What we say at rallies and meetings with people who could help, but rarely do, is sometimes abstract and loaded with policy discussions that muddle even interested advocates at times. Healthcare in Colorado and all over the country is not only taking a hit with provisions of the “Big Beautiful Bill” passed by Congress in 2024 beginning to take effect, the healthcare industry is also still and increasingly one of the most profitable investment opportunities and nearly one-fifth of our GDP, or gross domestic product, flows from the healthcare industry. Private equity is in. Wall Street is in. It is as though the health industry CEOs and the elected officials they fund know exactly how to play the market to win. Human life is on the balance sheet bottom line buried in accounting lingo and those gorgeous profit terms.

Medicaid cuts hurt people. Medicaid cuts hurt communities. And on Tuesday, May 5, 2026, Coloradans were busy explaining the pain. Some were in warm conference rooms at Denver Health with a United States senator, and some were in the cold rain outside a clinic that could suffer or even close because of the cuts.

Cut losses; maximize gains. We are human widgets—forget the AI revolution if you have ignored the business insurgency into every aspect of the healthcare industry. We all needed to learn the language of greed and profit taking without regard for human life, and all the while we argued lives were lost without coverage. Those numbers of sacrificial dead are no match for the billions and yes, trillions, of dollars wagered, won, and lost making sure that final bottom line looks sexy.

So, in Colorado and all over the country, we gathered to demand those who vote to take our healthcare away will be held accountable. We may be widgets to the bean counters, but to one another and across multiple states and organizations, we stood together against the storm. In Westminster, Colorado, it was freezing rain and chilly, but we stood and carried on.

We intend to love one another enough to make sure human life is the profit we value more than the almighty dollar.

Dr. Vince Markovchick ran the emergency medicine department at Denver Health for 26 years. Think about what he must have seen and heard over time. Human life saved. The care not given when a patient tells the doctor they cannot afford the care or missing work or groceries if they allow care for a serious illness or injury. That is what Dr. Markovchick spoke about. Tender mercies delayed and shared as the rain briefly paused as we listened, as if the universe cared too. (Meanwhile, safe and sound and warm, in the hospital where he gave his professional life for us all, Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) held an invitation only round table on the Medicaid cuts. Even the press stayed nice and warm and didn’t come to witness the more than 25 Coloradans who gathered in the cold.)

Lydia Guzman spoke with passion and fire about the damage she saw and sees in lives without access to care; Tyler Quick spoke to us about the issues the LGBTQ+ community faces in receiving not only gender affirming care but HIV prevention and care. We might weep for his reminder to us that what happens in the LGBTQ+ community will also spread to the straight community and others among us. Like it or not, no human is an island. Nope. We are the human community.

What do we demand together in this drippy, difficult weather? We spoke clearly, “Stop Taking Our Healthcare.” No more beautiful bills taking benefits away; no more enforcement of policies in unrelated ways to healthcare delivery; and no more healthcare dollars wasted on business measures like advertising, stockholder pleasures, “inducements” for prescribing or procedures, lobbying expenses for policies passed or policies blocked, or even baubles and freebies when you table with your wares at all those conferences.

Then, we would be fine with seeing that end of the healthcare industry given over to actual delivery of care—for us all. And we intend to stay loud. We intend to be seen. And we intend to love one another enough to make sure human life is the profit we value more than the almighty dollar.

A US military strike on May 4 killed two mariners in an alleged “narco boat” campaign which now has a cumulative death toll of at least 188. The pace of extrajudicial executions is ramping up, according to The Guardian. But why?

The serial murders could be, as the Trump administration claims, a genuine counter-narcotics operation. Or Mr. Trump and company may be conducting a demonstration exercise of executive power. Alternatively, the “kinetic strikes” may reflect more domestic concerns or perhaps foreign policy issues. Another possibility is that the administration is intentionally cultivating an image of unpredictability associated with “madman theory” of deterrence. We interrogate those explanations.

Counter-Narcotics Rationale

When small boats were first being blown out of the water off the coast of Venezuela last September, stopping the epidemic of fentanyl deaths was presented as a national-security emergency.

This claim was despite failure of the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s reports from 2017 through 2025 to list Venezuela as a fentanyl producer or trafficker. This was backed by comprehensive studies from the United Nations. Almost all the fentanyl enters the US from land routes, according to the US State Department.

The old “war on drugs” was morphed into the “war on terror.”

The White House initially warned that these small outboard motorboats would actually make the 1,370-mile oceanic journey to attack the homeland. Consequently, overwhelming military force was necessitated to deter them. The largest armada ever was deployed in the Caribbean: an aircraft carrier, a nuclear submarine, a number of battleships, stealth bombers, etc.

Later, the War Department signaled that the naval deployment would be “enduring” regardless of the drug interdiction mission, suggesting that was not the purpose of “bringing a howitzer to a knife fight” in the first place. Strikes, some two-thirds of them to date, were extended to the eastern Pacific.

The US subsequently invaded Venezuela on January 3, kidnapping its president and first lady. On May 1, President Donald Trump threatened that the US Navy may “take on Cuba.” This is without drug interdiction as the central pretense.

Shifting Legal Justifications

The administration did not initially articulate a detailed legal doctrine after the first lethal strike in September. The broad rubric of the president’s responsibility to defend the homeland was proffered as if the US were being attacked rather than the other way around. In this initial stage, the rhetoric echoed the “war on drugs” with only a vague legal rationale.

Early polling by the Harris organization surprisingly showed initial public support for the strikes. Democratic Party discomfort centered mainly on procedural issues regarding secrecy and constitutional war powers authority within a larger bipartisan consensus over expanding national-security tools and legitimizing militarized counter-narcotics policy.

Soon, the Trump administration’s discourse transitioned to “narco-terrorism.” SOUTHCOM statements began referring to traffickers as “Designated Terrorist Organizations” and “unlawful combatants.” This legal maneuver was needed because simple criminal behavior such as drug trafficking cannot legally justify extralegal executions. Increasingly the administration cited cartel violence as something comparable to warfare in order to move beyond criminal law.

The administration’s new legal category to justify arbitrary use of naked military force without arrests or trials came on October 1. Trump notified Congress that the US was engaged in a “non-international armed conflict.” Accordingly, alleged combatants could be lethally targeted, eliminating customary due process.

This was backed by a classified Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion, which transforms ordinary criminals into “terrorists” or “enemy combatants.” With this legal sleight of hand, strikes were normalized as wartime actions rather than exceptional interdictions. To this day, the OLC document remains secret.

By late 2025, the justification was further expanded to constitute collective self-defense in a regional war. Much to the protests of their heads of state, the US president asserted his prerogative to intervene in Columbia and Mexico to solve their drug problems. This argument of preserving regional stability—while actually achieving the opposite—bolsters the claimed legal justification by pretending that Washington not only acts in its own interest but also that of neighboring states.

By 2026, the strikes became institutionalized as routine hemispheric conflict against “narco-terrorists,” shifting a law-enforcement framework toward a war framework. The old “war on drugs” was morphed into the “war on terror.”

Domestic Political Symbolism

Another interpretation is the strikes are aimed at domestic audiences. The attacks in Latin America are thus confounded with domestic concerns over insecure borders and the punishment of perceived enemies. Fox News posted this comment after the latest extrajudicial murders: “They’re like gnats. Stupidly annoying but.. removable!”

Missiles attacks on small boats demonstrate the administration taking dramatic action against supposed threats. The imagery communicates strength and decisiveness. This explains the unusual practice of displaying videos. Never mind that Trump’s bragging of success should have led to the cessation of strikes rather than ramping them up.

A Method to the Madness

Washington capriciously flaunts its lawlessness. Defying logic is the apparent inconsistency between (1) claiming the strikes “almost totally stopped” maritime trafficking while simultaneously (2) escalating rhetoric about the existential danger trafficking poses, requiring expanded force.

This suggests that there may be a method in Trump’s madness. The obvious contradiction implies that the objective is not merely operational success but continual demonstration of unconstrained authority. The guard rails are down.

The evidence suggests that the strikes serve multiple purposes: operational interdiction, political symbolism, deterrence signaling, and above all demonstration of US imperial might.

Unlike previous administrations that justified US imperial actions as “democracy promotion,” “responsibility to protect,” and upholding “international law,” Trump unapologetically assumes the posture that the “rules-based order” is one where the hegemon makes the rules and the rest follow his orders.

Impunity is paraded rather than hidden. The administration’s secrecy and shifting legal theories are consistent with a mission prioritizing political and psychological effects. The message to Venezuela’s Delcy Rodríguez, Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, or Mexico’s Claudia Scheinbaum is deviation from Washington’s dictates carries high risks.

