfire seasons in the Western states, and the potential for extremely heavy rainfall becoming more common in the eastern states.”

The news about plastic pollution is similarly dark. Earth Action reported that on last September 5 – Plastic Overshoot Day – the amount of plastic waste exceeded the capacity of waste systems to manage. An estimated 220 million tonnes of plastic waste were expected to be produced in 2024, with 66 percent of the population living in places where the amount of waste exceeds local capacity. While negotiation of a strong global treaty on plastics last year held forth the promise of handling some of these issues, negotiators failed to reach an agreement and the talks drag on while the industry continues to pollute year after year.

All of this is taking place in the face of increasing scientific news about the harmful impacts of plastics on humans and their health. World Wildlife Federation reported that humans could be ingesting up to 5 grams of plastic each week and a recent report found that high levels of plastics have been found in human brains. Additional research has shown that plastics are associated with everything from cancer to endocrine disruption, which can impair reproduction, growth, and cognitive abilities. Wildlife is also suffering, with plastic ingestion and entanglement contributing to starvation and strangulation, among other issues.

For years we have been told by the plastics industry that we can clean up and recycle our way out of this problem , but continued use of plastics however means continued use of fossil fuels and recycling has been demonstrated to be largely myth due to factors including quality degradation, contamination, and non-recyclable content.

What is the common thread of all these challenges facing our planet and the survival of its people ? The cause of all of these threats can be traced to one source: human greed and disregard.

But the encouraging and hopefully inspiring news is that the solutions to these problems also rest in the hands of the people. We have the collective power not only to protect our planet but also to improve lives and livelihoods.

The link between greenhouse gas emissions and climate change is now scientifically indisputable. According to the United Nations, fossil fuels make up 75% of greenhouse gas emissions and 90% of carbon dioxide emissions. The good news from the International Renewable Energy Agency is that 90% of global electricity can and should come from renewable sources by 2050.

Slowing the climate crisis is only one of many reasons to switch to renewables. Renewable energy prices are falling, and in most places of the world today, it is the least expensive option. Other benefits range from preventing unhealthy air associated with the burning of fossil fuels to creating up to 30 million jobs to supporting energy security.

Whether you choose to power your home or vehicle with renewable energy, support community solar, or call on government leaders for more research and investment, the options for taking action to accelerate the transition to renewables are many. Similarly, as consumers we can choose plastic-free products, demand a reduction in the use of plastics from businesses, while at the same time pressuring government leaders to reduce production globally, end the use of toxic ingredients, and improve waste management systems.

So this Earth Action Day exercise your power! We need to demonstrate to our leaders in government and business that we are still here, we are a witness to their actions, and we will hold them accountable to do right by our planet and its people.

What is the mission of the Washington, D.C.-based Tax Foundation? Even a quick review of the Tax Foundation’s output makes it perfectly plain: to help make average Americans see the richest among us as terribly overtaxed.

Hardly a Tax Foundation report goes by without one iteration or another of this overtaxed claim. Just last fall, the Tax Foundation produced a study that had billionaire Warren Buffett paying taxes at a rate of over 1,000 percent.

A few years back, early in the Biden years, I deconstructed another Tax Foundation claim, that the passage of tax changes the Biden White House was then pushing would leave the estate of a hypothetical taxpayer worth $100 million facing a tax rate of 61.1 percent. My response detailed the absurdity of that claim.

But what if that 61.1 percent had turned out to be an appropriate calculation? Would that 61.1 percent rate have really amounted to an oppressive tax levy? The Tax Foundation sure wants people to think so.

So let’s take a closer look at the Tax Foundation’s mythical ultra-rich taxpayer and let’s tweak the Tax Foundation’s hypothetical facts to make them just realistic enough to work with.

Suppose we assume our mythical taxpayer originally paid $1 million for the asset that ended up worth $100 million at her death 25 years later. That would leave $99 million of taxable gain. And a $1 million asset appreciating to $100 million after 25 years would have an average annual rate of return of 20.23 percent, a realistic rate for the sort of “home run investments” the ultra-rich actually make.

Let’s also ignore the exemption from federal estate tax — currently $14 million per individual, $28 million for a married couple — and treat the entire amount remaining from the $100 million after payment of income tax as subject to a 40 percent estate tax.

Applying the Tax Foundation’s methodology from that point, we would end up with a total effective tax rate just shy of 65.8 percent, nearly five percentage points higher than the 61.1 percent rate that had our friends at the Tax Foundation clutching their pearls. Wow! Sounds stunningly oppressive, huh?

