The U.S. national debt just crossed a once-unthinkable threshold on the way toward breaking the record set in the wake of World War II: It now exceeds 100 percent of America’s gross domestic product.

As of March 31, our publicly held debt was $31.27 trillion, while America’s GDP in 2025 was $31.22 trillion. This puts the ratio at 100.2 percent, compared with 99.5 percent when the last fiscal year ended September 30.

That 100.2 percent figure will likely climb, because the federal government is running historically large annual deficits of nearly 6 percent of GDP, which add to the debt. The final tally will depend on Iran war spending, tariff refunds, and the strength of the economy.

Should you worry? Well, it’s not as if we’re heading into a depression. Passing the 100 percent threshold won’t suddenly cause the world to lose confidence in the dollar.

The real problem is that an increasing portion of our nation’s budget—and your tax dollars—is dedicated to paying interest on this growing debt. That’s money we don’t spend on education, healthcare, roads and bridges, social safety nets, or (if we actually needed more spending on it) national defense.

As the debt continues to grow, interest payments continue to soar. We’ll soon be paying more in interest on the federal debt each year than we spend each year on Medicare.

So, who exactly receives these interest payments? This is an issue you hear very little discussion about, because the wealthy and powerful of this country would rather you didn’t know.

You probably do hear that a chunk of our debt is held by foreign governments and foreign investors. That’s true, but they hold only about 30 percent of our debt. The rest—roughly 70 percent—is held domestically. That is, we pay the interest to ourselves.

And who, exactly, is the “ourselves” who receive these interest payments? The Federal Reserve holds part of this debt, state and local governments hold part.

But the biggest chunk—nearly half—is held by mutual funds, pension funds, insurance companies, and banks. And who owns them? The Americans who invest in these funds—and who thereby, directly or indirectly, hold Treasury bills.

And who, exactly are these Americans—the Americans who are directly or indirectly collecting a large amount of the interest we’re paying on the national debt? It’s the people at the top.

The richest 1 percent of U.S. households hold about 35.6 percent of all financial assets—shares of stock, corporate bonds, and Treasury bills—so it’s safe to assume they hold at least a third of all Treasury bills.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Here’s where things get really interesting.

Decades ago, wealthy Americans financed the federal government mainly by paying taxes. Their tax rate was far, far higher than it is today. In the 1950s, under President Dwight Eisenhower, the richest Americans paid a marginal tax rate of 91 percent. (Tax deductions and tax credits meant that the top effective marginal rate was lower than this.)

Fast forward. Now, wealthy Americans finance the federal government mainly by lending it money and collecting interest payments on those loans.

Interest payments on the national debt this year are expected to reach $1 trillion.

There are roughly 128 million households in the United States. Dividing $1 trillion in annual interest among U.S. households would amount to $650 per household per month. (This is a simplified average, of course; actual burdens vary based on tax status, income, and spending.)

The point is that a big chunk of the growing interest payments American taxpayers make on the federal debt is going to wealthy Americans.

Keep following the money. One of the biggest reasons the federal debt has exploded is that tax cuts—starting with the George W. Bush administration in 2001 and extending through Trump’s 2018 and 2024 tax cuts—have reduced government revenues by $10.6 trillion.

Most of the benefits from those tax cuts are going to the wealthy. Since 2000, 65 percent of the benefits from tax cuts have gone to the richest fifth of Americans—22 percent to the top 1 percent.

So, you see what’s happened?

The wealthiest Americans used to pay higher taxes to finance the government. Now, the government pays wealthy Americans interest on a swelling debt, caused largely by lower taxes on wealthy Americans.

Which means a growing portion of everyone else’s taxes are now paying wealthy Americans interest on those loans, instead of paying for government services everyone needs.

So, from now on, whenever you hear someone say how huge, horrible, and out-of-control the national debt is, explain to them that it’s because of tax cuts to the wealthy—who are also the major recipients of interest on that debt.

America’s wealthy have never been wealthier. If they paid their fair share of taxes, we wouldn’t have such a huge federal debt. And we wouldn’t be paying them so much interest on that debt.

The Trump administration will host a new round of talks this week aimed at ending the latest warfare involving Israel and Lebanon.

No new developments on the Lebanese front give reason for optimism that this round will yield an agreement that two prior rounds did not. The Trump administration, however, has an incentive to push for an agreement because of President Trump’s need to extract himself and the United States from the impasse involving the Strait of Hormuz.

The last time Iran lifted its closure of the strait—a move Tehran reversed when Trump continued his own blockade—was in response to the announcement of a ceasefire in Lebanon.

Iran has insisted from the outset of the war that any ceasefire must be comprehensive, covering what Israel is doing in Lebanon as well as combat in the Persian Gulf. Israel and the United States have resisted linking these two Middle Eastern theaters. But if either side in a conflict says that two things are linked, then there is linkage, whether the other side likes it or not.

The Iranian perspective on this question reflects the fact that the military operations in Lebanon grew directly out of the war against Iran. Shortly after Israel and the United States launched that war in late February, Lebanese Hezbollah responded by firing rockets into northern Israel.

Hezbollah has always been an ally of Iran. No one, least of all the Israelis, should have been surprised by this response.

The fighting on the Lebanese front since then has been as one-sided in the resulting death and destruction as Israeli combat with Palestinians. The Israeli assault has killed 2,700 people in Lebanon, while Israeli fatalities have been 18 military personnel and two civilians. At the height of the offensive, more than a million people—about a fifth of Lebanon’s population—were displaced, and most remain so. Israeli forces have destroyed entire villages in southern Lebanon.

The ceasefire that the United States brokered in March, like most ceasefires involving Israel, has seen at most a slowing of the tempo of offensive operations rather than a cessation of them. In addition to continued lethal operations in the south of Lebanon, Israel conducted one of its bolder airstrikes in the Beirut area, which destroyed an apartment building in the city’s southern suburbs.

The talks this week in Washington will be unusual as peace negotiations go, in that they are not really between two belligerents. The weak government of Lebanon has not sought a war with Israel, and the war that is taking place is as asymmetrical in nature as the casualty figures suggest. Israel says its enemy is Hezbollah, but Hezbollah will not be in the conference room.

Israel’s central demand involving Lebanon has been that Hezbollah must be disarmed. No one is talking about disarming Israel, or even limiting its arms, even though Israel has inflicted far more of the suffering on this front than Hezbollah has. In any event, even though many figures in the Lebanese government would welcome Hezbollah’s disarmament, that is far easier said than done.

The hurdles to any disarmament of Hezbollah are partly a matter of physical capability. They also are a matter of political realities within Lebanon. Hezbollah speaks for a substantial proportion of the Lebanese population, especially the nearly one-third of Lebanese who are Shiites. It holds 13 seats in the Lebanese parliament and did well in municipal elections last year.

One indication of those realities comes from Nabih Berri, speaker of the Lebanese parliament and one of the most powerful politicians in Lebanon. Berri heads Amal, the other major Shiite party in Lebanon and an ally of Hezbollah. Berri said last week that there should be no negotiations with Israel until Israel ceases its offensive military operations in Lebanon and withdraws from the south of the country.

That similar sentiments extend beyond the Shiite portion of Lebanon’s population is reflected in the position of President Joseph Aoun, who, like all Lebanese presidents, is a Maronite Christian. Aoun has resisted US pressure for him to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying that any such meeting must await a cessation of Israel’s offensive operations and a withdrawal of Israel from Lebanon. Aoun’s stance is why this week’s talks are being held at the ambassadorial level.

Hezbollah is not a prime mover of mayhem that somehow arose through spontaneous generation, now was it imposed on Lebanon by Iran. Hezbollah owes its existence and rapid rise in the 1980s to previous Israeli aggression and occupation of portions of Lebanon. Hezbollah presented itself as a defender especially of Lebanese Shiites but also of all Lebanese against Israeli predation.

That history is especially relevant to what Israel is doing to Lebanon today. In addition to the lethal aerial assaults, it is occupying much of southern Lebanon, in a replay of what it did four decades ago. It has singled out Shiites with a demand—not equally directed toward other sectarian groups—to abandon their homes in that portion of Lebanon.

Such discriminatory demands will stoke additional resentment and desire for revenge within the confessional group that has always been Hezbollah’s main base of support.

The results are already being seen in the attitudes even of some Lebanese who wish Hezbollah had never fired rockets in support of its Iranian ally and who blame the group for drawing Lebanon into the US-Israel-Iran war. In the face of the suffering from the new Israeli offensive and the inability of the Lebanese government to do much about it, many of these Lebanese are again looking to Hezbollah as their main hope for defending themselves.

An implication is that even if some agreement is reached that silences the guns for now, the ingredients will remain in place for future rounds of fighting on the Israel-Lebanon front. A lasting peace would depend on a complete and permanent Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon and some assurance by the United States that it would use its influence to keep the withdrawal permanent.

Violence on the Israeli-Lebanese front is a reminder of how much instability in the Middle East stems from Israeli subjugation of the Palestinians and the violent resistance that it inevitably provokes. Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 involved going after the exiled Palestinian Liberation Organization—an organization that would not exist if there were no perceived need to liberate Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. The last previous Israeli invasion of Lebanon in October 2024 grew out of the devastating Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip that had been ongoing for a year, in response to which Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel in support of the Palestinians in Gaza.

The government of Lebanon wants the United States to exert enough pressure on Israel to end the current Israeli offensive. Lebanon is one of multiple fronts in the Middle East in which the biggest variable in determining whether instability will lessen is whether the United States will pressure Israel. In this case, Trump’s desire to extract himself from the Iran quagmire may be sufficient to yield at least a ceasefire that holds up better than the one that currently is being repeatedly violated.

Whether even that limited form of agreement is achieved will depend mostly on the US-Israeli dimension of this week’s talks, more than the government of Lebanon’s role in the negotiations. Given the linkage with events in the Persian Gulf, it may also depend partly on any wider bargains struck in Pakistani-mediated negotiations between Iran and the United States.

Empires rise and fall. They do not last forever. Imperial declines follow a gradual shifting of the economic tides, but are also punctuated and defined by critical tipping points. There are many differences between the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the US war on Iran today, but similarities in the larger context suggest that the United States is facing the same kind of “end of empire” moment that the British Empire faced in that historic crisis.

In 1956, the British Empire was still resisting independence movements in many of its colonies. The horrors of British Mau Mau concentration camps in Kenya and Britain’s brutal guerrilla war in Malaya continued throughout the 1950s, and, like the United States today, Britain still had military bases all over the world.

Britain’s imperial domination of Egypt began with its purchase of Egypt’s 44% share in the French-built Suez Canal in 1875. Seven years later, the British invaded Egypt, took over the management of the Canal and controlled access to it for 70 years.

After the Egyptian Revolution overthrew the British-controlled monarchy in 1952, the British agreed to withdraw and close their bases in Egypt by 1956, and to return control of the Suez Canal to Egypt by 1968.

The only silver lining in the current crisis is that it may mark the final collapse of the neoconservative imperial project that has dominated US foreign policy since the 1990s...

But Egypt was increasingly threatened by Britain, France, and Israel. Through the 1955 Baghdad Pact, the British recruited Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan to form the Central Treaty Organization, an anti-Soviet, anti-Egyptian alliance modeled on NATO in Europe. At the same time, Israel was attacking Egyptian forces in the Gaza Strip, and France was threatening Egypt for supporting Algeria’s war of independence.

Egypt’s President Nasser responded by forging new alliances with Saudi Arabia, Syria, and other countries in the region, and, after failing to secure weapons from the US or USSR, Egypt bought large shipments of Soviet weapons from Czechoslovakia.

Upset with Egypt’s new alliances, the United States, Great Britain, and the World Bank withdrew their financing from Egypt’s Aswan Dam project on the Nile. In response, Nasser stunned the world by nationalizing the Suez Canal Company and pledging to compensate its British and French shareholders.