Corporate Media

Trump’s egregiousness presents a challenge for the usual follow-the-flag corporate press. Initially their coverage expressed shock over the strikes with mild questioning of their legal basis relating to constitutional authority and lack of due process.

By late 2025, press coverage shifted from treating the strikes as novel to accepting them as routine. Around the same time, what passes as the “liberal” media—such as The Washington Post, Reuters, AP, and Politico—began to more strongly question the legal basis of the strikes but not the strategic objectives.

More recently, press coverage of the strikes might be characterized as acceptance through regularization. This reflects audience fatigue and the broader post-9/11 normalization of targeted killing practices.

Hemispheric force projection

The evidence suggests that the strikes serve multiple purposes: operational interdiction, political symbolism, deterrence signaling, and above all demonstration of US imperial might. The strikes reflect a broader and growing trend by the imperial power to conduct cross-border operations against non-state actors without formal declarations of war.

This shift is tied to Pentagon doctrines emphasizing "great-power competition," "integrated deterrence," and persistent hemispheric "force projection" against both state and non-state actors. Related is the declamation by War Secretary Pete Hegseth of a “Greater North America,” a US-defined security zone extending from Greenland to the Equator.

Meanwhile, The Guardian reports: “Cocaine production is at a record high and global drug prices are at historic lows.”

The United States took a decisive step toward democracy with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. At the time, Black political representation was not just limited—it was nearly nonexistent. African Americans made up more than 10% of the population but held less than 2% of seats in Congress and none in the Senate.

By dismantling formal barriers to voting, the Voting Rights Act opened the door for Black political participation—and over time, representation. That progress was neither immediate nor inevitable, but it was real.

It was in this context that the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, the organization I lead, was founded in 1970. Our mission is to support the growth of Black political leadership and ensure that increased representation translates into meaningful policy outcomes.

More than five decades later, that mission remains urgent.

Representation alone does not guarantee equity—but without it, inequity is almost certain.

Black representation in the House has grown from fewer than 10 members in 1965 to more than 60 today, reaching roughly 14% of members—finally approaching parity with the Black share of the US population. But it took nearly 60 years to reach this point.

That underscores a critical truth: Representation requires sustained protection and intentional policy.

Even now, the progress is incomplete. Even with a record high five Black senators—just 5% of the total—Black representation in the Senate remains far below the Black population share.

Today, even these gains are under threat. Recent Supreme Court decisions have weakened the Voting Rights Act, reducing federal oversight and making it more difficult to challenge discriminatory voting practices.

The court’s most recent ruling gutted regulation designed to ensure Black representation, permitting what amounts to racial gerrymandering under the guise of partisan gerrymandering—a practice which itself badly undermines democracy for Americans of all races.

The result is a system increasingly driven by political advantage rather than fair representation. And Black representation is likely to suffer because of it.

Gerrymandering is often discussed as a partisan tactic, but it has broader structural consequences. When districts are drawn to maximize political control, they can dilute the voting power of communities of color—even without explicitly referencing race. For Black communities, whose political gains have often depended on fair districting, the erosion of these protections is particularly consequential.

This is not simply about who wins elections. It is about how policy is shaped and whose interests are represented in decisions that affect economic opportunity, education, healthcare, and wealth. Representation alone does not guarantee equity—but without it, inequity is almost certain.

The current moment demands clarity. The expansion of Black political representation over the past half century was the result of deliberate policy choices, sustained advocacy, and legal enforcement. As those protections are weakened, the risk is not just stagnation—it is regression.

At the Joint Center, our goal is clear: to ensure that the gains of the past are protected and that the path toward equitable representation remains open.

Nearly 60 years after the Voting Rights Act, Black Americans have come closer than ever to achieving representation in Congress that reflects their share of the population. But progress at this level is not self-sustaining. Without strong protections and continued commitment, it can be reversed.

The work of building a representative democracy is ongoing. And at this moment, it is clear that the work must continue.

Live at 9 AM Eastern & Streaming 24-7 Thereafter:

Editorial cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM Eastern time.

Today we discuss:

• Trump’s announcement that the U.S. military would escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz under Operation Freedom angered Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, who denied U.S. access to Saudi airspace and American bases in the country because he wants to end the war and saw the idea as a provocation. Prince Mohammed’s action stunned U.S. officials and forced Trump to abandon his plan. Trump’s unpredictable and whipsawing approach to Iran has strained ties with one of his closest allies.

• Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s governing Labour Party suffers big losses and the hard-right party Reform U.K. made major gains in partial results from local elections that are widely seen as an unofficial referendum on Starmer. Reform UK, led by nationalist politician Nigel Farage, won hundreds of local council seats in working-class areas in England’s north such as Hartlepool that once were solid Labour turf, and also made gains from the Conservatives in areas like Havering on the eastern edge of London.

• A crowd at a military Mother’s Day event laughed lightly when Melania Trump referred to her husband’s empathy. “Most know my husband as the strong commander-in-chief, but his empathy transcends the role,” she said as laughter bubbled up among military moms.

• The Washington Post editorial board argues: “Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) doesn’t just think there should be no billionaires. She believes accumulating that much wealth is inherently immoral, probably criminal and definitely illegitimate. How does she grapple with the 3,400 or so people who have that much? ‘You can break rules,’ she explained. ‘You can abuse labor laws. You can pay people less than what they’re worth. But you can’t earn that.’ To say that it’s impossible to legitimately earn a billion dollars is to put an arbitrary limit on human potential. And presuming that anyone who becomes too successful must be cheating shows a lack of imagination as to what humans are capable of accomplishing in a free society.”

JOIN US LIVE ON RUMBLE

https://rumble.com/c/DeProgramShow

FOLLOW TED:

https://rall.com/

https://x.com/tedrall

LISTEN ON SPOTIFY:

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

LISTEN ON APPLE MUSIC:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/deprogram-with-john-kiriakou-and-ted-rall

The post Saudi Nay-rabia | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

When I was a sociology graduate student and teaching assistant, we learned about the global fight over oil, that the center of oil dependence is in the Middle East, and that eventually we would go to war with Iran. Fast forward 20 years later and the predictions of my professor have reached fruition. As many of us are now catching up to, roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply flows through the Strait of Hormuz, whose shipping lanes are currently closed and controlled by Iran and Oman.

As fraught relations with Iran continue to play out, and regardless of our political alliances, it is important for us to realize and remind ourselves that crude oil, petroleum, is a finite and non-renewable resource. Earth’s reserves took millions of years to form, and we are using them up at an alarming rate. If oil demand continues to increase over the next few decades, we are not in a position to meet that demand.

Scientists have been predicting that peak oil, the time when oil production and demand is highest, will come and go, but AI will change that. Data centers, large buildings housing servers, data storage, and related equipment, require elaborate power and cooling systems to run and further tax our energy grid. According to research, there are over 4,000 data centers in the United States with 643 in Virginia alone. In 2024, these data centers consumed more than 4% of our country’s total electricity and 26% of total electricity supply in Virginia. Fifty-six percent of the energy needed for AI data centers is from gas and coal; natural gas supplies over 40% of this electricity. In order to meet these needs, utility companies are expected to increase the average residential bill. The AI trajectory is not only fossil fuel dependence, it is continued extraction where environmental problems are converted into revenue. This trend of profit for some at the expense of many people and the environment will accelerate our depletion of our natural resources, and we should all be concerned.

Access to cheap fuel is not a right. It is a subsidy built on violence, both societal and environmental harm. The price of cheap oil is exploitation and death, including death of children and the destabilization of our climate, which all risk future generations' viability on Earth. In the face of such consequences, surely we can do better.

In learning how to decouple our existence from consumerism and fossil fuel overdependence, we need to move beyond our shopping choices.

The only solution to expensive gas is to consume less gas. To be sure, this is a rock and a hard place conundrum. We rely on our vehicles to get to work. Most of our cities lack high bikeability. And, most Americans live paycheck to paycheck and a small increase in the price of gas is too much on an already strained budget. The federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour has not changed since 2009.

Meanwhile, our federal government has gutted The Environmental Protection Agency, climate change policy, and environmental regulations and the supreme court has developed a shadow docket whose first action was to roll back environmental protections. Our structure is crumbling any semblance of respect for our planet and leaning hard into anthropocentrism, the “humans first” logic that parallels President Donald Trump’s America first faulty logic.

What are the costs of being first? From a sociological viewpoint, increased demands for goods, technological pursuit, militarization, and war without long-term risk assessment and a society overly dependent on consumerism and endless growth needs to be checked. A society unwilling to critically reflect on nor willing to change its self-destructive trajectory is not a sustainable one. Gas prices should reflect their true costs, not only to us, but to our planet and to future generations.