Actually, no. The reason: The Tax Foundation’s presentation deceptively ignores the tax reduction magic of buy-hold for decades-sell, the tax loophole that causes the effective annual tax rate on the growth in the value of investments to decline as the rate of return and length of the holding period increase.

Our mythical taxpayer would be the quintessential beneficiary of this tax reduction magic. She would see her investment gains compound for 25 years without paying a nickel in income tax, all while her asset’s value was increasing by 20.23 percent per year.

The Tax Foundation, you see, makes quite the fuss over the one-time tax a mythical taxpayer’s estate would pay in the year of her death, but conveniently forgets about the taxpayer’s zero tax rate for the previous 25 years running.

That focus on a once-in-25-years tax payment ignores the full picture. To see that more clearly, consider the impact that a 65.8 percent tax would have on a mythical taxpayer’s overall investment return. At an after-tax annual rate of return of 15.18 percent, an asset with an initial value of $1 million will be worth $34.2 million in 25 years, exactly the amount left of the mythical taxpayer’s $100 million after her estate’s one-time tax payment of $65.8 million. That would be a 25 percent reduction in the pre-tax annual rate of return of 20.23 percent.

In other words, that supposedly onerous 65.8 percent tax at the time of the Tax Foundation’s mythical taxpayer’s death translates to an effective annual tax rate of just 25 percent.

Had the Tax Foundation’s mythical taxpayer been required to pay federal tax, covering both current income tax and future estate tax, at an annual rate of 25 percent on the growth in her investment’s value, and had she sold off just enough of the investment each year to pay the tax, her estate would be left with the same amount in the year of her death as it would have after paying the supposedly oppressive income and estate tax due under the terms of the Biden budget.

So, to review, the Tax Foundation concocted a hypothetical situation to show the proposals in Biden’s budget rated as extreme and oppressive. But even though that hypothetical is so concocted it couldn’t be found in the real-life situations of even the richest Americans, the supposedly oppressive one-time tax rate paid by the Tax Foundation’s mythical taxpayer translates to a modest effective annual tax rate of just 25 percent.

The bottom line: Once we take into account the impact of buy-hold for decades-sell, the tales of horror that apologists for the ultra-rich concoct to advocate against any meaningful tax increases on their deep-pocketed friends turn out to be not at all horrible.

Unless you’re horrified at the prospect of a reformed tax system that prevents the already obscene concentration of American wealth from becoming even worse.

In 2003, the Macedonian police arrested Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen vacationing in their country. They handed the unfortunate man over to the CIA, who shipped him off to one of their “black sites.” For those too young to remember (or who have quite understandably chosen to forget), “black sites” was the name given to clandestine CIA detention centers around the world, where that agency held incommunicado and tortured men captured in what was then known as the Global War on Terror. The black site in this case was the notorious Salt Pit in Afghanistan. There el-Masri was, among other things, beaten, anally raped, and threatened with a gun held to his head. After four months he was dumped on a rural road in Albania.

It seems that the CIA had finally realized that they had arrested the wrong man. They wanted some other Khalid el-Masri, thought to be an al-Qaeda associate, and not, as Amy Davidson wrote in the New Yorker, that “car salesman from Bavaria.”

El-Masri was not the only person that representatives of the administration of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney mistakenly sent off to another country to be tortured. In an infamous case of mistaken arrest, a Canadian citizen named Maher Arar was detained by the FBI at JFK Airport in New York while on his way home from a vacation in Tunisia. He was then held in solitary confinement for two weeks in the United States, while being denied contact with a lawyer before ultimately being shipped off to Syria. There, he would be tortured for almost a year until the Canadian government finally secured his release.

An “Administrative Error”

I was reminded of such instances of “extraordinary rendition” in the Bush-Cheney era when I read about the Trump administration’s March 2025 deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego García to a grim prison in El Salvador. Because of threats against him and his family from Barrio 18, a vicious Salvadoran gang, Abrego García had fled that country as a young teenager. He entered the U.S. without papers in 2011 to join his older brother, already a U.S. citizen.

He was arrested in 2019, while seeking work as a day laborer outside a Home Depot store and handed over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which accused him of being a member of another Salvadoran gang, MS-13. This proved a false claim, as the immigration judge who heard his case agreed. While not granting Abrego García asylum, the judge assigned him a status — “withholding from removal” — which kept him safe in this country, because he faced the possibility of torture or other violence in his homeland. That status allowed him to work legally here. He married a U.S. citizen and they have three children who are also U.S. citizens.