British leaders saw the loss of the Suez Canal as unacceptable. Chancellor Harold Macmillan wrote in his diary, “If Nasser ‘gets away with it’, we are done for. The whole Arab world will despise us… and our friends will fall. It may well be the end of British influence and strength forever. So, in the last resort, we must use force and defy opinion, here and overseas."

British Prime Minister Anthony Eden hatched a secret plan with France and Israel to invade Egypt, seize the Canal and try to overthrow Nasser. The US rejected military action against Egypt, and President Dwight Eisenhower told a press conference, on September 5, 1956, “We are committed to a peaceful settlement of this dispute, nothing else.” But the British assumed that the US would ultimately support them once combat began.

Israel invaded the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula, and then Britain and France landed forces in Port Said at the north end of the Suez Canal, under the pretense of protecting the Canal from both Israel and Egypt.

But before Britain and France could fully seize control of the Canal, the US government intervened to stop them. The US began selling off its British currency reserves and blocked an emergency IMF loan to Britain, triggering a financial crisis. At the same time, the USSR threatened to send forces to defend Egypt and even hinted at the possible use of nuclear weapons against Britain, France, and Israel.

The UN Security Council used a procedural vote—which Britain and France could not veto—to convene an Emergency Special Session of the General Assembly under the “Uniting for Peace” process. Resolution 997 called for a ceasefire, a withdrawal to armistice lines and the reopening of the Canal, and was approved by a vote of 64 to 5.

Four days later, Prime Minister Eden declared a ceasefire. British and French forces withdrew six weeks later, and the Canal was cleared and reopened within five months. Egypt subsequently managed the Canal effectively, and did not block British or French ships from using it.

The Suez Crisis was the pivotal moment when the British government finally learned that it could no longer use military force to impose its will on less powerful countries. Like Americans today on Iran, the British public was way ahead of its government: opinion polls found that 44% opposed the use of force against Egypt, while only 37% approved. As Prime Minister Eden dithered over the UN’s ceasefire order, 30,000 people gathered at an anti-war rally in Trafalgar Square.

Eden was forced to resign, and was replaced by Harold Macmillan, who withdrew British forces from bases in Asia, expedited independence for British colonies around the world, and repositioned Britain as a junior partner to the United States. That new role included arming British submarines with US nuclear missiles, which is now a violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). But Macmillan’s successor, the Labour Party leader Harold Wilson, would later keep Britain out of Vietnam.

Britain charted a successful transition to a post-imperial future through its relationships with the United States and the British Commonwealth–an association of independent states that preserved British influence in its former colonies. On the domestic front, there was broad political support for a mixed capitalist-socialist economy that included free education and healthcare, publicly owned housing and utilities, nationalized industries, and strong trade unions.

Macmillan was reelected in 1959 with the slogan, “You’ve never had it so good.” When a cartoonist mockingly dubbed him “Supermac,” the nickname stuck.

Britain’s Tories were dyed-in-the-wool imperialists, much like Trump and his motley crew today. But they did not let their imperial world view blind them to the lessons of the Suez Crisis. They could see that the world was changing, and that Britain had to find a new role in a world it could no longer dominate by force.

Most Americans today have learned similar lessons from failed, disastrous US wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But like the British people who opposed Eden’s invasion of Egypt, Americans have been repeatedly dragged into war by the secret scheming of leaders blinded by anachronistic, racist, imperial assumptions.

Trump is now encountering the same kind of international pressure that forced Britain and France to abandon the Suez invasion. Another Emergency Special Session of the UN General Assembly and a new “Uniting for Peace” resolution might also be helpful.

But ultimately, the resolution of this crisis, and the future of the United States in today’s emerging multipolar world, will depend on whether US politicians are capable of making the kind of historic policy shift that Macmillan and his colleagues made in 1956 and the years that followed.

Macmillan was not an opposition politician, but a senior member of Britain’s Conservative government, up to his neck in the Suez fiasco. The secret plot with the Israelis was his idea. President Eisenhower personally warned him at the White House that the US would not support a British invasion of Egypt. But unlike the British Ambassador who sat in on the same meeting, Macmillan assumed that, when the chips were down, Eisenhower would stand by his old World War II allies.

Maybe it was the shock of getting it all so wrong that persuaded Macmillan and his colleagues to take a fresh look at the world and radically rethink British foreign and colonial policy.

Americans must insist that this crisis spark the radical rethink of US politics, economics and international relations that neocons in both parties have prevented for decades.

The crisis with Iran is at least as catastrophic for US imperialism as the Suez Crisis was for the British Empire. The question is whether anyone in Washington today is capable of grasping the gravity of the crisis and making the required policy shift.

To follow Britain’s Suez example would mean closing US military bases around the world; renouncing the illegal threat and use of military force as the main tool of US foreign policy; and relying instead on multilateral diplomacy and UN action to resolve international disputes.

But where is the Macmillan in the Trump administration or the Republican Party? Or the Harold Wilson in the Democratic Party, whose leaders have never even tried to formulate a progressive foreign policy since the end of the Cold War? Obama’s belated outreach to Cuba and Iran in his second term were their only flirtation with a new way forward.

The only silver lining in the current crisis is that it may mark the final collapse of the neoconservative imperial project that has dominated US foreign policy since the 1990s and now cornered Trump into a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” choice between an unwinnable war with Iran and a historic diplomatic defeat.

Americans must insist that this crisis spark the radical rethink of US politics, economics and international relations that neocons in both parties have prevented for decades. Trump’s dead end in the Persian Gulf must also be the final end of this ugly, criminal neoconservative era, and the beginning of a transition to a more peaceful future for Americans and all our neighbors.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

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

Today we discuss:

• Writing in The New York Times, Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) argues that the Left is picking on Israel but gets a free pass: “The Democratic condemnation piled on Israel’s government is overwhelming in comparison to other allies. It’s also louder than Democrats’ condemnation of Iran’s regime for the slaughter of thousands of Iranians in December and January. Israel has been decried by some leading Democrats as an ‘apartheid’ state. But I haven’t heard any of them claim apartheid when it comes to how women and LGBTQ people are treated across the Middle East.”

•  A report, from the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based advocacy group, concludes that Israel employs “systematic sexual violence” in jails and prisons that is “widely practiced as part of an organized state policy.”

• Netanyahu says he wants Israel to wean itself off the $3.8 billion it gets from the US each year over the next decade.

• Six people are found dead inside a cargo train boxcar in Laredo, home to one of Texas’ largest hubs for trade with Mexico, accounting for roughly 62% of the state’s land port trade, or $340 billion.

MERCH STORE: https://www.deprogram.live

https://x.com/tedrall

https://x.com/JamarlThomas

LIVE ON RUMBLE: https://rumble.com/c/DeProgramShow

SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/2kdFlw2w8sSPhKI8NRx8Zu

APPLE MUSIC: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/deprogram-with-ted-rall-and-jamarl-thomas/id1825379504

The post Is the Left Picking on Israel? | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Microplastics, those miniscule particles smaller than 5 millimeters which plastics physically break down into, have now infiltrated every part of the planet – from the highest point of the Himalayas; to the deepest depths of the sea; to the snow of Antarctica. They penetrate all layers of ocean and are often mistaken for zooplankton and consumed by fish. Consequently, people of coastal countries and islands who are highly dependent on the sea for food are consuming microplastic contaminated fish.

Scientists have recently detected microplastics in human blood, breast milk, heart arteries, lungs, testicles, brains and placentas, foreboding serious human health consequences.

A 2024 study found that 99 percent of seafood samples in stores and West Coast fishing boats were contaminated with microplastics. Plastics, made from oil and gas and toxic chemicals and manufactured largely in poor, communities of color in Texas and Louisiana, are a major source of greenhouse emissions and air pollution. Plastic recycling is a master myth, given 5-6 percent are actually recycled in the U.S. as of 2021, despite a century of existence.

When I first learned that plastic flakes filled my lightweight winter jacket, I thought “great”—recycling plastic rather than throwing it away. But I have since learned what Judith Enck, author of The Problem with Plastics, and other critics prescribe: the best thing we can do is reduce the use of plastic in our lives to bring our planet back from this runaway pollution. Yes, we can re-use as much as certain plastic allows, which is not back to itself like wood, paper, metal, and glass. It is “down-cycled” at best, like the filling in my jacket, before disposed in a landfill, or incinerated, or dumped unconscionably in a poor, developing country.

Invented a century ago, plastic is now ubiquitous, having increased from about 2 million tons annually in 1950 to one half billion tons a year today, and projected to triple by 2060. Plastics are derived from fossil fuels, which are converted into chemical components such as ethylene and propylene—the building blocks for plastics. They were first manufactured as nylon and PVC, then boosted by use in WWII and subsequently Increased by the middle-class love affair with single-use products, such as straws, coffee cups, and water bottles. Agricultural fields are polluted with plastic through the use of plastic-contaminated sewage sludge. irrigation water, and plastic films to suppress weeds. These then decompose into microplastic and enter streams, rivers and, ultimately, the ocean.

With the growth of renewable technologies replacing fossil fuels, oil and gas corporations are aggressively promoting plastics, such that greenhouse gases from plastics are poised to surpass those of coal. Because of the plethora of toxic chemicals added to it, plastics are now associated with the rise of non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, reproductive cancer, and cardiovascular diseases.

The plastics industry aims to account for one-half of oil and gas demand by 2050, unless (and that is a questionable unless) the world’s countries can reverse the failed 2025 Plastics Convention.

What we can do?

Stop using single-use plastics, which constitute some 40 percent of plastics today. This would immediately reduce throwaway plastic, greenhouse gas emissions, our exposure to hundreds of toxic chemicals in plastic, and diminish ocean pollution. Further, critics advocate never using plastic to package food because research shows that chemicals can migrate from plastic food packaging into food.

One thousand strategies with tens of thousands of people in the lead advocating for city, state and federal bans on single-use plastics are needed. Surveys indicate that the public (both Republicans and Democrats) support ‘a pause’ in new manufacturing facilities and legislation to protect oceans from further plastic pollution.

Beyond Plastics provides a guide for Meals on Wheels, restaurants and dry cleaners to reduce use of throwaway plastics and also invites organized groups to join them as an affiliate and to use the model legislation they provide.

Women lead the charge against plastics. Author Judith Enck recounts the story of nearly a dozen women, some from Cancer Alley and the Gulf Coast, whose unstinting activism has blocked plastic industries from their neighborhoods.

For decades the US and higher-income countries have exported much of their plastic waste to low-income countries – an environmental injustice on a massive scale. Researchers found that poor people living in more than 25 developing countries burn the flammable plastic waste to cook and heat their home, making plastic pollution a “daily health and survival issue.” Women in poor countries., responsible for all the household chores and childcare, inhale disproportionately these toxic plastic fumes. Additionally, smoke from chimneys in packed slum neighborhoods contaminates everything: people, water sources, soil and crops.

Plastics, “the terrible debris of progress,” is an immense environmental injustice. We must stop this juggernaut.

When an American missile blew up an elementary school in Iran, killing nearly 200 boys, girls, and teachers, few Americans seemed highly concerned about it. Nevertheless, the war is highly unpopular—mainly because rising fuel prices are pinching our wallets.

The post The Agony of War appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

As an iconic sports league with a deep historic commitment to social justice, two of the National Basketball Association’s commercial branding relationships contradict the league’s values.

Questions are being raised about the branding deal the NBA struck with the United Arab Emirates, ignoring the killer drones and other support it is sending to a militia which the United Nations found to be committing genocide in Sudan.

Much less critical attention has been paid to the NBA’s commercial partnership with Rwanda, whose army and senior officials the US government recently sanctioned for backing a deadly armed group that is committing “horrific human rights abuses.” Rwanda has been a central partner in the Basketball Africa League (BAL), the NBA’s first professional basketball league outside North America. The Rwandan government pays the NBA between $6 million and $7 million annually to be a sponsor and to host some of the BAL playoffs. And Rwanda’s national airline is the official travel partner for the BAL.

The Los Angeles Clippers signed their own sponsorship deal with Rwanda last year. “Visit Rwanda” is their official jersey patch sponsor, so it appears on all uniforms. There is “Visit Rwanda” branding in the Clippers’ arena, and it is the official coffee sponsor for the team.