How we move forward from this mess is up to us. While individual actions, such as knowing what we buy, how large our ecological footprint is, and that eating less meat is good for the environment, are important, they will not be impactful at scale unless we can connect them to organized and sustained collective action. We need viable political options. In learning how to decouple our existence from consumerism and fossil fuel overdependence, we need to move beyond our shopping choices. We need to get to know our political candidates and vote for people who prioritize both social and environmental sustainability. Elections are right around the corner, and we can all learn more about the candidates and measures.

These days, everything seems so fake that it’s impossible to discern what may or may not be real in order to determine whether you should care.

The post Everything Is Fake appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

On April 30, 2026 a group of 36 leading mental health experts issued a statement calling for the immediate removal of President Trump from office, citing his mental instability and calling him “increasingly a danger to the public.” Their statement was entered into the Congressional Record by Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed of Rhode…

We are witnessing what happens to a person who is consumed with the need to dominate but cannot.

Iran is unlikely to give in. It can withstand the economic pressure of a blockade better than Trump can withstand the political pressure that comes with rising gas prices (now nearly $4.50 a gallon, on average), soon followed by rising food prices.

His looming failure in Iran is not just a serious geopolitical defeat for the United States; it’s a personal crisis for Trump.

Those rising prices coupled with an increasingly unpopular war have increased the likelihood that Democrats will take back control of the House and even possibly the Senate in the upcoming midterms.

Here again, not just a political defeat for the Republican Party but a personal crisis for Trump.

His ego cannot accept a humiliating loss, as we saw after the 2020 election. His need to bully, dominate, and gain submission is so hardwired inside his insecure head that the defeats he’s now facing — to Iran and to Democrats — are already setting off explosions.

He’s posting more wildly than ever — attacking, insulting, ridiculing, threatening.

On Sunday, Trump posted that Democrats had “RIGGED the 2020 Presidential Election. GET TOUGH REPUBLICANS—THEY’RE COMING, AND THEY’RE COMING FAST! They’re no good for our Country, they almost destroyed it, and we don’t want to let that happen again!” He demanded that Republicans “approve all of the necessary Safeguards we need for Elections to protect the American Public during the upcoming Midterms.”

More of his posts are bizarre AI-generated paeans to himself, his godlike powers, his wished-for physique, and his self-image of omnipotence. On Friday night, he posted an AI-image of himself, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Doug Burgum, all shirtless and with young physiques, standing in the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, along with an unidentifiable woman in a bikini. Minutes later he posted an image of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries holding a baseball bat, with a caption calling Jeffries “low IQ,” “a THUG,” and “a danger to our Country.” On Tuesday, he posted AI-images of Joe Biden on one knee with the caption “COWARDS KNEEL,” Barack Obama with the caption “TRAITORS BOW,” and himself with his fist raised and the caption “LEADERS LEAD.”

His mouth — never in control — is now in diarrheic mode. He’s even back to attacking the pope, accusing him of “endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people,” adding, “but I guess if it’s up to the pope, he thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

His thin-skinned vindictiveness is beyond anything we’ve seen before, which is saying a lot. Last week, after German chancellor Friedrich Merz said the U.S. was “being humiliated by the Iranian leadership,” Trump repeatedly attacked and ridiculed Merz. The Defense Department then said it was pulling 5,000 troops out of Germany, and Trump said he was increasing tariffs on European cars and trucks to 25 percent (from 15 percent).

He’s becoming ever more obsessed with monuments to himself — his ballroom, his arch, his so-called “garden of heroes,” his Trump-embossed passports, his image on 24-karat gold commemorative coins, and his name plastered or etched all over Washington. His plans for self-monuments are becoming larger by the day, more grotesque, more grandiose, and more expensive. Senate Republicans just proposed $1 billion more for Trump’s ballroom, which, recall, was supposed to “cost taxpayers nothing.”

He has even directed the Treasury to announce that his own signature — yes, the same one that appears in a book of birthday greetings for Jeffrey Epstein — will replace the Treasurer’s on all new U.S. paper currency. This will be the first time in American history that a sitting president’s name will appear on circulating cash money.

His thirst for vengeance is exploding, too. Last week the Department of Justice launched another criminal case against former director of the FBI James Comey (whose earlier indictment was quashed by the courts) for posting a picture of seashells spelling out “86 47” on Instagram a year ago. Trump is also insisting that the Justice Department restart its criminal investigation of Jerome Powell and double-down against former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Mark Milley and others he considers “enemies.”

Facing the two monumental failures of Iran and control over Congress, Trump is fanatically seeking other ways to assert dominance. On Tuesday, his Education Department announced a civil rights investigation into Smith College over enrolling transgender students. Expect more of this.

Regardless of what happens in Iran, he’ll claim victory. That will be difficult to do convincingly when gas prices remain over $4 a gallon, but he’ll undoubtedly try.

What if Democrats win control of one or both chambers of Congress in the midterms and he claims they lost or cheated? The nation barely survived the last time Trump’s fragile ego faced a major loss.

We’ll also have to cope with Trump as a lame-duck president who can no longer dominate and gain submission as he did before. Will he try to remain president beyond his second term to avoid this?

The man is unwell. Seriously unwell. Lame-duck presidents fade away, but injured dictators can be dangerous.

Productivity growth is an old concept; we’ve been seeing it at a substantial pace for more than 200 years. Nonetheless, many elite intellectual types like to claim they know nothing about it when they talk about AI.

It’s far from clear how much of a productivity boom we will see with AI. For people who are lost with my reference to productivity growth, the story that AI will take all the jobs is a story of a massive productivity boom. If that happens, it will mean that the people who are still working will be hugely more productive, since we will be producing the same or more goods and services as we do at present, with many fewer people working.

FWIW, virtually no major forecaster or forecasting agency is projecting anything like this productivity boom. For example, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that productivity growth will average 1.5 percent over the next decade.

That’s a healthy rate of productivity growth, but nothing extraordinary. It’s a bit better than the 1.3 percent rate from 2005 to 2025, but less than the 2.0 percent rate we saw in the 1990s and much less than the 2.4 percent pace the country had from 1947 to 1973. There is no story of AI creating mass unemployment here.

CBO is not God, but they are pretty much in the center of professional forecasters by design. They try to make sure that their forecasts do not vary hugely from what other public and private sector forecasters are projecting.

It is also worth noting that if CBO is seriously wrong on the low side, then some other things logically follow. Most importantly, if productivity growth proves to be far more rapid than what they have projected, GDP growth will also be far more rapid than projected. This would mean, among other things, that the debt-to-GDP ratios will be much lower in the future than is currently projected.

In other words, the people yelling about unsustainable debts and deficits need to STFU. You can’t both be expecting a massive AI productivity boom and think the US has a huge debt problem. That is not a matter of opinion; it is a matter of logic.

But let’s assume for a moment that we do get a huge productivity boom from AI. We don’t need to run around like chickens with our heads cut off when we ask what to do about it. Because productivity growth is in fact a very very old phenomenon. We have long known how to deal with it; we shorten work hours.

Workers in Germany, France, and other wealthy countries work on average 20-25 percent fewer hours a year than Americans.

That is why we got the 40-hour work week with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) in 1937. The Act doesn’t actually prohibit employers from having longer work weeks; it simply requires them to pay a 50 percent premium for overtime hours. This was supposed to encourage them to hire more workers instead of working their existing workforce more hours. (Contrary to the way it is discussed in the media, the decision to put in overtime is almost always the employer’s, not the worker’s. Unless a union contract specifies otherwise, an employer has the option to fire a worker who refuses overtime.)

This is why it was truly incredible that Trump eliminated the income tax on the overtime premium. This is effectively encouraging employers to have longer workweeks, 180 degrees opposite of the intention of the FLSA.

But just because Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress have no grasp of economics doesn’t mean the rest of us shouldn’t. If we really are seeing an AI-driven productivity boom, the most obvious way to deal with it is to shorten the workweek and work year. The United States is an outlier here. While we were originally a leader in implementing a 40-hour workweek, we have done little to reduce work time in the 90 years since then.

As a result, workers in Germany, France, and other wealthy countries work on average 20-25 percent fewer hours a year than Americans. As a crude approximation, if workers put in 20 percent fewer hours on average, it will mean 20 percent more jobs. Things in the real world are never quite that simple, but the basic logic that shorter work years means more jobs does hold.