Then, on March 12, 2025, on his way home from his job as a sheet-metal apprentice, he was suddenly stopped by ICE agents and arrested. They told him his status had been revoked (which wasn’t true) and promptly shipped him to various detention centers around the country. Ultimately, he was deported to El Salvador without benefit of legal assistance or a hearing before an immigration judge. As far as is known, he is now incarcerated at CECOT, the Center for the Confinement of Terrorists, a Salvadoran prison notorious for the ill treatment and torture of its inmates. While built for 40,000 prisoners, it now houses many more in perpetually illuminated cells, each crammed with more than 100 prisoners (leaving about 6.5 square feet of space for each man. It is considered “one of the most dangerous prisons in the Western Hemisphere” with “some of the most inhumane and squalid conditions known in any carceral system.” Furthermore, among the gangs reported to have a substantial presence at CECOT is Barrio 18, the very crew Abrego García fled El Salvador to escape so many years ago.

The Trump Justice Department has now admitted that they made an “administrative error” in deporting him but have so far refused to bring him home. Responding to a Supreme Court ruling demanding that the government facilitate his return, the Justice Department on April 12th finally acknowledged to the D.C. district court that he “is currently being held in the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador.” Its statement continued: “He is alive and secure in that facility. He is detained pursuant to the sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador.” On April 14, 2025, in contemptuous defiance of the supreme court, President Trump and his Salvadoran counterpart Nayib Bukele made it clear to reporters that Abrego García will not be returning to the United States.

Previously, the government’s spokesman, Michael G. Kozak, who identified himself in the filing as a “Senior Bureau Official” in the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, had failed to comply with the rest of Judge Paula Xinis’s order: to identify what steps the administration is (or isn’t) taking to get him released. The judge has insisted that the department provide daily updates on its efforts to get him home, which it has failed to do. Its statement that Abrego García “is detained pursuant to the sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador” suggests officials intend to argue that — despite paying the Salvadoran government a reported six million dollars for its prison services — the United States has no influence over Salvadoran actions. We can only hope that he really is still alive. The Trump administration’s truth-telling record is not exactly encouraging.

Extraordinary Rendition

The technical term for such detainee transfers is “extraordinary rendition.” “Rendition” involves sending a prisoner to another country to be interrogated, imprisoned, and even possibly tortured. Rendition becomes “extraordinary” when it occurs outside of normal legal strictures, as with the cases of el-Masri and Ahar decades ago,, and Abrego García today. Extraordinary rendition violates the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which explicitly prohibits sending someone to another country to be mistreated or tortured. It also violates U.S. anti-torture laws. As countless illegal Trump administration acts demonstrate, however, illegality is no longer a barrier of any sort to whatever its officials want to do.

Two other flights left for El Salvador on the day Abrego García was rendered. They contained almost 200 people accused of being members of a Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, and were similarly deported under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 without any hearings. Are they actually gang members? No one knows, although it seems likely that at least some of them aren’t. Jerce Reyes Barrios, for example, was a Venezuelan soccer coach who sought asylum in the U.S. and whose tattoo, celebrating the famous Spanish soccer team Royal Madrid, was claimed to be evidence enough of his gang membership and the excuse for his deportation.

Andry José Hernández Romero is another unlikely gang member. He’s a gay makeup artist who entered the United States last August to keep a pre-arranged asylum appointment. Instead, he was arrested and held in detention until the Tren de Aragua flights in March. The proof of his gang membership? His “Tres Reyes” or “Three Kings” tattoos that were common in his hometown in Venezuela.

In fact, all 200 or so deportees on those flights have been illegally rendered to El Salvador in blatant defiance of a judge’s court order to stop them or return those already in the air. None of those men received any sort of due process before being shipped off to a Salvadoran hellhole. In response, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele tweeted, “Oopsie… Too late” with a laughing-face emoji.

Even U.S. citizens are at risk of incarceration at CECOT. After Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with President Bukele, the State Department’s website praised his “extraordinary gesture never before extended by any country,” an offer “to house in his jails dangerous American criminals, including U.S. citizens and legal residents.” Trump reiterated his interest in shipping “homegrown criminals” to El Salvador during his press conference with Bukele. As former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance has observed, “If it can happen to Abrego Garcia, it can happen to any of us.”

It Didn’t Start with Trump

It’s tempting to think of Donald Trump’s second term as a sui generis reign of lawlessness. But sadly, the federal government’s willingness to violate federal and international law with impunity didn’t begin with Trump. If anything, the present incumbent is harvesting a crop of autocratic powers from seeds planted by President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney in those war on terror years following the attacks of September 11, 2001. In their wake, the hastily-passed Patriot Act granted the federal government vast new detention and surveillance powers. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 established a new cabinet-level department, one whose existence we now take for granted.