The NBA and the Clippers have some uncomfortable decisions to make. Should they continue to accept money from a government that is in large part responsible for one of the largest humanitarian emergencies in the world?

The uncomfortable truth for the NBA and the Clippers is that Rwanda invaded eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 2022 and dramatically escalated its invasion last year, deploying up to 12,000 troops and backing a very violent proxy rebel group known as the M23. Under Rwandan command and control, the M23 has committed extensive human rights abuses, including mass killings targeted at certain ethnic groups, torture, and forced deportations. Over 5 million people in DRC are now displaced from their homes due to the conflict, and 10 million people are now at risk of starvation, as M23 “has driven farmers from their land… and blocked food imports.”

NBA deputy commissioner Mark Tatum responded to a bipartisan letter from US senators in September 2024, "If American policies were to change regarding business activities in and relating to Rwanda or any other BAL market, our actions would, of course, change accordingly."

Therein lies the rub. US policy on Rwanda has changed suddenly and significantly over the last two months, with major implications for the NBA’s close involvement with Rwanda. Just days following the signing of a peace accord between Rwanda and DRC brokered by the US and overseen by President Donald Trump last December, Rwanda and its proxy force launched a new, bloody offensive that left 200,000 more civilians displaced. Instead of pulling back to make peace, Rwanda doubled down on war right after telling the White House it would do the opposite.

The breach of the peace agreement has since led to a major shift in long-standing US policy on Rwanda. Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated in December that “Rwanda’s actions are… a clear violation of the Washington Accords…, and the United States will take action to ensure promises made to the President are kept.” US Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz then argued that “Rwanda is leading the region… toward more war.”

The US government has followed up with a series of actions, including placing sanctions on the entire Rwandan army, visa restrictions on senior Rwandan officials, suspending a US-Rwanda health agreement, and canceling an investment conference and negotiations with Rwanda over a new development finance project.

M23 forces continue to occupy nearly all strategic areas of eastern DRC, Rwanda maintains 7,000 troops there, and the conflict is deepening. Notably, the DRC government is also responsible for many human rights abuses, and it must halt its partnerships with deadly armed groups.

Rwanda is also profiting from the deadly trade in illicit gold and other minerals from eastern DRC, minerals that provide fuel for the conflict. Rwanda-backed M23 occupies key gold and critical minerals mines and exports the minerals to Rwanda. Despite having no major domestic gold mines, Rwanda is estimated to have skyrocketed its gold exports to $2 billion in 2025, a more than five-fold increase from four years ago. Ironically, most of their smuggled gold exports go to the UAE, the other major NBA partner.

Because of Rwanda’s heinous behavior in eastern DRC, several major sports teams have recently halted their partnerships with the Rwandan government following campaigns from human rights groups. The English soccer club Arsenal ended its commercial branding deal with Rwanda following a campaign by the group Gunners for Peace, as did German soccer giant Bayern Munich.

The NBA’s main defense of its commercial partnership with Rwanda has been that its dealings have been consistent with US policy. That policy has now changed in response to Rwanda’s unwillingness to end its greed-fueled military intervention in DRC.

The NBA and the Clippers have some uncomfortable decisions to make. Should they continue to accept money from a government that is in large part responsible for one of the largest humanitarian emergencies in the world? Should they continue to be part of Rwanda’s strategy of “sportswashing” its image? Can they follow in the footsteps of Arsenal and Bayern Munich and drop Rwanda’s commercial branding sponsorship? These questions won’t garner the same attention as gambling players and tanking teams, but the stakes for millions of Congolese lives couldn’t be greater.

In a maneuver dripping with historical irony and geopolitical desperation, French President Emmanuel Macron is set to land in Nairobi on May 11. He will be in Kenya to co-host the “Africa Forward Summit: Africa-France Partnership for Innovation and Growth.” To the uninitiated, the title suggests a progressive leap into a shared future.

However, to those who have watched the sun set on Françafrique in the West, the subtext is clear: Having been unceremoniously evicted from its traditional "stomping grounds" in the Sahel, Paris is pitching its tent in East Africa, hunting for new deals to cover the hemorrhaging fortunes of a dying empire. Ahead of his arrival—incidentally on the Ides of March—three French warships docked at the port of Mombasa, carrying with them over 800 military personnel. They were riding on the wave of newfound defense cooperation between the governments of Kenya and France.

The pact focused on maritime security, intelligence cooperation, peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, and “any other defense or security-related areas of cooperation defined by mutual agreement between parties.” Through this pact, France now has a new hunting ground in East Africa, complete with boots on the ground, sea, and air. Kenya’s 142,400 square kilometers of Exclusive Economic Zone in the Indian Ocean, reputed for riches in fish, oil and gas, is in for a rude shock.

The irony is almost pathological. For over a century, France treated West Africa as a private warehouse. It did not merely colonize; it plundered, looted, and systematically attempted to dismantle the resilient African civilizations that predated its arrival. Its "assimilation" policy remains the most abhorrent, ignoble of colonial concepts; a cultural and political mis-philosophy designed to supplant African languages, customs, and identities with French surrogates.

Africa must stay circumspect. The convergence of military signalling and corporate presence must worry all countries participating in Nairobi. They must watch out for unequal relationships under new language.

When other colonial powers were loosening—however reluctantly—their grip, France was tightening its hold through a web of lopsided financial and military pacts.

With the rising tide of political "wokeness" across the continent, however, France now finds itself sorely ostracized, and endangered. Yet, rather than offering atonement, the French leadership has chosen to grandstand. The mask slipped definitively earlier this year when Macron, frustrated by the anti-French revolts sweeping through former colonies, dropped the pretense of diplomacy. “I think someone forgot to say thank you,” he remarked, with the chilling entitlement of a landlord demanding gratitude for a house he broke into.

Fast forward five months, and this same "savior" is now knocking on East Africa’s door, hat in hand, seeking a "new partnership built on equal ground."

The sudden pivot is driven by a cold reality: France’s "green" future is powered by African minerals. While the lights of Paris stayed bright on the back of Niger’s uranium, Africa remained in the dark.

But as the Nairobi summit approaches, Africa must move beyond being a passive host. If Macron and his European contemporaries truly seek a partnership of equals, they must meet a set of nonnegotiable demands that protect African interests, specifically within the environment and energy sectors.

First, a mandate for local beneficiation and value addition. Africa will no longer be a mere pit stop for raw material extraction. The Nairobi summit must establish a framework where no critical mineral—lithium, cobalt, or uranium—leaves the continent in its raw state.

Africans must demand that French and European companies invest in local processing plants and refineries. If the "Green Transition" requires African minerals, then the "Green Industrialization" must happen on African soil, creating African jobs and keeping the value chain within our borders.

Second, total reform of the financial architecture and the CFA Franc. For a nation that has enforced financial slavery through the CFA Franc since 1945, Macron’s talk of "financial reform" must be met with skepticism.

Africa must demand the total dismantling of the colonial financial umbilical cord. Africa requires a global financial system that does not penalize African nations with "sovereign risk" premiums that make green energy projects three times more expensive here than in Europe. It must demand the unconditional return of foreign reserves held in Paris and a shift toward independent, African-led monetary policies.

Third, energy sovereignty over "green exportation." France proposes to "decarbonize" Africa, yet many of our nations have barely "carbonized" to begin with. African “partners” must demand energy justice. This means the right to achieve universal electrification. Africa must reject a "Green Deal" that forces Africa to export its renewable energy (like green hydrogen) to Europe while her own hospitals and schools remain off the grid.

African energy needs must be met first; European exports come second.

Fourth, technology transfer, not just licensing. True innovation is not found in buying French software; it is found in owning the source code. The Nairobi summit must secure commitments for the unconditional transfer of green technologies. Africa should not be a "market" for European patents; it must be a co-owner of the intellectual property that will define the 21st century.

Fifth, climate reparations and debt cancellation. Already, France is active in "debt-for-development" swaps. Africa must demand that these are not treated as "gifts" but as partial down payments on a century of ecological and economic debt. Africa should also insist on total cancellation of debts that were accrued through colonial-era structures. Climate finance must be provided as grants, not loans that further burden Africa’s children for a climate crisis they did not create.

Sixth, accountability for multinational conglomerates. Total Energies, Orano, and Eramet—over 60 CEOs from French corporations will be attending—must answer tough questions at the summit. They ought to answer for their extractive interests that have historically disadvantaged the continent. Across Africa, communities have borne the environmental, social, and economic costs of such operations, with countries like Mozambique offering stark reminders of the consequences.

The companies must agree to be held to African environmental standards, not just French ones. Africa should pitch for a legal framework that allows communities to sue French corporations in both African and French courts for environmental degradation and human rights abuses.

There can be no "partnership" where companies operate with impunity in the Global South while preaching "environmental and social governance" values in the North.

Seventh, an end to paternalistic "security" pacts. Finally, Africa demands an end to the "policing" of the continent. True peace and security come from economic dignity, not from the over 60 military interventions France has conducted since 1960 to protect its interests. Africa must demand the closure of foreign military bases that serve extractive interests and a shift toward supporting African-led, autonomous security architectures. If partnership means equality, then reciprocity is simple—every French troop granted access and immunity in Africa should be matched by an African troop with the same rights in France

The "New Scramble" is couched in the language of "climate resilience" and "debt-for-development swaps." But beneath these green platitudes lie a hidden quest: to re-establish unfettered access to Africa’s critical minerals.

Africa must stay circumspect. The convergence of military signalling and corporate presence must worry all countries participating in Nairobi. They must watch out for unequal relationships under new language.

What France and its European partners fail to realize is that the "disinherited" continent has found its voice. Africa is no longer interested in being a marginal chapter in a European story, not even with a thousand summits. If President Macron wants a "thank you," he should start by returning what was stolen from Africa and respecting the sovereignty he so arrogantly claimed to have authored. The era of the "political orchestra" directed from Paris is over. The music has changed, and Africa is finally playing its own tune.

Happy Mother’s Day—because that’s what you’re supposed to say, right?

Motherhood is always dressed up in soft language like community, support, and…“it takes a village.” But I have learned in real time that not all of us actually have one.

I am raising my sons without consistent help, without a built-in break, without the kind of support people assume is just there. Everything falls on me emotionally, financially, and physically, and I still have to show up every single day like I am not carrying all of it alone. And when I do pull back, when I protect my energy or go quiet, it is not because I am distant. It is because I am overwhelmed.

There is this unspoken expectation that mothers, especially single mothers, are just supposed to figure it out, hold it together, and do it gracefully. But the truth is, a lot of us are doing the work of an entire village by ourselves, and nobody wants to say that part out loud.

In Baltimore's guaranteed income pilot, of which I was a part, data shows that I'm not alone: Young parents reported less stress and more stability, and those improvements lasted even after the payments stopped.

And this is where the conversation needs to shift, because how I feel about motherhood and how motherhood is structured in this country are two very different things.

I love being a mother. My children are everything to me. They are the reason I keep going when I am tired, when I am stretched thin, when I feel like there is nothing left to give. But love does not remove the weight. It does not pay bills. It does not create time, energy, or support where there is none. Loving my children deeply does not make the system around me any less difficult to navigate.

When people talk about motherhood like it is just a personal experience, like it begins and ends with love and sacrifice, they miss something critical.

Because motherhood is also structural. It is economic. It is shaped by whether or not you have resources, support, and stability. And when those things are missing, love alone is not enough to carry the load.

That is exactly why I stand behind guaranteed income strongly.

Because when there is no village, money becomes the closest thing to stability, something that's within our control.

It is about investing in the people who hold families together.

It is about acknowledging reality.

Caregiving is labor. Raising children is labor. Holding a household together on your own is labor.

Guaranteed income gives mothers breathing room. It gives us the ability to make decisions from a place of stability instead of survival.

It means not having to choose between rest and responsibility, between being present with our children or being consumed by stress.