It’s also not rocket science to get to shorter work years. We can amend the FLSA so that the overtime wage premium kicks in at 34 or 36 hours. Also, instead of removing taxes on the premium (having taxpayers subsidize long workweeks), we can raise the premium from 50 percent to 75 percent, as the Congressional Progressive Caucus recently proposed. We can also mandate 2 weeks or more vacation, along with paid sick days and family leave, as many states have already done. All this is old-fashioned stuff that other wealthy countries have been doing for decades, and we have done in the United States nationally in the distant past and more recently at the state level.

The immediate prompt for this diatribe was a New York Times article that asked how we will deal with a collapse of employment from AI. In fairness, the piece does note that an AI-driven productivity boom is far from certain, but it then suggests that if it does happen, a universal basic income, or a universal high income might be ways to deal with it. The piece notes that Elon Musk is supposedly an advocate of the latter.

While any pro-worker legislation will face an enormous uphill battle in the current political environment, a variation of policies that people have seen for a century might have a better shot than something that seems completely new.

While these proposals are, in principle, fine, they ignore the reality of US politics. Just four years ago, when the Democrats had a trifecta, they could not get a modest increase in the child tax credit approved in the Senate. Get out your yard stick and try to measure the distance between a modest boost to the child tax credit and a universal basic income, much less a universal high-income.

It’s probably also worth mentioning that Elon Musk has done everything he can to keep his workers at Tesla from forming a union, where they would be better able to secure their share of the company’s profits. That may lead reasonable people to question his commitment to workers’ well-being in an era of AI-driven mass unemployment.

While any pro-worker legislation will face an enormous uphill battle in the current political environment, a variation of policies that people have seen for a century might have a better shot than something that seems completely new. It is also worth pointing out that the tools for dealing with a surge in productivity growth are well-known and tested. Whether or not a universal basic income is a better way to go, our toolbox is already far from empty when it comes to dealing with this situation. This is not a new story, and it is wrong to portray it as one.

At 8:15 AM on August 6, 1945, a 9,000-pound atomic bomb detonated 1,900 feet above Hiroshima, instantly killing 70,000 people. Three days later, a second bomb exploded over Nagasaki, killing another 40,000.

The sheer scale of destruction—that humans could annihilate each other by means as violent as a nuclear blast—ensured that Hiroshima and Nagasaki would become the defining images of nuclear weapons in the American imagination. According to a 2025 Pew Research survey, 83% of Americans reported knowing at least something about the use of nuclear weapons in Japan. However, increasingly large numbers of younger Americans don’t know enough about nuclear weapons today to give an opinion on their role in national security.

What is often remembered as the only detonation of nuclear weapons in history remains the sole use of nuclear weapons in warfare. While Americans looked overseas at the devastation in Japan, fewer recognized that nuclear weapons were also transforming the American environment at home.

For decades after World War II, nuclear weapons reshaped landscapes and communities across the United States. Between 1945 and 1992, the United States conducted 1,030 nuclear tests, while producing tens of thousands of warheads during the Cold War. At its height, the US nuclear stockpile comprised 31,255 warheads, with the last fully functional nuclear weapon being produced in 1989. The environmental and human consequences of this effort extended far beyond test sites and production facilities. Yet, the US government kept the public in the dark, leaving a generation born in the 21st century to bear the consequences of its obfuscated proliferation campaign.

The Nuclear Transformation of Marginalized America

Consider that the plutonium used in the first nuclear test in New Mexico and in the Nagasaki bomb was produced at the Hanford Site in Washington State. Between 1945 and 1970, Hanford’s reactors discharged roughly 444 billion gallons of radioactive wastewater into the Columbia River basin, a watershed that today supports over 8 million residents.

Other sites tell similar stories. In South Carolina and Georgia, rural communities were displaced to make way for the Savannah River Site nuclear weapons facility, where millions of gallons of radioactive waste were stored in underground tanks.

Make no mistake, the United States federal government was calculated in its targeting of marginalized communities to isolate radioactive material from the general population. These facilities were often located in rural or economically disadvantaged areas, where political resistance was limited and land was cheaper.

Nuclear weapons represent one of the most profound environmental risks humanity has ever created.

Currently the only permanent waste site for nuclear material in the United States, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad, New Mexico, collects plutonium-contaminated waste to be buried over 2,000 feet underground a salt flat formation. Framed as a barren wasteland far from major population centers, WIPP is in Eddy County, New Mexico—home to a population of over 61,000 people, of which 64% identify as people of color. Many communities face contaminated water supplies and elevated rates of respiratory illness, kidney disease, and cancer: a pattern sometimes described as “radioactive colonialism.”

Despite the government’s efforts to isolate nuclear activities and waste disposal, radioactive contamination did not respect geographic boundaries. Research released in 2023 found that nuclear tests conducted between 1945 and 1962 distributed radioactive fallout across 46 of the lower 48 contiguous states in the United States, as well as parts of Canada and Mexico. As a result of nuclear tests conducted by both the United States and other nuclear-armed powers, radioactive isotopes released into the atmosphere spread throughout the world in communities far from test sites. By the 1960s, “there was no place on Earth where the signature of atmospheric nuclear testing could not be found in soil, water, and even polar ice.” Radioactive isotopes entered the food chain through plants and animals, creating pathways of exposure far from any test site.

For most people living far from testing areas, these exposures were small. But they illustrate a fundamental reality of nuclear weapons: Even carefully controlled programs produce global environmental consequences. Even when the government attempted to isolate radioactivity and testing in supposedly remote communities, contamination from weapons production, testing, and disposal still spread far beyond those sites, affecting environments across the world.

The Renewed Nuclear Arms Race

While the United States has not conducted a full-scale nuclear test since 1992, nuclear competition is accelerating again.

China is rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal, with estimates suggesting that its stockpile could exceed 1,000 warheads by the early 2030s. At the same time, arms control agreements that once constrained the world’s largest nuclear powers are eroding. The expiration of the New START treaty in February 2026 removed the last formal limits on US and Russian strategic nuclear forces.

Even if informal limits remain in place, the collapse of binding agreements signals a shift toward a less regulated nuclear environment. Some policymakers have suggested that renewed nuclear testing may be necessary in response to foreign advances, which would risk repeating many of the mistakes of the Cold War.

Consider that for the first time in history, the new nuclear proliferation environment includes a three-way standoff between three major armed powers: the United States, China, and Russia.

Mutually Assured Climate Destruction

A global nuclear war alone would be enough to trigger catastrophic climatic effects. Even a limited nuclear exchange could inject vast quantities of smoke and soot into the upper atmosphere, blocking sunlight and lowering global temperatures. The use of a mere 2% of the world’s current arsenal could trigger severe cooling and agricultural disruption, leaving 2 billion people at risk of starvation in just the following two years. If nuclear winter renders any use of nuclear weapons as unsurvivable, then deterrence may be an inadequate strategy, since the consequences of a miscalculation or accidental launch would increase dramatically.

This erosion of international nonproliferation channels comes as climate change fuels geopolitical instability by intensifying resource competition, migration pressures, and regional conflicts, increasing the risk of confrontation among nuclear-armed states. Climate change and nuclear weapons therefore reinforce one another in dangerous ways: Environmental stress increases the risk of conflict, while nuclear conflict would produce environmental consequences on a planetary scale.

Bridging the Gap: Building the Next Generation of Advocates

Despite these connections, environmental and social justice concerns remain peripheral in most nuclear policy debates. Discussions of deterrence and arms control typically focus on military balance and strategic stability, while the environmental legacy of nuclear weapons receives far less attention.

This gap may help explain why nuclear policy often struggles to engage younger generations.

Surveys consistently show that climate change is one of the defining concerns of younger voters. Roughly 70% of young people report deep anxiety about environmental degradation and say they are likely to support candidates who prioritize climate policy. Nuclear weapons policy rarely speaks to these concerns directly. Yet nuclear weapons represent one of the most profound environmental risks humanity has ever created.

Reframing nuclear policy to include environmental and social justice considerations would not only reflect historical reality, but also make nuclear policy more relevant to the challenges of the 21st century.

A recent analysis from the Tax Foundation argues that the US federal income tax system remains solidly progressive. Citing new Internal Revenue Service data for tax year 2023, the group is emphasizing that high-income taxpayers pay the highest average tax rates and account for a large share of total income taxes paid. On its face, that claim sounds reassuring—a sign that our tax code must surely be doing its job.

But this framing leaves out a critical part of the story. Yes, the wealthy pay more in taxes than everyone else. The real question: whether they’re paying enough, their fair share relative to their rapidly growing share of our nation’s income and wealth. By that measure, the answer must be a clear no. The US tax system, the underlying data show, remains far less progressive than it once was—and far less effective at counteracting inequality than it needs to be.