As I wrote more than a decade ago, after September 11th, torture went “mainstream” in the United States. The Bush administration cultivated an understandable American fear of terrorism to justify abrogating what, until then, had been a settled consensus in this country: that torture is both wrong and illegal. In the face of a new enemy, al-Qaeda, the administration argued that the requirements for decent treatment of wartime detainees outlined in the Geneva Conventions had been rendered “quaint.” Apparently, wartime rights granted even to Nazi prisoners of war during World War II were too risky to extend to that new foe.

In those days of “enhanced interrogation,” I was already arguing that accepting such lawless behavior could well become an American habit. We might gradually learn, I suggested, to put up with any government measures as long as they theoretically kept us safe. And that indeed was the Bush administration’s promise: Let us do whatever we need to, over there on the “dark side,” and in return we promise to always keep you safe. In essence, the message was: there will be no more terrorist attacks if you allow us to torture people.

The very fact that they were willing to torture prisoners was proof that those people must deserve it — even though, as we now know, many of them had nothing whatsoever to do with al-Qaeda or the September 11th attacks. (And even if they had been involved, no one, not even a terrorist, deserves to be tortured.)

If you’re too young to remember (or have been lucky enough to forget), you can click here, or here, or here for the grisly details of what the war on terror did to its victims.

The constant thrill of what some have called security theater has kept us primed for new enemies and so set the stage for the second set of Trump years that we now find ourselves in. We still encounter this theater of the absurd every time we stand in line at an airport, unpacking our computers, removing our shoes, sorting our liquids into quart-sized baggies — all to reinforce the idea that we are in terrible danger and that the government will indeed protect us.

Sadly, all too many of us became inured to the idea that prisoners could be sent to that infamous offshore prison of injustice at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, perhaps never to be released. (Indeed, as of January 2025, of the hundreds of people incarcerated there over the years, 15 war on terror prisoners still remain.) It should perhaps be no surprise, then, that the second time around, Donald Trump seized on Guantánamo as a possible place to house the immigrants he sought to deport from this country. After all, so many of us were already used to thinking of anybody sent there as the worst of the worst, as something other than human.

Dehumanizing the targets of institutionalized mistreatment and torture proved to be both the pretext for and a product of the process. Every torture regime develops a dehumanizing language for those it identifies as legitimate targets. For example, the torturers employed by the followers of Augusto Pinochet, who led Chile’s 1973 military coup, typically called their targets “humanoids” (to distinguish them from actual human beings).

For the same reason, the Israel Defense Forces now refer to just about anyone they kill in Gaza or on the West Bank as a “terrorist.” And the successful conflation of “Palestinian” with “terrorist” was all it took for some Americans to embrace Donald Trump’s suggestion that Gaza should be cleared of its people and turned into the “Riviera of the Middle East” for Israelis, Americans, and foreign tourists.

Trump’s representatives have used the same kind of language to describe people they are sending to that prison in El Salvador. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, referred to them as “heinous monsters,” which is in keeping with Trump’s own description of his political opponents as inhuman “vermin.” At a rally in New Hampshire in 2023, Trump told the crowd, “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” Here he was talking not only about immigrants, but about U.S. citizens as well.

After years of security theater, all too many Americans seem ready to accept Trump’s pledge to root out the vermin.

It Can Happen to You

One difference between the Bush-Cheney years and the Trump ones is that the attacks of September 11, 2001, represented a genuine and horrific emergency. Trump’s version of such an emergency, on the other hand, is entirely Trumped-up. He posits nothing short of an immigration “invasion” — in effect, a permanent 9/11 — that “has caused widespread chaos and suffering in our country over the last 4 years.” Or so his executive order “Declaring a National Emergency at the Southern Border of the United States” insists. To justify illegally deporting alleged members of Tren de Aragua and, in the future (if he has his way), many others, he has invented a totally imaginary war so that he can invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which was last used during World War II to justify the otherwise unjustifiable internment of another group of dehumanized people in this country: Japanese-Americans.

Donald Trump has his very own “black site” now. Remember that El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele is perfectly willing to receive U.S. citizens, too, as prisoners in his country. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Jackson, made that point in a statement that accompanied that court’s recent order requiring the Trump administration to facilitate Kilmar Abrego García’s return to the United States. They wrote, “The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U.S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.”

As the justices remind us, it can happen here. It can happen to you.