In Baltimore's guaranteed income pilot, of which I was a part, data shows that I'm not alone: Young parents reported less stress and more stability, and those improvements lasted even after the payments stopped.

Right now, too many mothers are forced into impossible trade-offs. Work more and lose time with your kids. Stay present and fall behind financially. Ask for help and risk being judged. Stay silent and carry it alone. These are not personal failures. These are policy failures.

People love to celebrate strong mothers, but strength should not have to come from constant struggle. Strength should not be built on exhaustion. And survival should not be the standard we measure good parenting by.

If we are serious about supporting families, then we need to stop romanticizing hardship and start investing in mothers in real, tangible ways. Guaranteed income is one of those ways. It is not a cure-all, but it is a foundation. It is a recognition that mothers should not have to break themselves just to keep their households afloat.

Because the truth is, many of us are not asking for a village anymore…

We are building without one.

We are showing up every day, making a way out of no way, holding everything together with very little support and even less margin for error.

And still, we keep going.

So yes—Happy Mother’s Day.

Not the polished version. Not the performative one. But the real one.

Happy Mother’s Day to the mothers who carry what no one sees, who love without limit, who build without a village, and who keep showing up anyway. You are not invisible. You are powerful. And you are worthy of more than survival.

Yes, I’m still trying to write a book. Meanwhile, horrific wars rage and the outrage I feel quietly morphs into helplessness and then, after a while, shame. I believe, in some deep place inside me, that we can move beyond this. I know we can.

I also believe I have a role to play, as a writer, to help push our collective awareness beyond a public shrug over the cost and consequences of militarism: our trillion-dollar-plus military budget and ho-hum acceptance of the “collateral damage” that budget inevitably winds up creating... over there somewhere. This is simply assumed to be the nature of power. You know, dominance. It’s how we stay safe.

What I want to cry out is that this is fake power. It’s a trap. It keeps us in hell. Connection and creative conflict resolution are a different form of power. When we listen to and empathize with our “enemy,” we can start seeing beyond the moment and working to create a world that works for everyone. We can only evolve together.

I say these words humbly, quietly. In no way am I suggesting that anything about such a process is simple. But it can only begin if we believe it’s possible, and then find the collective courage to begin the journey... together.

When emotions are uncontrolled—when they are uncontrolled and armed—the fragmentary nonsense has lethal potential.

So I open up the soul of my book and tell a story: a story about Restorative Justice, which I have written about a great deal. People sit together in what is called a peace circle, sometimes to discuss a harm that has been done, a wrong that has occurred. All sides in the matter are part of the circle; they sit in vibrant equality. A talking piece is passed around. When you hold it, you speak; otherwise, you listen. Often the words go deep. People tell difficult truths.

The following story is that of Robert Spicer, who at the time was the culture and climate coordinator at Chicago’s Fenger High School. To put it more simply, he was the peace guy. He had a peace room. He trained students in conflict resolution. He brought Restorative Justice to Fenger.

One day, as students were eating breakfast in the cafeteria, waiting for the first bell to ring, two boys were standing together and suddenly ignited the volatility in the room—the volatility present at every struggling school in a low-income neighborhood. They tried out a new handshake.

Amid the talk and laughter, Spicer explained: “Another student noticed them doing their handshake and began to question them about what they were doing. Feeling disrespected, the students started to have words and then other students gathered around to see what was going on.”

And suddenly, the first two boys, he explained, “postured themselves to fight.”

But Fenger was a high school that knew about something beyond fighting—beyond the unleashing of righteous anger, the subduing of an enemy. Fenger, like other schools that have opened their doors to Restorative Justice, had peace ambassadors roaming their hallways. These are young people trained in restorative practices, like listening, like keeping calm, like refusing to surrender to the inevitability of hatred. Sometimes they were called peer jurors: students who help run conflict-resolution circles, circles that address disputes and attempt to undo—that is, heal—harm that has been done.

And there were peace ambassadors in the cafeteria that morning.

“As I was preparing for my day, some of my peer jurors who were in the lunch room approached me and told me about the situation and who was involved. One of my peer jurors said, ‘You’re going to have a big peace circle today. Let me know if you need my help.’ Quite frankly, because this situation happened in the lunchroom, I knew that all of the eight male students involved were not going to end up in my office but be sent home on a suspension. But was I in for a surprise that day!”

Both the dean and the principal had interviewed the boys and, oh changing world, decided they needed to sit in a peace circle with one another. The Chicago Public School System, like most American school systems, is primarily ensconced in punishment-based discipline, but this is changing.

Eight boys, along with the dean and the principal, entered the Spicer peace room and sat with one another. They passed the talking piece around the circle. As each one talked, an awareness filled the room: This was a big misunderstanding, nothing more. Some of the boys talked about other issues they were dealing with, complicating their day and their behavior. People got it.

“After the closing ceremony,” Spicer wrote, “each of the students shook hands and even hugged each other as they were preparing to leave my office. They did this without any adults prompting them to do this, which showed their sincerity. Once we concluded the circle, the adults decided to allow them to blow off some steam and play basketball. And the students who were the main ones in conflict were on the same team. They played for about 25 minutes and afterwards were sent to class skipping and excited about the school day.”

And so it begins. Kids talk, a community that hadn’t existed—a sense of commonality and understanding among a group of tough guys at a Chicago high school—emerges. Punishment morphs into basketball, into joy, into healing. This is not a simple process, but—cynics, beware—it’s possible; it happens, in schools and elsewhere. An awareness is slowly shifting.

Sometimes it’s a matter of life or death. When emotions are uncontrolled—when they are uncontrolled and armed—the fragmentary nonsense has lethal potential. This is the case in so many broken communities, around the country, across the planet.

How can we transcend war? For those planning for peace, Restorative Justice is a gold nugget.

In 1870, Julia Ward Howe penned her “Mother’s Day Proclamation,” calling for peace. Her words still ring with truth, calling us not to raise our children to kill another mother’s child but rather to gather together to “promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.” She wrote this following the ravages and violence of the Civil War, a war like the wars today waged for the needs of the rich. Now the War Economy has consolidated in the hands of the rich to a level never seen in history.

We live deep inside the War Economy—the extractive, destructive, oppressive economy founded upon greedy capitalism and imperialism. With the years-old genocide in Gaza ongoing, the continued dehumanizing blockade of Cuba, and the inhumane and strategically disastrous war on Iran all coinciding, we see how war serves the War Economy. Proof of this violence is served up, ubiquitous and relentless, via our phones, those devices we hold so near and dear to us. The War Economy has mesmerized us into participating in its cynical lullaby: We accept domination, dehumanization, demoralization, cynicism, and apathy as normal and natural, allowing War Economy thinking to pervade everyday interactions with our families, communities, and even our relationship to ourselves. The War Economy knows that, individually, we have little power to stop it. Convincing us that we are alone and powerless is its greatest trick.

These, however, are lies. We know this intuitively. We can understand that the War Economy is trying to lull us into a fugue of forgetfulness of our own nature. How do we remember what care and connection feel like? How can we begin to practice something other than the addictions the war economy forces on us? What experiences that we perceive as normal and natural are just internalized War Economy thinking and behaviors?

The Peace Economy is how humans have survived for millennia; it is how we have served each other and the world since humanity began tens of thousands of years ago. It is how people across the ages and the globe have learned to survive and thrive through the experience of community, collaboration, and connection. It is showing up for the needs of each other with generous and caring hearts. It is the giving, sharing, caring, thriving, relational, resilient economy that serves all life on this planet. Whether we know it or not, it is fundamental to serving life and cultivating peace. We can’t end war until we end the War Economy, so we who desire peace must create a future built on the habits of peace.

What can you choose to practice this week, right where you live? How might you care for others the way a mother might care for her child?

The Peace Economy is rooted in maternal care. When we are born, most of us experience love and connection effortlessly. We are provided for without the need for transactional thinking and relationships. The War Economy lies to us and says we can find love and connection through the purchase of things and transactional relationships. An insidious lie.

Think about it. How do you experience connection and care in your life? How do you experience joy and creativity? How do you play? How do you give of yourself to others and to things that matter to you? When you disconnect from phones and computers and walk out into the more-than-human world, how do you relate to what surrounds and sustains you? None of those things has a purchase price. They are freely given, like a mother’s love.

The War Economy forces addictions on us to survive its abusive thrall. We can break those addictions just by practicing habits of peace and walking through life with the care and connection of a mother’s love. Habits of peace, which we like to call “Pivots to Peace,” build muscles that will help us thrive and participate in the creation of a more beautiful future. It is a way to “mother” the world. A pivot is a commitment you can make on this Mother’s Day, a day hijacked by the War Economy to be one of consumption. Let us be as committed to peace as the war mongers are to war; they all do it for transaction and money—together let us build a future that serves life with love.

Here are some Pivots to Peace.

• Pivot from Transactional Relationships to Relational Connections: Our relationships are what keep us alive and thriving. One of the ways our War Economy has isolated us from each other is by turning our relationships into transactions. Transactions do not support life and relationships. Instead, transactional interaction steals what nourishes you and your community. Because our culture is based on transactions, this pivot can be especially challenging. It will require some self-honesty to witness what drives you. This will take a lifetime of practice, and the reward is life itself. How might you decrease transactionality in your everyday interactions with your family, friends, and neighbors?

• Pivot from Feelings of Scarcity to Abundance: The War Economy takes those things that were once free—food, water, land, entertainment, etc.—and monetizes them, forcing us to experience them as scarce. The War Economy also forces us to think we need an excess of things that are not essential to life; these things don’t really bring us true joy and pleasure, but rather distract us. How do you experience scarcity in your life? What feels out of reach to you? Which of your needs are unmet? What always feels out of your reach, and how does that make you feel? Ideas to pivot to abundance: Start with defining what is “enough.” What is it that you really need? What do you already have? What can you share with others who have less than you? Give something away every day this week—not as a transaction but as a way of relating.

• Pivot from Self-Oriented to Community-Engaged: It’s easy to see why we’re all alienated from each other when we live in a society that emphasizes individual achievement and self-directed actions over community care and engagement with those around us. What if our culture valued community care and engagement with those around you as the highest virtue? What are some ways you retreat into self-directed actions and individual achievement? Reflect on what nourishes you when you are community-engaged. Take some opportunities to see those who are caring for and creating your community—the teachers, healers, caretakers, nurses, essential workers, gardeners, etc., who enrich all of our lives. Thank them.

• Pivot from Reactionary to Investigative: In the War Economy, the corporate elites and warmongers control the media and the cultural narrative that is so pervasive in our lives. They capture your heart and mind to support their goals of domination and control. Often, they are weaponizing you to serve their goals, maneuvering you into a reactive stance. Mainstream media relies on us becoming reactive so that we will support the agenda of the War Economy. Instead of swallowing what the media is serving up, begin to practice investigating. What stories are seeking a reaction? What stories are investigative and nuanced? Begin to pay attention to who is benefiting. Where do you notice informed journalism that is not serving the War Economy? Notice what changes when you practice investigative and discerning media intake.

• Pivot from “Us vs. Them” to All of Us: Have you noticed that in most movies, the solution to the problem is to kill the villain? From an early age, we are fed the “good guy vs. bad guy” narrative. What are some ways this has permeated your own life and thinking? Where do you hold on to an “us vs. them” attitude? How does this serve your life? Can you transform your idea of separation from “them” into a more complex understanding of how relationships to the larger systems are affecting all of us—instead of placing blame on an individual or particular group of people? The War Economy thrives on divide and conquer, and people are the power if we stay connected.

• Pivot from Consumption to Creativity: The War Economy is fueled by consumption. Through the lifestyle the War Economy creates, we are forced into an addiction to consuming—be that the consumption of material goods, media, entertainment, or something else. Most of the things we consume are not what we need but what we are taught to need. Often, they distance us from joy and pleasure, creating a cycle of dissatisfaction and emptiness. Creativity is usually the way to truly fill the void we are seeking to fill through consumption. We are fulfilled through connections. We are fulfilled when we create avenues for feeling, art, expression, and for life to thrive. How can you create space for creativity in your life?