The Tax Foundation is claiming that the top 1%’s share of the nation’s adjusted gross income, AGI, “fluctuates with the business cycle” while the share of the taxes these rich pay has been “generally increasing.” But, in fact, these two indicators track each other rather closely over time. By placing income share and tax share on separate graphs, the Tax Foundation obscures how close this tracking has been.

Graphed together, the obvious correspondence of these two measures becomes unmistakably clear: As the top 1%’s share of income rises, so does the top 1%’s share of taxes. In other words, the increase in the tax dollars these rich are paying largely reflects the larger slice of total national income these rich are pocketing, not that the tax system has somehow become meaningfully more progressive. The top 1% tax share is rising because the top 1% income share is rising, not because our most affluent are facing a heavier tax burden on their gains.

A truly progressive system should meaningfully reduce inequality by redistributing income and wealth and curbing the concentration of economic power at the top. By that standard, the US tax system falls short.

By characterizing the top 1%’s income share as “fluctuating with the business cycle” while characterizing its tax share as “generally increasing”—and separating the graphic presentation of these two trends—the Tax Foundation is playing fast and loose with our core tax reality.

The time frame of the Tax Foundation’s analysis further muddies the waters. By starting in 2001, the Tax Foundation misses the longer arc of rising inequality in the United States. Looking back to the 1980s, the trend is unmistakable: The top 1%’s share of income has climbed substantially, from 11.3% in 1986 to 20.6% in 2023. The tax share of these rich has risen as well, from 25.8% in 1986 to 38.4% in 2023. Meanwhile their average effective tax rate has actually declined over the same period, from 33.1% to 26.3%, according to IRS data.

Even more importantly, focusing solely on income ignores the explosion of wealth at the top. Adjusted gross income (AGI) itself is a limited and often misleading measure—an arbitrary definition used for tax purposes that fails to capture total economic income, and completely misses the scale of wealth accumulation. Over the past several decades, our nation’s richest households have accumulated an outsized share of the nation’s wealth, with that wealth share far outpacing the top 1%'s growing share of national income. Yet the tax system does relatively little to address this imbalance.

Wealth remains lightly taxed compared to income, and many forms of capital income, to make matters worse, enjoy low preferential tax rates or taxes that can be deferred indefinitely. The end result: The overall tax burden on America’s richest is failing to keep pace with their expanding economic power.

The distortions become even clearer when we look beyond the top 1% to the tippy top of our wealth distribution, the top 0.01%. These ultra-wealthy households have seen extraordinary gains in both income and wealth over time. But their tax contributions have not kept up proportionally.

An Institute for Policy Studies analysis of data collected by economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman shows that our top 0.01% more than tripled their share of the nation’s wealth between 1962 and 2018. Yet their share of US taxes paid in 2018 hovered only slightly higher than their share of taxes paid in 1962.

All of this raises a fundamental question: What makes a tax system “progressive”? Just somewhat higher tax rates on higher earners? No. A truly progressive system should meaningfully reduce inequality by redistributing income and wealth and curbing the concentration of economic power at the top. By that standard, the US tax system falls short.

Our current tax system largely mirrors our nation’s underlying distribution of income rather than reshaping that distribution. The rich pay more because they have more. But they don’t pay more at levels sufficient to counterbalance their outsized gains. In 2023, the top 1% captured about 20.6% of pre-tax income and still held roughly 17.7% after federal income taxes, only a modest reduction. That after-tax share is still higher than their 17.4% share of pre-tax income in 2001, underscoring how little the tax system has done to curb the growing concentration of income at the top.

Reversing these trends will require more than modest tweaks to the tax code. It will take a more ambitious approach, one that directly addresses both income and wealth concentration at the very top. Until then, claims that the tax system is adequately progressive risk obscuring a deeper reality: Inequality continues to widen, and the tax code is doing too little to stop it.

Canada is set to host the headquarters of the proposed Defence, Security, and Resilience Bank, or DSRB, a new multinational institution designed to mobilize tens of billions in financing for military and security projects among allied nations. In short, what we are seeing is the quiet normalization of something far more consequential: the permanent financialization of war.

The structure being envisioned for DSRB closely resembles other multilateral financial institutions. It would raise capital on global markets, issue bonds, and extend loans to governments and defense companies. That means funding for military supply chains, weapons systems, and defense infrastructure would increasingly flow through financial markets rather than direct public expenditure. In doing so, war itself risks being transformed from a political decision subject to public scrutiny into a financial product embedded in portfolios.

And so, with remarkable efficiency, we may be arriving at a point where, whether you like it or not, you are investing in war. Not because you consciously chose to, but because modern finance rarely asks for permission. It integrates. It diffuses. It embeds. Just as complex mortgage-backed securities seeped into pension funds and retirement portfolios before the 2008 Financial Crisis, instruments tied to defense financing could quietly become part of the same financial plumbing that underpins everyday savings. Deposits in major banks, such as Royal Bank of Canada or Toronto-Dominion Bank, feed into broader lending and investment pools. If those banks help underwrite DSRB bonds or finance defense projects, then ordinary savings are, at least indirectly, part of the system. You won’t need to opt in. The system will do it for you.

Once you are in that system, try opting out. Go ahead—divest. In theory, it sounds simple. In practice, it is anything but. Large pension funds, such as the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board or the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, operate within a web of financial relationships that makes complete divestment extraordinarily complex. If DSRB bonds are rated as safe investment-grade assets, they could easily find their way into fixed-income portfolios. Even if funds choose to avoid them directly, indirect exposure remains: through banks that underwrite the bonds, through ETFs that bundle defense assets, and through lending syndicates that finance defense contractors. “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men” of global finance, institutions like JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank, are already lining up behind this model. When the entire financial stack aligns like this, divestment becomes less a matter of choice and more a question of how far you are willing, or even able, to disentangle yourself from the system.

The DSRB starts to look like a "World Bank for Warfare."

What emerges is not just a new bank, but a new layer of abstraction between citizens and the consequences of war. Traditionally, military spending is debated, however imperfectly, through parliaments and public scrutiny. A financialized model shifts that process into capital markets, where decisions are driven less by voters and more by risk assessments, yield expectations, and institutional incentives. Over time, this risks normalizing war as an investable asset class, something to be priced, traded, and held in portfolios rather than questioned in public forums.

That transformation carries consequences. One of the most immediate concerns is that such a bank could normalize or even facilitate controversial military interventions. If borrowing costs for defense spending are lowered, the financial barriers to launching military operations also fall. History offers a sobering precedent. The Iraq War was widely condemned after the central justification, claims of weapons of mass destruction, collapsed under scrutiny. Yet the war had already been financed, executed, and justified through institutional momentum. A system like DSRB could make such momentum easier to sustain, not harder. When capital is readily available, restraint becomes less likely.

Over time, this could make war financing a permanent feature of the global system. What used to be occasional becomes routine, and what was once debated becomes taken for granted. In that sense, the DSRB starts to look like a "World Bank for Warfare."

Equally concerning is the question of democratic oversight. Traditional military spending must pass through national parliaments, where budgets are debated by elected representatives. A multilateral financial institution operates differently. By raising funds on global capital markets and deploying them through loans and financial instruments, DSRB could create a layer of decision-making that sits at arm’s length from voters. The result is a subtle but significant shift from public accountability to financial abstraction. Decisions about long-term military financing could become less visible, less contested, and ultimately less democratic.

What makes this shift particularly jarring is where it is happening. Canada has long cultivated an image of a country that prioritizes diplomacy, multilateralism, and peacekeeping. Yet by stepping forward to host the DSRB, it is positioning itself not just as a participant in global security, but as a financial hub for its expansion. The very country that has emphasized de-escalation is now spearheading an ecosystem designed to sustain long-term militarization.

In a world where defense financing is deeply embedded in financial markets, peace does not simply reduce risk; it disrupts revenue.

The implications extend beyond symbolism. By helping institutionalize a system capable of mobilizing upwards of $100-135 billion in defense financing, Canada is effectively tying part of its economic future to the expansion of military spending. That alignment carries risks. When financial systems are built around a particular sector, they begin to depend on its growth. We have seen this dynamic before, most notably in the housing market prior to the 2008 Financial Crisis, when an entire economic ecosystem became reliant on ever-expanding real estate values.

Apply that same logic to the realm of defense, and the parallels become difficult to ignore. A system that depends on continuous military spending creates subtle but powerful incentives: to maintain high levels of defense budgets, to expand procurement programs, and to sustain the geopolitical tensions that justify both. Over time, what begins as risk management can evolve into dependence. A system built to finance war risks becoming a system that depends on it.

Then comes the uncomfortable question: What happens if the wars actually stop?

In a world where defense financing is deeply embedded in financial markets, peace does not simply reduce risk; it disrupts revenue. If the assumptions underpinning defense-linked investments are built on sustained spending and ongoing tension, then de-escalation could trigger a recalibration across portfolios, institutions, and markets. The consequences would not remain confined to defense companies or financiers. They would ripple outward to pension funds, public investment vehicles, and the everyday savings of millions who never consciously chose to participate in this system.

This is where the analogy to the 2008 Financial Crisis becomes more than rhetorical. Before that collapse, housing was treated as a permanently expanding asset class. Financial innovation spread exposure across the system, embedding risk in places few fully understood. When the underlying assumptions failed, the fallout was systemic. Homes were lost. Savings evaporated. Institutions faltered.

Now imagine a similar architecture built around militarization. A world in which conflict is not just a geopolitical reality, but a financial dependency. Where instability is quietly priced into the system as a driver of returns. And where, if that instability recedes, the economic consequences are felt far beyond the battlefield.

At that point, the challenge will not just be moral or political, it will be structural. Governments may find themselves trying to stabilize a system that has grown dependent on the very thing it claims to minimize: war. And there may come a moment when the system simply breaks, and it becomes impossible to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

For many pundits and policymakers, there is little doubt that Artificial Intelligence will devour the jobs of millions of people, including professionals formerly presumed immune to technological replacement. The only question is how many jobs will be lost, how quickly. In fact, there is nothing inevitable about AI—not its development, its deployment, or its impact. Massive job losses are not inherent in the algorithm, preordained by the laws of nature and physics. Rather than remaining struck by awe, we can reassert human agency over this technology. We can not only save jobs, but perhaps even make them better.

AI is not an abstract force that operates solely at the macroeconomic level. AI systems and agents are developed and implemented in ways specific to each sector, each workplace, each type of job. Although employers might focus myopically on cutting their wage bill, their employees know firsthand how the work actually gets done. They know what disclosures to request about how the technology would be used. They know how AI might affect the content and flow of their work, what training would be most helpful, and which implementations would be most likely to devalue their labor versus those most likely to enhance it. Thus, the most effective way to ensure that AI makes work life better and not worse is to empower workers to bargain about it.

By “workers” I mean people who rely on their own labor to earn a living—which is to say, most of us, whether we write reports, treat patients, teach kids, manufacture products, or stock warehouses. AI is not something that’s going to happen only to other people; it will affect all of us.

Workers need the authority and the power to bargain about the implementation of AI in the workplace, not just the effects. “Effects bargaining” is the traditional approach: After a technology has wiped out jobs, people negotiate a little severance pay to tide them over, and maybe some training for completely different jobs, if any such jobs exist. By contrast, our goal should be to make sure workers can negotiate for technology that makes their jobs better, more productive, more valuable. To avoid the car crash in the first place, if you will, and not just to apportion damages afterward.

AI will not destroy or devalue our jobs by itself, unless we let it.

One can imagine some objections to this approach. Some people might insist that AI is in irresistible force, that large-scale job destruction is inevitable, and that our task is to figure out other things for people to do to earn a living—or, if that’s not possible, to pay them a small stipend so they don’t starve. This defeatism is a short step away from the more nihilistic vision of the pure doomers, who think it might already be too late to save humanity from machine-led destruction. I love science fiction myself—but it is fiction, not history.

Another objection might be that placing restraints of any kind on AI companies in the United States will keep the industry from winning the global race for dominance. This is the Trump administration’s view. This logic is inverted. Nations should be governed for the benefit of their people, not just their Big Tech companies. Both the Republican and Democratic parties proclaim themselves to be the champions of the American worker. If so, the real triumph for the nation would be to ensure that technology enhances work and makes working people’s lives better, not to create havoc and economic devastation across the labor market.

Some might object that it is unrealistic to think that working people have the interest or ability to intervene effectively, to exercise their right to bargain about AI technology. But that is exactly what has been happening in the entertainment industry. One of the central issues in the 2023 strike by the Writers Guild of America against the Hollywood studios and producers was the use of AI in writers’ workplaces. The Guild represents the professionals who create scripts for TV and streaming series and for feature films. In late 2022 Open AI revealed that ChatGPT could write—coherently and at some length. Although the union did not conclude that robots had suddenly become capable of crafting award-winning scripts, Guild members recognized that their employers could use AI to do just enough to degrade and devalue their work.

During contract talks in 2023 the Guild proposed—and won, after a five-month strike—language that puts meaningful guardrails on the use of AI. These guardrails reflect the process writers and studios actually use to create characters and stories and full-length projects. They ensure that AI cannot be used to deprive writers of the opportunity to do the full range of writing work, and they deprive employers of the economic incentive to replace professional writers with algorithms. Guild members knew how to defend their careers, and they fought for meaningful protections.

The Guild members’ willingness to take on the AI issue, rather than passively accept that the technology would hollow out their careers, resonated with working people everywhere. The actors’ union (SAG AFTRA) also struck and won contract protections on AI, and the following year the other entertainment industry unions did the same. The entire labor movement has made workplace AI a top priority. There is broad and deep recognition that AI technology will reshape the future of work, and unions have decided to roll up their sleeves (and dust off their picket signs) to bargain how AI will be implemented, to do what, to what effect.

AI systems do not develop themselves; AI companies do. AI does not implement itself in the workplace; employers do. AI will not destroy or devalue our jobs by itself, unless we let it. Working people can and must protect their livelihoods by bargaining over AI implementation. Nothing less than the future of work is at stake.

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:

• Tennessee Republicans propose a new congressional map that includes a district stretching nearly 300 miles from Memphis to the Nashville suburbs. The 9th Congressional District, which historically covers Memphis, would be redrawn to stretch from the bottom of Shelby County to the edge of Nashville. This move is designed to split Shelby County into three districts and split Nashville to maximize Republican representation. The new districts cover a massive geographic area, spanning from the state’s poorest ZIP codes in Memphis to the wealthiest in Brentwood and Franklin, totaling a distance of nearly 300 miles. The proposal follows a special session called by Gov. Bill Lee aimed at redrawing the map following a Supreme Court ruling that weakened the Voting Rights Act, allowing for the elimination of a district that is 61% Black. Tennessee, which is 1/3 Democratic, would have zero Democratic Congressmen.

• Voters across Scotland and Wales will elect members of their national parliaments, while residents in many parts of England will choose members of local councils. In place of Labour and its traditional opponent, the Conservatives, many voters are embracing other parties in what experts say represents the largest transformation in British politics in a generation. The two biggest beneficiaries are Reform U.K., the right-wing populist party led by Nigel Farage, a supporter of President Trump, and — on the other side of the political spectrum — the leftist, pro-environment Green Party. Polls suggest that the Conservative Party, known as the Tories, will continue to lose seats after cratering in local and national elections over the past two years. In some parts of Britain, the party once led by the “Iron Lady” of British politics, Margaret Thatcher, could come in fourth or fifth, with support in the single digits.

• You might not have asked for an AI model on your computer, but you might have gotten it anyway. Google Chrome has been installing a 4GB model onto devices without asking or notifying users. Google has been installing Gemini Nano — an AI model that runs on devices like smartphones and laptops instead of in the cloud — onto some people’s Chrome browsers, without their permission, according to Alexander Hanff, a Swedish computer scientist and lawyer known as That Privacy Guy. And Google doesn’t tell you that it’s on your device after it’s installed. Hanff said Gemini Nano will only be installed if the person’s device meets the hardware requirements. It’s unknown how many people have gotten the install.

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 All to Screw Memphis | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The Pulitzer Prizes, administered annually by Columbia University, are the most famous prizes awarded to American journalists, authors, playwrights and others in the world of letters. A win can elevate an obscure book to bestseller status, turn a play into a Broadway hit or save a reporter during a round of layoffs. So prestigious is this honor, getting shortlisted as one of a given year’s three finalists can be leveraged into bigger paychecks and gaining new clients.

Shortly after each year’s application deadline in late January, Columbia invites several jurors in each category—subjects like Photography, Nonfiction Book, Opinion Writing, etc.—to its Morningside Heights campus in Manhattan, where the panels—chosen for their expertise in their respective fields—sift through piles of entries. Generally speaking, each subject panel selects three finalists. Each trio goes to the main Pulitzer board, which picks one winner—leaving the remaining two as runners-up. (Usually. There are exceptions, but let’s not voyage too deep into the weeds.)