• Pivot from Limitation to Imagination: Limitation of ourselves is one of the great crimes of the War Economy; it gets us locked into transaction, productivity, and patterns of comfort that sever us from free thinking, creative action, and imagination. The War Economy convinces us that we need to stay narrow to survive, and often, we don’t even realize how narrow our bandwidth for creative thought, wild expression, and imagination has become. Where in your life does your imagination find expression and value? Take time each day to let your mind wander beyond what feels safe or familiar. Gather with your community and discuss what frustrates you. Then start a free flow of ideas that could address the frustrations. The more “out there” the idea, the better. Being in relationship with new pathways and new potential realities is a great way to expand creativity and birth the future.

• Pivot from Restraint to Pleasure: The War Economy shakes in its boots because the things that bring us joy and pleasure are free and abundant—a secret they don’t want us to realize. What would you be doing with your time and energy if you made decisions based on a feeling of deep, erotic yes? Often, the first thing we need to remove to find pleasure is transaction. Where do you experience restraint in your life? How is it imposed on you? By your habits? By self-limiting beliefs? By the culture? What scares you about pleasure? What excites you? Even when we do things we think will give us pleasure, we are sometimes so lost in transaction and productivity that instead we find emptiness and frustration. What were some times, have you sought pleasure and it has been beyond your reach? What were the circumstances? What one thing can you do today that will make you feel joy without having to purchase something?

These are a few of the 23 pivots you can find at peaceeconomy.org. They are offerings to serve you as you take your life away from serving the War Economy and cultivate a future on the foundation of a peace economy. It all starts small and local. Peace-making starts with our circle of influence right around us—in our families and communities—and that is where our personal actions and their impacts are felt and create effect. What can you choose to practice this week, right where you live? How might you care for others the way a mother might care for her child?

What would it look like if peace came alive in your community, connection by connection, family by family, and eroded the grip of the War Economy habits? What if we all remembered the connection and unconditional love given to us as our birthright by our mothers? Remember, we may be just one drop in an ocean of our culture, but oceans are made, drop by drop, little by little, to become the most powerful force in nature. Together, let us be an ocean of peace.

"No matter what you do it will never amount to anything but a single drop in a limitless ocean. What is an ocean but a multitude of drops.”―David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Editors of newspapers like to say that they cover the newsworthy events “without fear or favor.” Sure. But how can they cover events without the requisite curiosity, without deeply feeling for the public’s right to know, and without breaking through their “comfort zone”?

Maybe you can help explain the following examples of editors and reporters going AWOL and suggest how they could overcome their jaded inaction.

1. You’ll recall the criminal enterprise, led by felon Elon Musk, in 2025 called “The Department of Government Efficiency” or DOGE. Trickster Trump allowed Musk to rampage through one government agency after another. In fact, DOGE ushered in a regime that set records in government waste yet received insufficient media attention. By shuttering, dismantling, or closing programs and whole agencies serving people’s needs—health, safety, and economic support and protections—the Musk-Trump DOGE left crumbling agencies doing little or nothing with hamstrung staff.

There is sprawling corruption and waste inside the government, causing devastating and real waste by not preventing sicknesses and injuries, and forcing consumers deeper into personal debt for necessities such as healthcare, housing, food, and transportation.

With declining polls and rising majorities of Americans wanting Congress to impeach and remove Trump from office, more civic power, that is laser-focused on Congress and receives mass media, is needed.

Since DOGE began to wind down last summer, after Musk exited as a hyper-wealthy fugitive from justice, there have been no thorough investigations by Congress nor by the inspectors general, most of whom President Donald Trump illegally fired very early on in his dictatorial regime.

Not a day goes by without Trump unilaterally wasting billions of taxpayer dollars on his White House ballroom, on further larding runaway Pentagon spending. Wasteful and unnecessary military attacks, and the firing of government auditors, watchdogs, irreplaceable experienced managers, and first responders to disasters all contribute to freezing vital government services.

2. Why has the media not covered the legislative drive in New York’s state legislature to end the 45-year-long rebate of a tiny sales tax on stock transactions? Minimally estimated at $15 billion a year collected and electronically rebated back to the brokers, the bill S01237-A allocates the revenues to mass transit, education, healthcare, and the environment (visit greedvsneed.org for more information on the campaign to pass this legislation). Two years ago, the sponsoring lawmakers led a demonstration before the New York Stock Exchange building. No coverage. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani needs this money for his people-serving programs, yet he has been totally silent about ending the rebate. No reporters are asking him why?

Over the last eight years, I have spoken to seven reporters and two business editors, who say that it is a good story, recently made better by Mamdani not speaking out about this proposal. The journalists said they would get back to me. None have. That’s not indifference from the top; that’s silent censorship! Only the Amsterdam News wrote a long feature on this topic. The rest of the New York City media balked. Shame on The New York Times and the New York City daily newspapers.

3. The vast death undercount in Gaza (over 600,000, not the reported 75,200) is explained away by both the mainstream and independent media. Reporters say they have no reliable estimate of the enormous death toll. Nonsense. Dig in and investigate! Various disaster casualty specialists have estimated deaths at hundreds of thousands resulting directly from Israeli military genocidal violence and indirectly from the related absence of food, water, healthcare, medicine, fuel, and electricity, blocked by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. One expert on bombing casualties, professor emeritus Paul Rogers of the University of Bradford in the UK, calculated that the TNT volume of Israel’s bombs, missiles, and artillery was the equivalent of six or more Hiroshima atomic bombs and more devastating because of today’s precision targeting of this tiny enclave of crowded, defenseless civilians.

What other ethnic group would have its death toll underestimated by nearly 90%? (See my March 28, 2025 column “The Vast Gaza Death Undercount—Undermines Civic, Diplomatic, and Political Pressures” and my February 21, 2025 column “Stop Repeating the Vast Undercount of Gazan Deaths. It Is Ten Times Greater.” Also see “Exposing the Gaza Death Undercount” in the August-September 2024 issue of the Capitol Hill Citizen.) A more accurate estimate matters morally and intensifies the political, diplomatic, and civic pressure to stop the killing and to compel the Israeli regime to fully allow sufficient humanitarian aid into Gaza to help the starved, sick, and dying in this ravaged land. (See Dr. Feroze Sidhwa’s report, “The Truth About Gaza’s Dead”). The calculating media plays dumb.

4. The Democrats on Capitol Hill have been very willing to oust their colleagues accused of sexual harassment or assault. Pushed out were Congressman John Conyers in 2017, Senator Al Franken in 2018, and Congressman Eric Swalwell in 2026.

Yet when it comes to the far greater order of magnitude of offenses by the craven, sadistic, sexual abuser of women (over 60 women have dared to provide credible experiences of Trump’s abuses, and one woman has won a tort lawsuit against him). Since 2016, the congressional Democrats have largely looked away.

In early 2020, I delivered personally to over 100 Democratic members of Congress, most of them women, a lengthy letter detailing the case for congressional hearings on Trump’s felonious aggressions (See the OPEN LETTER TO THE WOMEN IN CONGRESS, February 24, 2020). I met staff who agreed that some action was necessary, but said it was up to Speaker Nancy Pelosi or that hearings would have little impact on Teflon Trump and be ineffective. Suffice it to say that only two members of Congress formally acknowledged receipt of the letter without comment. The rest ignored the letter, as did several women’s groups known for focusing on sexual harassment and assault against women. No media coverage. No interest at all in this contradiction by reporters. Read the letter; your observations are welcome.

5. With declining polls and rising majorities of Americans wanting Congress to impeach and remove Trump from office, more civic power, that is laser-focused on Congress and receives mass media, is needed. Fast-rising tides could occur were the retired presidents, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and even G.W. Bush, to come out of their luxurious lairs and mobilize pressure to impeach Trump. The serious entry into this struggle to save the Republic and the Constitution for which it stands would electrify the mainstream media and the frustrated citizenry. Such an effort could quickly and easily attract the requisite funds needed to mobilize such an effort to every congressional district. Feeling the heat, Democrats in Congress would commence publicizing “shadow hearings” and further splinter the once iron-clad sycophancy for Trump by the GOP, who are terrified by their prospects in November.

Trump himself daily provides more vivid evidence of impeachable offenses. (See, H.Res. 1155). He can’t help himself, believing he can continue to get away with everything he does, no matter how extreme.

We know why there is reluctance by the ex-presidents. They would be assailed by Trump and the Trumpsters. They would be accused of having committed many of the same or similar crimes when they were in the White House. True for G.W. Bush in Iraq and Joe Biden in Gaza, for starters. However, this is an occasion for declared regrets and redemption as they pursue the removal from office of Donald Trump, a dangerously unstable, megalomaniacal tyrant who is perilously wrecking, endangering, and weakening our country. MOREOVER, WITH TRUMP, THE WORSE IS YET TO COME, MUCH WORSE AND SOON.

Do the former presidents want to stay on the sidelines and have their inaction on their conscience for historians to record? The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said wisely: “Duty arises from our potential control over the course of events.”

Why don’t the reporters ask the former presidents the obvious questions? How about some editorials? Or op-eds?

For decades, many Democrats have suspected what’s now being confirmed in plain English by a Trump insider. Ashley St. Clair — the 27-year-old former Turning Point USA brand ambassador and mother of one of Elon’s 14 kids who built a million-follower platform on X and became one of MAGA’s most visible young women — has spent the past few weeks blowing the lid off the entire racket.

In a series of TikTok monologues and a recent feature in The Washington Post, she’s describing in detail how the Republican’s right-wing influencer economy actually works, and her bottom line is brutal: she estimates that “roughly 99 percent” of the largest right-wing influencers are compensated in some form, most of it locked behind nondisclosure agreements so airtight that anyone who tries to talk about it will get buried under litigation they can’t afford.

According to St. Clair, GOP consulting firms (some run by former White House officials) run platforms where wealthy donors and Republican political operatives can list influence campaigns, and influencers will sign up to push specific scripts, petitions, or even GOP legislative messaging on a per-click rate or for a flat fee.

There’s no disclosure requirement because the content is “political” rather than “commercial” and the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that political lies (“speech”) are protected in ways that wouldn’t be the case for lies told to simply make money.

She’s shared screenshots of DMs offering thousands per post, and she’s detailed coordinated group chats on X where administration officials and Trump’s team can push talking points to the biggest accounts in real time.

Smaller influencers and the mainstream media see the resulting wave of identical posts across social media, assume it’s an organic movement, and jump on the bandwagon, creating an even larger echo chamber for rightwing talking points that benefit billionaires or monopolistic corporations.

It isn’t. As she put it: “There is no free thinking here. They are waiting to get marching orders and a direct deposit.”

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because we already saw a version of it in 2024, when the Biden Justice Department unsealed an indictment revealing that Putin’s people had funneled almost $10 million through a Tennessee shell company, Tenet Media, to bankroll a group of right-wing influencers including Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and Dave Rubin who podcast to millions daily.

One right-wing influencer was reportedly paid $400,000 a month plus a $100,000 signing bonus to produce videos that just happened to riff on topics serving Trump’s and the Kremlin’s interests. (The influencers all swore they were victims who didn’t know the money was Russian, if you can believe that, but they sure were happy to take and keep it.)

And the broader point stands: the entire ecosystem of right-wing media is so saturated with covert money that a foreign adversary could plug straight into it without anyone even noticing, and did!

I’ve been around long enough to remember when this stuff was happening to radio hosts, before podcasting took off. Back in the early 2000s, I had a friend who was a nationally syndicated right-wing talk show host, and he told me how every time he gave a speech to a high school audience, a right-wing foundation would cut him a $20,000 check as a “speaker’s fee” to supplement his income. He did a dozen or more a year. That was the level of subsidy on offer just for keeping kids’ minds tilted in the right direction, and it was, he said, available to hundreds of right-wing radio hosts across the country.

None of this came out of nowhere.