The Pulitzers have been the subject of scrutiny since their founding more than a century ago. The ongoing crisis in journalism, which has left 74 percent of the profession unemployed since 2008, has left the few rats remaining in the cage more rabidly competitive than ever. Resentments abound. Being snubbed in favor of work a writer feels is inferior to theirs, or not believing their entry was given a fair shake, or suspecting that personal or political bias impacted the results, risks contributing to a toxic loss of faith in a system that picks winners and losers. And let’s not forget: these are journalists. They’re wired to root out the slightest soupçon of impropriety.

At a time when Americans’ trust in the news media is at a record low—only 8% trust journalists to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly”—the last thing we need is corruption in the institution that anoints the best of the best of the news, and that declares the examples other journalists ought to emulate.

While I have my opinions about other categories, Illustrated Reporting and Commentary (as of 2022, the successor category to Editorial Cartoons) is the category I care about and know the most about as a syndicated editorial cartoonist and former cartoon syndication corporate executive.

Editorial cartooning is a tiny profession (soon to be extinct, thanks to those never-ending budget cuts); I either know or am one person removed from everyone in the field.

I instantly smelled a rat when I read this year’s Illustrated Reporting and Commentary finalists. Among them is Peter Kuper, whose cartoons the Pulitzer website says are syndicated by PoliticalCartoons.com. (Disclosure: I have socialized with Peter, and he was my colleague at MAD magazine. Nice guy, and this story is only peripherally about him. There is no evidence that he did anything wrong here. Told you it was a small employment sector.)

A syndicate is a company that sells features like comics and puzzles to newspapers and other media outlets; it’s why you’ll find “Beetle Bailey” in scores of newspapers across the country.

The PoliticalCartoons.com syndicate is owned and run by cartoonist Daryl Cagle. (Disclosure: I have known Daryl for decades, and often been at odds with him about his business model. Like I said…) Daryl has a daughter, also a cartoonist but also an editor, Susie Cagle. (I know her too.) Susie was one of the five jurors on this year’s Illustrated Reporting and Commentary jury—the jury that selected Peter Kuper as a Pulitzer finalist.

Columbia is notoriously secretive about Pulitzer deliberations, and swears jurors to secrecy. Still, some rules are clear, especially those concerning conflicts of interest, which are widely known throughout journalism. If you or someone close to you might be favorably or unfavorably impacted by something you report—or a prize you judge—you must disclose that relationship, and probably bow out. What’s in your heart doesn’t matter. The mere appearance of conflict of interest is a conflict of interest.

“Throughout any part of the Pulitzer Prize process, if anyone reviewing material is involved with an organization or an immediate family member the group is examining, they must recuse themselves,” notes Poynter, the journalism research organization.

Did Susie Cagle recuse herself from this year’s judging? The question goes much deeper than Peter Kuper. Susie Cagle’s father Daryl syndicates dozens of cartoonists, many of whom submitted entries to this year’s Pulitzer Prizes. If any of them won or became a finalist—as did Kuper—Daryl Cagle could use that prize announcement to promote their work and potentially earn more money. Allowing a syndication boss’ nepo daughter to judge a Pulitzer category full of entries by syndicated cartoonists is like putting Ivanka Trump on the Nobel Peace Prize Committee. It’s a conflict of interest, and it’s best avoided by picking someone else as a juror.

Unfortunately, those involved refuse to answer.

I emailed Susie Cagle for comment for this piece. She did not reply. I emailed Ann Telnaes, a previous Pulitzer winner and fellow cartoonist who served as a juror this year alongside Susie. She did not reply. I emailed the Pulitzer Prize board at Columbia. Even though I’m a Columbia alum (GS, Class of ’91), they did not grant me the courtesy of a reply.

Refusal to answer a columnist colleague’s questions about the judging process is highly hypocritical. Institutions like Columbia J-School and cartoonists like Telnaes, who famously quit the Washington Post because she suspected anti-anti-Trump editorial bias, expect the President of the United States to hold press conferences and answer questions and be transparent, and rightly so. The same standards, however, do not seem to apply to them.

Between the prize administrators who announced their plans to discriminate against cis white men, and the broadening of my category to include vast numbers of graphic novelists, gag cartoonists and other artists, I don’t like the odds. So, as I have decided in other years recently, I didn’t apply this time.

I have been a finalist, in 1996. My syndication list expanded dramatically.

By Pulitzer perfidy standards, the possibility that a syndicate honcho’s daughter did her dad a favor by elevating a cartoonist on his list is not at the top of my list. That spot is reserved for my colleague who submitted his animated cartoons under a unique URL. When he checked, the number of views was zero. The Pulitzer jury didn’t even bother to open, much less look at, his work, before “rejecting” him. They did cash his $75 application fee, though.

There’s also the time the jury set aside all the edgier entries to look at later, but then forgot by the time the open bar became available. And the cartoonist who so drunk-bonded with an editor that, once on the jury, the editor made sure he won. Some winners have even proven to be plagiarists and fabulists.

Whatever the scale, this looks rotten. It necessarily makes me wonder: If the category I happen to know about has been corrupted, should we wonder about the other ones too?

Life is unfair and the Pulitzers are unfair. But life is only unfair because we don’t care enough to raise our voices. If you see something, you ought to say something, especially when it matters as much as journalism matters—or used to.

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

 

The post Scandal at the Pulitzers appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The Supreme Court’s decision to destroy what remained of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais will take every element of our already broken political system and make it worse. It was not a surprise. But it shocked nonetheless.

What should we do? Boil with fury at the ruling. Scoff at the justices who claim only to call “balls and strikes,” in a game they’ve fixed. But don’t stop there. Yell, loudly, for action by the one part of our government that can do something: Congress.

The Supreme Court’s ruling leaves the Voting Rights Act “all but a dead letter,” as Justice Elena Kagan put it. Callais is a grave blow to racial equality, especially in the South. Scholar Rick Hasen warned, “This decision will bleach the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and local bodies like city councils.” We may see the fastest rollback in representation since the end of Reconstruction after the Civil War. Even if it’s not as bad as that, it will be bad enough.

Arid legal abstractions can have harsh real-world consequences. After the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder ruling, which gutted the most important part of the Voting Rights Act, the gap between white and nonwhite voters’ turnout grew twice as fast in states that were once covered by the strong protections of the law, according to the Brennan Center’s research. Callais will only worsen this disparity, especially since the justices have agreed to rush the implementation of their decision so its effects will be felt as soon as possible.

In recent years, a paralyzed and polarized Congress has failed to do its job. This torpor created the opening for an imperial judiciary and an abusive executive.

To perfume its actions, the ruling glorifies, of all things, partisan gerrymandering. And this in the middle of a nationwide redistricting frenzy. Justice Samuel Alito explained that states can deflect even proof of a racially discriminatory map by simply claiming that the manipulative district lines aim to entrench a political party. We aren’t discriminating against Black people, you see. Just against Democrats. Case closed.

After this overt assault on our democracy, Congress has a duty to act.

First, it should ban partisan gerrymandering—immediately. Such a rule would apply to red states and blue states alike. A bill to do this has been introduced by Sens. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), Angus King (I-Maine), and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), building off language from the Freedom to Vote Act. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) put forward the measure in the House.

Such a move is constitutional. None other than Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in 2019’s Rucho v. Common Cause ruling, “[The] Framers gave Congress the power to do something about partisan gerrymandering in the Elections Clause.” He even approvingly pointed to what became the Freedom to Vote Act, which would come very close to becoming law in 2022.

Second, Congress should enact new laws to give citizens a meaningful and robust right to vote, as well as a right to sue if their voting rights have been abridged, diluted, or denied. Judges should be charged with viewing any burden or dilution with extreme skepticism. It should be easier to prove discriminatory intent. And nationwide standards for elections would make them harder to manipulate.

Finally, Callais shows the urgent need for Supreme Court reform, starting with an 18-year term limit for justices. Judicial term limits would restore accountability. They would reflect the core value that nobody should hold too much power for too long. Term limits are broadly popular. The most recent Fox News poll on the issue showed that 78% of the public supports them. That’s an awful lot of Republicans, on top of Democrats and independents.

Momentum is growing. A Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) statement put it well. “Our nation’s highest court has been compromised,” it declared. “The CBC will make it our mission to aggressively advance Supreme Court reform. We will work to establish term limits for justices to help restore independence, neutrality, and legitimacy to the court.”

This kind of congressional pushback used to be common. But in recent years, a paralyzed and polarized Congress has failed to do its job. This torpor created the opening for an imperial judiciary and an abusive executive. As my colleagues Miriam Rosenbaum and Emily Whitehead noted, “In recent years, the court has repeatedly gutted landmark pieces of democratically enacted legislation that had earlier survived the court’s scrutiny.” Citizens United destroyed a century of campaign finance laws, just as Callais finished the job of demolishing the voting rights legislation overwhelmingly passed by Congress and signed into law by a Republican president. Yet Congress failed to restore the Voting Rights Act or repair campaign finance rules, even when Democrats controlled the White House and the legislature.