It started with the Powell Memo of August 1971, when corporate lawyer and tobacco company board member Lewis Powell (about to be appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon) sent a confidential blueprint to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce telling American business it had to build a permanent infrastructure of think tanks, media operations, scholars-on-call, colleges, and legal foundations to destroy New Deal programs like Social Security and union rights.

Joseph Coors took that memo and used it to seed the Heritage Foundation in 1973 with $250,000. Richard Mellon Scaife followed with tens of millions. The Bradley, Koch, Uihlein, and Seid family fortunes joined the party.

Today that same network of six billionaire family fortunes has been joined by other right-wing billionaires to put more than $120 million into the groups behind Project 2025 alone, and dark-money conduits like DonorsTrust and Leonard Leo’s network have funneled additional hundreds of millions more into Heritage, the Federalist Society, Hillsdale College, Turning Point USA, the Cato Institute, ALEC, and the rest of the Powell ecosystem.

Then there’s Rupert Murdoch, who brought his Australian poison to America with a little help from Ronald Reagan, built Fox “News” into the propaganda flagship for the GOP, and then had to write a $787.5 million check to Dominion Voting Systems for knowingly broadcasting lies about the 2020 election.

And let’s not forget Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022 and, according to peer-reviewed research published in Nature and the Queensland University of Technology study, tilted the X algorithm in mid-July 2024 to dramatically boost his own posts and Republican-leaning accounts. After that change, views on Musk’s posts surged 138 percent, and right-wing accounts saw engagement leaps that progressive accounts simply never get any more on billionaire-run social media.

So, step back and look at what all that money buys. It buys a constant drumbeat telling:

— Working-class white people that they should be afraid of Black and Hispanic neighbors,
— Women in the workplace are stealing their jobs,
— Gay and trans people are coming for their kids,
— Low or no taxes on billionaires will “trickle down” somehow despite forty-five years of evidence to the contrary,
— Deregulation will lower prices instead of raising them,
— Fossil fuels are essential and climate science is a hoax, and that
— Russia and Israel are our friends while Canada, Germany, and France are our enemies.

It’s a deliberately constructed fog of lies and grievance, and it has one purpose: to keep us screaming at each other about bathrooms and brown-skinned invaders while the people writing the checks rob us blind.

And the scale of that robbery is genuinely staggering. The most recent RAND Corporation working paper by Carter Price, updated in 2025, calculates that since 1975 a cumulative $79 trillion has been “redistributed upward” from the bottom 90 percent of Americans to the top 1 percent.

In 2023 alone, the transfer to the morbidly rich was $3.9 trillion, enough to give every working American a $32,000/year raise. Meanwhile, we’re still the only developed country on earth without a national health care system, our kids go into a lifetime of debt to attend college, our infrastructure is crumbling, and we’re falling further behind Europe and China every year on the clean-energy transition that climate science says we have maybe a decade to get right.

Republicans don’t have any real answers for any of the crises we’re creating, because their actual policy agenda (more tax cuts for billionaires, more deregulation for monopolists, more handouts to fossil fuels) both caused most of these problems and is also wildly unpopular when stated plainly.

So they manufacture the rage, pay the influencers, bias the algorithms, fund the think tanks, bankroll rightwing podcasts, radio and TV, and then coordinate and pay for the talking points in private group chats.

They have to do it this way because if American working people ever stopped to add up what’s actually been done to them over the past forty-five years of the Reagan Revolution, the political landscape would shift overnight.

This should be a national scandal. It should be the lead story on every progressive show, in every Democratic stump speech, in every union newsletter, and on every front page.

Ashley St. Clair has handed us a confession that Democrats need to use. Call your senators and representatives at the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and demand legislation requiring full disclosure of paid political messaging by online influencers, the same way every other form of paid political advertising is regulated.

Make sure your registration is current at vote.org. Find out who’s running for your state legislature and county offices at openstates.org, because that’s where the next round of voter-suppression and gerrymandering fights will be won or lost.

And the next time somebody in your life forwards you a piece of viral right-wing outrage, ask them one simple question: who paid for that post?

The answer, more often than not, will be a rightwing billionaire or the fossil fuel, pharma, insurance, tech, or banking industry that made them rich. And once people know that, the spell starts to break.

For decades, major fossil fuel companies have exploited both people and the planet for their own corporate greed, fueling the climate crisis while communities are left to absorb the costs. When floods, wildfires, and heatwaves strike, it is states, local governments, and taxpayers—not corporate polluters—are stuck with the bill.

Communities have had enough of cleaning up Big Oil’s mess, and momentum is growing nationwide to recover the mounting costs of climate change from the companies most responsible for the crisis. States, municipalities, and tribes across the country are taking Big Oil to court for knowingly fueling climate change, and orchestrating a Big Tobacco-style campaign of deception to mislead the public. Washington is home to four climate accountability cases, including the first-ever climate-related wrongful death case, two tribal climate deception cases, and a first-of-its-kind class action suit naming Big Oil’s role in fueling the escalating insurance crisis.

Terrified of facing accountability, the fossil fuel industry is seeking total legal immunity from the legal and legislative efforts communities across the country are pursuing to make polluters pay for the climate costs they’ve enabled for decades. For the past year, Big Oil has been lobbying Congress and the Trump administration for a liability shield that would effectively put the industry above the law, much like the 2005 law protecting gun manufacturers from lawsuits. And they are starting to get their wish.

Climate accountability is our democratic right, and Big Oil’s push for immunity is a power grab to shut us out.

The threat is real. On April 17th, Republican lawmakers in Congress introduced the “Climate Shakedowns Act”, a bill that would shelter the fossil fuel industry from facing accountability, and immunity bills protecting Big Oil have already started to be introduced and passed in Utah, Tennessee, and other states.

If Big Oil receives this ‘get-out-of-jail-free card,’ it would take away our right to hold this harmful industry accountable. Blocking these efforts is dangerous overreach and would set a harmful precedent that protects corporations at the expense of our communities. No corporation should be above the law.

That’s why 32 organizations in Washington state submitted a letter to Sens. Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray, along with the rest of our congressional delegation, urging them to reject any attempts to give Big Oil immunity.

When catastrophic flooding hits our homes, we’re the ones responsible for paying for repairs and rebuilding, while the recovery costs further strain already overburdened state and local budgets. The climate crisis is deeply interwoven with, and significantly exacerbates, the affordability crisis. Extreme weather events like droughts, floods, wildfires, and heat waves are all becoming a much more common occurrence in Washington. And most often it is hitting low-income and communities of color who are hit the hardest and the least able to recover.

Meanwhile, the major oil and gas companies most responsible for the damages are raking in $3 billion dollars in profits each day. Why should we keep footing the bill for a crisis caused by greedy billionaire oil corporations?

By seeking immunity, these companies are working to silence our efforts to hold them accountable, deny communities their day in court, and override state climate laws. Climate accountability is our democratic right, and Big Oil’s push for immunity is a power grab to shut us out. Washington's lawsuits against Big Oil are grounded in justice and accountability. We must keep fighting for a future where communities are protected, democracy is respected, and corporations are held accountable when they cause harm.

Our world seems to me to be moving very very fast these days—often that’s because of the feral energy of the Trump White House, feverishly trying to do the wrong thing on as many fronts as possible. In the last few cycles have come the news that that the White House is evicting bison herds from federal lands in Montana (a favor to ranchers, an insult to tribal leaders), approving fruit-flavored vapes (a favor to the big-donor vapor lobby, an insult to public health), and insisting that the Pope wants Iran to have a nuclear weapon (an insult to Catholics, a favor to his easily bruised ego). If the strategy is designed to wear us down, it’s definitely working on me.

But something else is moving fast too, and far more productively—that’s the ascension of new technologies. I don’t mean AI, which so far has had little impact on me and a generally dispiriting one on my fellow Americans, to judge from the polling; I mean the surging changes in clean tech, which are rewriting what’s possible in the course of months, even days.

Consider, for instance, the news from California. As I’ve noted before, the Golden State is suddenly supplying huge amounts of night-time energy from big grid-based batteries; basically, at night its running on stored sunshine. But the reporter Claire Barber, in an interview with grid expert Ed Smeloff, put a number on this Wednesday: California’s new batteries, installed over the last 36 months or so, are the equivalent of a dozen new nuclear power plants. If California had installed a dozen nukes in a couple of years, you’d know about it—indeed, the fate of its single reactor, at Diablo Canyon, has inspired thousands of articles, documentaries, protests, and counterprotests over the same stretch of time. But batteries are… metal boxes that pose no great threat. They just… work. Smeloff:

The most remarkable change in the California energy market has been the very rapid addition of grid-connected batteries and the use of those batteries to provide peak demand capacity. California is transitioning fairly quickly from using primarily natural gas resources to now using batteries. The batteries are [used] during the peak period, which is in the evening, typically around seven o’clock, producing as much as 40% of the peak capacity requirements. That’s a pretty remarkable achievement in a short period of time.

Bottom line, from Stanford’s Mark Jacobson on Tuesday: California using 61% less natural gas this year to generate electricity than it did three years ago.

There’s also the sudden advent of a slightly smaller class of batteries, ones that as Elizabeth Ouzts observes are:

designed to fill specific community needs and—due to their size—relatively quick and low-cost to build.

The Blue Ridge Power Agency, which serves a string of nonprofit utilities in central and western Virginia, is set to go live this summer with a collection of five batteries of about 5 megawatts each. The systems will help two rural electric co-ops and the city of Salem’s utility save money by storing power when it is cheap and abundant. They can then rely on that saved-up power when high demand on the grid spikes prices.

All in all, the projects are predicted to save the member utilities $100 million over the batteries’ 20-year lifespan, addressing long-held local concerns over rising costs.

And now move down one more order of magnitude, and consider the report, out Thursday morning, from the Rewiring America think tank, about how solar, battery, and heat pump technology have advanced so quickly that a few policy shifts could allow the electrification of almost every home in America, turning them into useful and affordable parts of a national energy infrastructure. (Good coverage from Catherine Boudreau here). Consider, say, what we could require of data centers. If some must be built, then force them to supply their own electricity—by buying heat pumps and solar panels for surrounding homes. It’s cheaper than building new supplies, and much much faster:

Hyperscalers are driving more than $100 billion per year into energy generation and infrastructure investment. Directing even a portion of that spending toward distributed energy resources could mobilize tens of billions of dollars for household energy upgrades. Hyperscaler investment in home energy upgrades would make such upgrades affordable for an additional 19 million households (increasing affordability from 30-58% of eligible households)—unlocking average lifetime savings of $9,400 per household.

Again—all this stuff is available right now. There are plenty of heat pumps and batteries; if Google wants a data center, it should be handing them out to the neighbors. And once they have, then all these homes can be easily knit together into virtual power plants (VPPs); as a new report from the good people at Pew points out:

Fully leveraging these existing and future Distributed Energy Resources through VPPs, including providing appropriate compensation for DER owners, could deliver power during peak demand at 40%-60% of the cost of traditional solutions.

And if you’re thinking—"Yeah, but policy changes come too slowly to matter in a polarized America," well, your cynicism is justified. But not entirely. The last few weeks have seen something remarkable, with legislative action happening at a speed I can’t quite recall. Everyone who participated in Sun Day last fall (and that’s many of you) helped launch a nationwide campaign for, among other things, balcony or plug-in solar. And that’s already bearing fruit: Just eight months later it’s passed legislatures in Virginia, Maine, Colorado, and Maryland. It’s through the Senate and the House in New Hampshire, and the Senate in New York, New Jersey, and Vermont, through the House (and late last night the Senate) in Connecticut and through committee in Massachusetts (in the latter two, its part of important larger omnibus solar bills). It’s also before committees in California, Illinois, and DC. This is a reminder that activism can (and must) move as fast as technology—before the spring is out, and despite serious opposition from utilities, we’ll have enough states to establish a firm American market for a technology that has swept through Europe in recent years. (Here’s a great account from my colleagues at Third Act Upstate NY on the kind of organizing that is producing these wins).

Meanwhile, the fossil fuel alternatives are… slow to appear. Dan Gearino has an excellent account of plans for a truly massive gas-fired power plant in Ohio, announced in March by the always classy Howard Lutnick as AC/DC’s Back in Black blared from the speakers. “We’re operating in Trump time,” he told the crowd ahead of the ceremonial groundbreaking. But Trump time sometimes means fantasy time:

“The whole thing doesn’t add up,” said Ric O’Connell, executive director of GridLab, a nonprofit that provides technical expertise on the electricity grid to policymakers and advocates.

O’Connell thinks the power plant’s high costs will make the project difficult to justify outside of a moment in which the Trump administration is seeking attention for big projects. Due to inflation on key components, the project would cost $3,586 per kilowatt, two to three times the cost of a combined-cycle gas plant two years ago.

“They’re just smiling and waving for the cameras, and then, as soon as Trump’s out of power, the [power plant is] going to get scaled way down or killed,” O’Connell said.

The clean energy build-out, of course, can’t come fast enough, because the climate crisis is pushing on inexorably. April saw the atmospheric level of carbon dioxide average 431 parts per million for the first time at the monitoring station in Mauna Loa (but don’t worry—Trump’s new budget zeroes out funding for the facility). A new report put a very human face on those statistics: As Oliver Milman reports, it found that the time may be coming to start thinking of the painful necessity to move people out of New Orleans, because climate change is in danger of putting it past a "point of no return":

Southern Louisiana is facing 3-7 metres of sea-level rise and the loss of three-quarters of its remaining coastal wetlands, which will cause the shoreline “to migrate as much as 100km (62 miles) inland”, thereby stranding New Orleans and Baton Rouge, according to the study, which compared today’s rising global temperatures with a period of similar heat 125,000 years ago that caused a rise in sea level.

This scenario makes the region the “most physically vulnerable coastal zone in the world”, the researchers state, and requires immediate action to prepare a smooth transition for people away from New Orleans, which has a population of about 360,000 people, to safer ground.

The way to avoid this—or a thousand follow-on horrors—is to move with desperate urgency to rebuild our energy system. That won’t end global warming—too late for that. But not too late to shave tenths of a degree off how hot the planet gets, and every tenth of a degree we raise the temperature moves a hundred million souls from a safe climate zone to a perilous one. Maybe New Orleans is in that next increment. Maybe your house. Someone’s house, that’s for sure. So speed, speed, speed.

Even if you’ve never stood next to a data center, you’ve probably felt its impacts. For instance, if you’re one of the 65 million people served by regional transmission giant PJM in the eastern United States, a huge spike in projected demand for electricity, driven almost entirely by proposed data centers, has raised your electric bills. But standing next to a data center—or worse, living next to one—is where you can really feel the totality of its impact. I didn’t fully realize this until I spent time in the belly of the beast.

In January, I took a trip to Loudoun County, Virginia, home of the notorious Data Center Alley, to do research for my new podcast project for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance called “The Data Centers Are Coming.” I wanted to learn about how ever-expanding data center facilities impact their neighbors. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw as I crested a rise on the freeway: 199 operational data centers laid out before me and around 100 more under construction, densely packed together and sprawling to the horizon. So much digging and building left everything covered in red dust, giving the whole scene an eerie, Martian feel. The noise was unbelievable, clanking metal and chugging diesel engines all atop a deep industrial hum.

The people that live here are experiencing negative health effects stemming from pollution and chronic severe noise exposure. I talked to people in neighborhoods where folks no longer hang out in their yards because of the noise, in turn becoming isolated from their neighbors. I heard about people spending thousands on renovations just so they can sleep through the noise. One Loudoun County resident measured the noise at 70 decibels on his front porch—equivalent to a vacuum cleaner that never turns off.

People die here, too. I visited Tippets Hill Cemetery, a historic Black burial ground dating to before the Civil War, now surrounded on three sides by monumental, noisy data centers. It was like nothing I’d ever seen or heard.

As West Virginia advocate and researcher Cathy Cunkel told me, the data center issue “isn’t about Left vs. Right, it’s about Up vs. Down.”

This is Big Tech’s vision for America. Their behavior reveals an air of entitlement to turn any community they choose into another Data Center Alley, extracting massive resources and tax breaks in the process. Elon Musk built what he called the world’s biggest supercomputer next to the Boxtown neighborhood in Memphis, Tennessee. Dismayed at the idea of waiting for a grid connection to power his massive electricity needs, he plopped more than 30 huge generators in the parking lots next to his Colossus data center, essentially building an unregulated gas power plant himself. This, of course, circumvented any regulatory processes, spewing dangerous pollution into adjacent Boxtown.

It’s worth noting that Boxtown is a historically Black neighborhood, founded by freedmen after the Civil War. But according to the logic of data center proponents, the land was already a lost cause. One podcast guest said, “Elon, what he did with Memphis is objectively somewhat dirty, but he’s also doing it in an area where there’s like, a bigger natural gas plant right next door and like, a wastewater treatment and a garbage dump nearby, right?” By this logic, the presence of other polluting facilities somehow gives data centers permission to pollute more. Industry has already colonized these communities, so what’s a bit more colonization?

My research travels also took me to remote, mountainous Tucker County, West Virginia, home to a few idyllic small towns and a thriving outdoor recreation economy. A mysterious shell company, Fundamental Data, is trying to build a data center and power plant next to the landfill between the towns of Davis and Thomas. Many residents there have concluded that Fundamental Data saw old strip-mined land behind a landfill and considered it theirs to extract from.

Nikki Forrester is one such resident refusing to accept this data center land grab. An organizer with Tucker United, she argues that thinking the only use for old strip-mined land is industrial development is a failure of imagination: “You could do a lot of restoration and trail development and all sorts of stuff on old strip mine land. We bike on awesome bike trails through old strip mines all the time.” Restoring this land for outdoor recreation would keep with what people love about Tucker County, not to mention what drives much of the local economy. Building a data center on that land threatens all of that.

The story of companies seeing community resources and assuming that they can easily extract them because “nobody is using them anyway” is not new. Indeed, such thinking runs beneath America’s 250-year history and beyond, from the seizure of Indigenous lands to highway expansion, from industrial agriculture to today’s data center boom. But another undercurrent of American history is localized resistance to corporate power and extraction, from the Boston Tea Party to the West Virginia Mine Wars, from the Great Railroad Strike to the successful unionization at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island.

We see that resistance today as vibrant and fearless coalitions form across the country to resist the corporate extraction of data center construction. These coalitions are so strong in part because people of all stripes, across the political spectrum, resent the idea of tech corporations feeling entitled to their local resources. As West Virginia advocate and researcher Cathy Cunkel told me, the data center issue “isn’t about Left vs. Right, it’s about Up vs. Down.”

When framed this way—the powerful and rich vs. the people they’re trying to extract resources from— the data center fight becomes another chapter in a long American history of resisting corporate extraction enabled by feckless, unimaginative politicians.

Republicans voted to slash $1 trillion from Medicaid. They ended Affordable Care Act subsidies, putting healthcare out of reach for millions of Americans. All to give massive tax handouts to the Epstein class, so they can buy another yacht.

Now, America’s already rotten healthcare system is spiraling into crisis. Hospitals across the country are at risk of closing, with those in rural areas most at risk. Those that remain will have longer waits and fewer resources. Even those with private insurance are not spared the consequences of Republicans removing $1 trillion in resources from the healthcare system. If you aren’t a billionaire, your healthcare is about to get worse and more expensive—if it hasn’t already.

This spring, Americans are fighting back. The Stop Taking Our Healthcare campaign included over 35 events across the country, concentrated in congressional districts with vulnerable Republicans. Many of these events took place in front of hospitals at risk of closure.

I want to share the stories of just a few of these events, where patients, healthcare workers, and advocates came together to highlight the pain that Republicans are inflicting on their own constituents.

Everywhere I go, Americans are worried about losing their healthcare and the threats to their local hospitals.

Rahway, New Jersey is located in New Jersey’s 7th District, currently represented by Republican Rep. Tom Kean Jr. At our protest across the street from Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, resident Theresa Luoni worried about her children’s future: “Human beings with real needs are dropped off at homeless shelters when Medicaid runs out. As I watch this happen, I can’t help but see my children’s future. I’m the mother of two autistic boys. Without the right therapies, their needs escalate. My children are not statistics. They are not just autistic. They are human. They deserve safety. They deserve dignity. We go to bed every night and wonder if the care we depend on will go away.”

When healthcare is cut, when Medicaid is reduced, when services disappear, the impact is not theoretical. It's a child losing access to therapy that helps them communicate. - Theresa Luoni, #NJ07 resident

[image or embed]
— Social Security Works (@socialsecurityworks.org) April 28, 2026 at 9:42 AM

Sadly, Theresa is far from alone in needing to worry about her family’s healthcare: 16.5% of the residents of Rahway rely on Medicaid and 400,000 patients across New Jersey are projected to lose their healthcare as a result of the $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid thanks to the law passed by Rep. Tom Kean Jr. and his fellow Republicans.

In New York’s 17th District, currently represented by Republican Rep. Mike Lawler, Hudson Valley community members gathered at Northern Westchester Hospital to raise awareness of the dangers to their hospitals and healthcare posed by the $1 trillion in healthcare cuts Rep. Lawler and other Republicans passed into law.

Karen, a family caregiver who lives in NY-17, spoke about her efforts to take care of her parents, who are 88 and 94. One of them has dementia. Her parents need full-time support, and rely on Medicaid for round-the-clock care. Rep. Lawler recklessly voted for a law that will cut $128 billion from New York’s Medicaid program over the next decade, putting 45 hospitals in New York at risk of closing, including two hospitals in his own district. Like Karen’s parents, 211,500 people in New York’s 17th District rely on Medicaid. Rep. Lawler is willing to put the health of his constituents at risk to give massive tax breaks to billionaires.

When I hear about cuts to Medicaid, I know exactly what that means for families here in #NY17. Fewer services, overwhelmed providers, and people going without the care they need.But despite what families like mine are going through, Rep. Mike Lawler voted to cut Medicaid. - Karen Rubinson

[image or embed]
— Social Security Works (@socialsecurityworks.org) April 29, 2026 at 11:58 AM

In Bakersfield, California, residents gathered at Kern Medical College to demand healthcare, not warfare. Jon “Bowzer” Bauman, president of Social Security Works PAC, raised alarms about the impact of Republican healthcare cuts on local residents in nearby communities, including the people living in Republican Rep. David Valadao’s district. Sam Hardman, a local resident and US Army veteran, expressed his feelings that congressional Republicans like Reps. David Valadao and Vince Fong “have no idea what it is to care for another person” while speaking about how his family’s healthcare needs.

In Montana, our protests in Missoula and Polson focused on the concerns of local community members worried about losing their healthcare. In front of Providence St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula and Providence St. Joseph Medical Clinic in Polson, several local elected officials and candidates, including MT-01 Congressional candidate Sam Forstag, joined me in bringing attention to the eight hospitals around Montana in danger of closing.

Over 218,000 Montanans have healthcare coverage through Medicaid, but Republican cuts are putting the health of Montanans at risk and leaving vulnerable communities without access to affordable care.

In Colorado’s 8th District, currently represented by Republican Rep. Gabe Evans, neighbors gathered outside the Clinica Family Health clinic in Westminster. At least nine hospitals in Colorado are at risk of closing or reducing services. In Colorado’s 8th District, 1 in 4 people are covered by Medicaid. Yet Rep. Gabe Evans supported $1 trillion in healthcare cuts, so the richest of the rich don’t have to pay their fair share.

Alex Lawson: Let's remind ourselves WHY they cut $1 trillion out of Medicaid. Why 56K people are going to die every year.To give TRILLIONS in tax handouts to the richest people the world has ever known so they can buy another golden yacht to sail to Epstein's Island or whatever it is that they do.

[image or embed]
— Social Security Works (@socialsecurityworks.org) May 5, 2026 at 1:58 PM

Donna Smith, a local resident, attended the protest, and described standing in the freezing rain to deliver a message of defiance. Joining Donna in demanding that those who take away healthcare be held accountable, Dr. Vince Markovchick spoke about his experience running the emergency medicine department at Denver Health for 26 years, and what happens when patients cannot afford the care they need.

To conclude our Stop Taking Our Healthcare campaign, Michigan’s Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell and other lawmakers joined us as part of a national virtual town hall to discuss the effects of the $1 trillion in Republican healthcare cuts. Rep. Dingell declared: “Across this country, people are feeling the continued attacks on their healthcare.” Rep. Dingell mentioned hearing from parents, seniors, and workers who are all worried about losing their healthcare and what could happen to them next.

While the Stop Taking Our Healthcare campaign has finished, the fight for our healthcare must continue. Everywhere I go, Americans are worried about losing their healthcare and the threats to their local hospitals. The Republicans who decided to cut $1 trillion from our healthcare to hand out massive tax giveaways to the richest of the rich will face the consequences this November.

By Ralph Nader May 8, 2026 Editors of newspapers like to say that they cover the newsworthy events “without fear or favor.” Sure. But how can they cover events without the requisite curiosity, without deeply feeling for the public’s right to know, and without breaking through their “comfort zone”? Maybe you can help explain the…

Last Thursday, populist Democratic candidate Graham Platner shook up the Democratic establishment when his primary competitor, Maine Governor Janet Mills, suspended her Senate campaign amid polls showing her badly trailing Platner, an oyster farmer who had come out of nowhere to win a national following.

Platner is the latest example of the rise of anti-establishment outsiders in the Democratic Party — a trend that also includes self-proclaimed democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, who last year defeated former Gov. Andrew Cuomo for New York City mayor.

Yet the Democratic establishment — corporate Democrats, wealthy Democratic donors, entrenched Washington “centrists,” the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee, and Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer — still don’t get it.

Hell, the Democratic establishment didn’t get it a decade ago when Hillary Clinton was the presumptive Democratic nominee (and, not incidentally, Jeb Bush was considered a shoe-in for the Republican nomination).

I remember interviewing voters about their political preferences in the late spring of 2015, in the Rust Belt, Midwest, and South, for a book I was then writing. When I asked them whom they wanted for president, they kept telling me Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. Often the same individuals offered both names. They explained they wanted an “outsider,” someone who would “shake up” the system, ideally a person who wasn’t even a Democrat or a Republican.

The people I met were furious with their employers, with the federal government, and with Wall Street. They were irate that they hadn’t been able to save for their retirements, indignant that their children weren’t doing any better than they had at their children’s age, and enraged at those at the top. Several had lost jobs, savings, or homes in the financial crisis or the Great Recession that followed it.

If Democrats fail to connect with the frustrations of average hardworking Americans and decide instead to side with big corporations and Wall Street, they’ll have given up the most crucial opportunity in a generation both to take back control of Congress and to lead the way on a new progressive agenda.

They kept reiterating that the system was “rigged” in favor of the powerful and against themselves. They didn’t oppose government per se; most favored additional spending on Social Security, Medicare, education, and roads and bridges. But they hated “crony capitalism” — large corporations using their political clout to gain special favors and changes in laws that often hurt average people.

The following year, Sanders — then a 74-year-old Jew from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist and wasn’t even a Democrat until the 2016 presidential primaries — came within a whisker of beating Clinton in the Iowa caucus and ended up with 46 percent of the pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention from primaries and caucuses. Had the DNC not tipped the scales against him by deriding his campaign and rigging its financing in favor of Clinton, Sanders would probably have been the Democratic nominee in 2016.

Trump, then a 69-year-old egomaniacal billionaire reality TV star who had never held elected office or had anything to do with the Republican Party and who lied compulsively about almost everything, of course won the Republican primaries and went on to beat Clinton, one of the most experienced and well-connected politicians in modern America. Granted, he didn’t win the popular vote, and he had some help from Vladimir Putin, but he won.

Something very big was happening in America: a full-scale rebellion against the political establishment.

That rebellion continues to this day. Yet much of Washington’s Democratic elite is still in denial. They prefer to attribute the rise of Trump and, more broadly, Trumpism — its political paranoia, xenophobia, white Christian nationalism, misogyny, homophobia, and cultural populism — solely to racism. Well, racism is certainly a part of it. But hardly all.

In 2024, Democrats didn’t even get to choose their nominee from the primary process, since Biden dropped out after a dreadful debate performance and was replaced by Kamala Harris — leaving some Democrats feeling like higher powers were picking their nominee.

The anti-establishment groundswell has by now spread to independent voters — who are now a whopping 45 percent of the electorate and have moved sharply against Trump. It’s one of the most dramatic shifts in recent political history.

Trump’s approval rating among independents now stands at 25 percent, while 68 percent of independents disapprove of him. In 2024, independents were evenly divided, with 48 percent voting for Harris and 48 percent for Trump. In 2020, independents favored Biden by 9 percentage points.

The Democratic establishment still doesn’t see the groundswell — or is actively fighting it.

In Iowa, whose primary is June 2, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is quietly backing state Rep. Josh Turek against state Sen. Zach Wahls. That’s probably a mistake. Turek is a good candidate, but Wahls is a young, dynamic progressive — similar to Platner in his ability to inspire and rally. (In Iowa, independents who want to vote in the Democratic primary need only declare themselves Democrats by June 2.)

In California, whose primary is also June 2, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee just rejected Randy Villegas as its preferred nominee for the 22nd Congressional District and instead endorsed doctor and assemblywoman Jasmeet Bains. Villegas, known as a strong progressive, has been endorsed by the congressional progressive caucus and the congressional Hispanic caucus’s campaign arm. “This is about party leadership and D.C. elites putting their thumb on the scale for who they know will bend the knee to party leadership and corporate interests,” Villegas says.

In Arizona, whose primary is July 21, the DCCC has endorsed Marlene Galán-Woods in a Democratic primary to replace Representative David Schweikert, the Republican who is leaving Congress to run for governor. The DCCC rejected Amish Shah, a doctor and former state legislator who won the primary in 2024 and came within a few points of defeating Schweikert. (That year, Ms. Galán-Woods finished third in the primary.) Shah has been leading Galán-Woods by a 3-to-1 margin in the only public poll of the race. Shah says Democrats should stop backing the party apparatus if they want to win the House majority.

In Michigan, whose primary is August 4, the DSCC is backing Rep. Haley Stevens, who’s in a tight race against rival Abdul El-Sayed. Also probably a mistake. El-Sayed is another young progressive who’s showing a remarkable ability to galvanize Democrats and independents. (Michigan has open primaries in which any voter can participate.)

I could go on, but you get the point.

If Democrats fail to connect with the frustrations of average hardworking Americans and decide instead to side with big corporations and Wall Street, they’ll have given up the most crucial opportunity in a generation both to take back control of Congress and to lead the way on a new progressive agenda.

What does this anti-establishment surge — including the remarkable growth of independents and their sharp rejection of Trump — mean for the presidential race in 2028?

For one thing, it suggests that the current presumed Democratic frontrunners — Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom — are frontrunners only because of their name recognition. As voters find out more about the alternatives, it’s unlikely that either of them will make the cut.

For another, it suggests that anti-establishment candidates are the ones to watch.

Obama chief of staff and former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel told a packed crowd at the Milken Institute Global Conference this week that the biggest challenge both parties have faced over the last quarter-century has been the battle between establishment forces and anti-establishment forces.

Emanuel was correct. But he then went on to suggest, absurdly, that he’s anti-establishment. Emanuel’s cozy ties to corporate America, his closeness to Citadel founder Ken Griffin (who praised Emanuel from Milken’s main stage), and even Emanuel’s presence at the Milken conference, belie his claim.

But the mere fact that Emanuel thinks it important to claim anti-establishment creds underscores that the biggest force in American politics today — and in the Democratic Party — is anti-establishment rage at political insiders.

Despite the Democratic establishment, a younger and more charismatic generation of populist and progressive Democrats is on the way to winning primaries and general election races across America. If Graham Platner beats Republican Senator Susan Collins in Maine, which seems likely, he’s the kind of candidate who (in my humble opinion) will be the future of the Democratic Party.

Growing up, my family was nothing if not outdoorsy: summers spent swimming in lakes, winters spent walking on frozen streams. My grandmother taught me to swim before I could walk. But as I reflect on those cherished memories, it’s hard to ignore the disconnect between the natural world as it was then and the reality of it today. All around me, I see the relentless impact of climate change: from more frequent hurricanes to smokey air and extreme heat.

That's why it’s galling to see how New York Gov. Kathy Hochul gutted New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA). Despite the clear-and-present danger of climate change, Gov. Hochul watered down the CLCPA by pushing back important emissions deadlines and changing the way we calculate methane. She moved us from a 20-year accounting framework to a 100-year framework. That matters because methane is extremely potent in the short term, so using a 100-year timeline makes fossil fuel emission appear less severe.

When the CLCPA was signed into law in 2019, it represented a high point in New York State’s fight against climate change. For the first time, it introduced emissions targets that the state was legally-mandated to achieve. If actualized, the CLCPA promised to meaningfully reduce our state’s climate emissions—bringing cleaner air to our communities and a better shot at a more livable future for us all.

But Gov. Hochul seems to have abandoned those goals. Instead, her ongoing effort to defer the CLCPA is moving us in the wrong direction; it’s locking New York into a fossil fuel-based energy infrastructure. She has also delayed the ban on oil and gas in new buildings, halted the cap and invest program that would fund the energy transition, and cut successful solar initiatives. While the governor claims these decisions are motivated by an “all of the above” approach to rising energy costs, the reality is that she has largely neglected investing in renewable energy. And that’s despite the fact that renewables are, increasingly, the most affordable source of new electricity.

Gov. Hochul must follow through on the vision the state has already set—and stop trying to delay and dilute the CLCPA.

Moreover, Gov. Hochul’s behavior is also taking place amid relentless misinformation campaigns about renewable energy. President Donald Trump regularly parrots falsehoods—and outright lies—about solar and wind energy. The fossil fuel industry is also waging a public relations campaign of its own against a rapid transition to renewable energy. All of this is stymieing the types of policy initiatives, and clean energy investment, that are absolutely indispensable in this moment.

But here’s the reality we’re facing: Electricity demand is projected to grow significantly in the US. That’s a product of electrification campaigns—buildings, vehicles, and the like—alongside the phenomenal growth in data center construction that’s happening right now across the country. By refusing to invest in renewables, our elected officials are functionally selecting for rising fossil fuel use at precisely the moment when we must be doing the opposite. That will only deepen the climate crisis and expose consumers to higher and more volatile costs in the process.

Meeting this demand with renewable energy, by contrast, offers a path to stable, affordable, and sustainable growth. For businesses considering investments in renewable energy or clean-technology manufacturing, policy matters. To that end, Gov. Hochul must demonstrate that New York is serious about implementing the CLCPA, and that it is committed to building a future powered by renewable energy.

I volunteer with Dayenu, a movement of American Jews confronting the climate crisis with spiritual audacity and bold political action. When I think about my own motivation for taking action, I think about a teaching from the Midrash Ecclesiastes Rabbah, a Jewish commentary on the Book of Ecclesiastes. The midrash warns us: “Take care not to spoil or destroy My world, for if you do, there will be no one to repair it after you.” This ancient insight could not be more relevant today. Climate change is already shaping our lives through extreme weather, rising costs, and worsening pollution. The responsibility to act falls squarely on us.

The CLCPA recognizes our responsibility and points clearly toward renewable energy as the path forward. It even embedded climate justice into the energy transition by requiring investments in disadvantaged communities.

As faith communities, we understand the importance of long-term responsibility. Jewish tradition teaches that we are not merely consumers of the world, but also stewards of it. The decisions we make today echo across generations. Choosing renewable energy is one of the clearest ways we can fulfill that responsibility. Gov. Hochul must follow through on the vision the state has already set—and stop trying to delay and dilute the CLCPA. New York helped lead the nation once before. With determination and courage, we can do so again.