This year, Americans have been energized around voting issues in response to the egregious SAVE Act, now blocked in the Senate. But rhetoric is not enough, and playing defense surely is not enough. Lawmakers must put at the center of their agenda bold, tough, unflinching steps to restore the health of American democracy.

Recently, I had the opportunity to stand in a friend’s kitchen eating pupusas, the Salvadoran national food, while listening to an update on conditions in Central America from Cristosal’s Noah Bullock. Cristosal is a key Central American human rights organization engaged in legal advocacy, forensic investigation, and amplifying the voices of people who are experiencing—and resisting—repression in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Noah offered considerable detail on the conditions in those countries, but his basic message for us living so far away was simple: No matter how dark the road gets, we keep on walking. We know the sun will rise again.

So, while most of the world (and the media) is all too reasonably focused on the ever-evolving, increasingly disastrous conflicts in Iran and Lebanon, I found myself instead thinking about the countries to our south.

Benign Neglect?

During the years when our main political work involved opposing US aggression in Latin America, my partner and I used to believe that the whole region would be better off if the imperial eye were focused on other parts of the world. Most Central American countries may be poor, but they’re more likely to prosper during times when Washington isn’t treating them as backyard gold mines, or pawns in a global conflict.

Take Nicaragua, for example. US Marines first occupied that country early in the last century and, by the 1920s, had helped establish a dynastic dictatorship there that would last until 1979. During that time, US companies profited endlessly from various forms of resource extraction, including the gold of the Las Minas (The Mines) area, comprised of the towns of Siuna, Rosita, and Bonanza; lumber from various parts of the country; and palm oil from its Atlantic coast.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the United States planted seeds in Central America that would eventually bloom as twin disasters for the region: the rise of international gangs and the ravages of climate change.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States used its Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union as a pretext for directly meddling in the lives and politics of countries across Latin America. Bogus threats of a communist takeover, for instance, excused the CIA’s 1954 overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz, the democratically elected president of Guatemala. Carlos Castillo Armas was then installed as president, the first of a long series of dictators, much to the satisfaction of that US commercial giant, the United Fruit Company, which proceeded to treat the country as its own private orchard.

When Chilean President Salvador Allende supported nationalizing his country’s two biggest copper mines, their US owners benefited from a 1973 CIA-backed coup that overthrew him. The newly installed dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet then launched a campaign of terror, torture, disappearances, and the murder of tens of thousands of Chileans over his 17 years in power.

Similarly, the United States supported right-wing, repressive governments in Argentina, Brazil, El Salvador, Honduras, and Uruguay during those Cold War decades. However, beginning with the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979, most of those countries managed to rid themselves of their repressive rulers in the last two decades of the 20th century.

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the United States began to push Latin America aside and focus elsewhere, sending its “Harvard boys” off to Russia and points east. Like the Chicago Boys of the 1970s, who remade Chile’s economy as a model of laissez-faire capitalism, those young Harvard economists sought to offer similar “benefits” to the benighted former Soviet Socialist Republics. Their efforts led to a fire sale of state industries and birthed a class of oligarchs whose successors still rule Russia and various former Soviet republics.

Then, beginning with the first Gulf War against Iraq (also in 1991), and especially after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, DC, the US acquired a new, if amorphous, “enemy” and launched the Global War on Terror. Washington’s geographic focus then turned to Central Asia, the Middle East, and northern Africa, as the US began what would prove to be disastrous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and now (with as-yet-unknown consequences) in Iran. Meanwhile, Latin America experienced a bit of what (in entirely different circumstances) President Richard Nixon’s adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan once termed “benign neglect.”

An Evil Harvest

As it happened, however, during the 1980s and 1990s, the United States planted seeds in Central America that would eventually bloom as twin disasters for the region: the rise of international gangs and the ravages of climate change. While Mexico’s gangs are largely homegrown affairs, those in El Salvador began as US imports. During the dictatorships and guerrilla wars of the 1980s, numerous Salvadorans, fleeing government repression, sought asylum in the United States. Thousands would settle in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Once the war in El Salvador ended in 1992, many of them headed home again, some bringing the gang culture of California with them, including Mara Salvatrucha (also known as MS-13) and the 18th Street gang, both from the Los Angeles area. I got a glimpse of that form of migration in 1993, when I spent a few days in El Salvador. On a wall in the capital city, San Salvador, I saw the tag of a gang from my very own neighborhood in San Francisco, the XXII-B, or “Twenty-two-B” crew. That stood for the corner of 22nd and Bryant streets, the very corner of San Francisco where my partner and I were then living. We’d watched them grow up on our block. They were never a big deal in San Francisco, nor did they really become so in El Salvador, unlike MS-13 and the 18th Street crew.

As for climate change, we obviously can’t pin all the blame for that on the United States alone, although our current president is doing his best to drive us in that direction. (Fond as he is of fake awards, perhaps someday he’ll get one for the World’s Most Devastating Climate Changer.) Until 20 years ago, however, the US was the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases and, though now leapfrogged by China, it remains historically by far the world’s largest user of fossil fuels.

One result of the intensifying global climate emergency is a series of devastating droughts in Central America, which lies within the “Dry Corridor,” running from southern Mexico to Panama. That region, inhabited in many places by subsistence farmers, has historically experienced cycles of wetness and drought, corresponding in part to the El Niño oscillation, which periodically warms the Pacific Ocean’s surface, bringing fierce rainfall to the West Coast of the United States and severe drought further south. In recent decades, climate change has been lengthening the drought periods and multiplying their effects. Increased heat reduces soil moisture, while rising seas contaminate estuaries and aquifers, leaving less water available for farming. A new round of droughts began in 2014 and, in 2018 and 2019, farmers across Central America would lose 75% to 100% of their main food crop, corn.

Worse yet, on our ever-hotter planet in this era of ever-more-intense climate change, the strongest El Niño in 140 years is predicted to begin later this year.

It turns out that not only has the US historically treated Central America terribly, but its neglect of the region in our era has hardly been benign. Under such circumstances, it shouldn’t be a surprise that, by the end of Joe Biden’s presidency, the combination of US “exports”—murderous gang violence, political repression, and drought—had led record numbers of migrants to our southern border, desperately seeking asylum in this country. And that brings us to Donald J. Trump, and his new best friend, Nayib Bukele.

In El Salvador: Trump’s BFF Nayib Bukele

President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador has called himself “the world’s coolest dictator.” He’s young, handsome, and extremely popular in his own country. Originally a man of the left, while mayor of the capital, San Salvador, from 2015 to 2019, he succeeded in reducing the murder rate there not through repression but by mending the “tejido social”—the social fabric. He rebuilt the city center, providing streetlights and surveillance cameras, thereby creating a safer central area for street vendors. He also opened up educational and recreational opportunities for the city’s youth. In addition, he made cosmetic changes symbolic of progressive politics like renaming Roberto D’Aubuisson Street, so-called in honor of a death-squad leader.

Bukele claimed that such measures alone had produced a genuine decline in the city’s disturbing murder rate. But investigations have since shown that he also followed in the footsteps of previous Salvadoran presidents by making pacts with the gangs to reduce visible violence. (For an exploration of Bukele’s agreements with them and later with Donald Trump, don’t miss the PBS Frontline film on the subject.)

In his eagerness to play the strongman, Donald Trump has climbed into bed with the world’s coolest dictator—and the criminals of Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13.

His 2019 election to the presidency began his full-scale shift to the right and toward what has now become full-on authoritarian rule. In 2020, he ordered soldiers into El Salvador’s congress to force it to accept a $103 million loan from the United States to underwrite the US-El Salvador anti-gang Plan Vulcan, which involved the massive incarceration of accused gang members (along with many innocents). At the same time, Bukele made an agreement with MS-13 to spare some of its key members in return for a reduction in the capital’s murder rate, which did indeed drop steeply during the first years of his first term as president. But in 2022, some MS-13 members who were supposed to be protected were mistakenly caught up in a sweep and, in retribution, murders spiked once again. As Cristosal’s Noah Bullock explained in that talk I listened to recently, the gangs have the power to dial visible street violence up or down. They use violence as a way to communicate with both El Salvador’s citizenry and its government. A display of corpses on street corners is a way of sending messages to both of them.

In 2021, having captured a majority in the legislature, President Bukele took control of the judiciary, too, by ordering an increasingly supine congress to oust the five members of the Supreme Court of Justice. Then, following a landslide reelection victory in 2024, he rewrote the constitution so that he could serve consecutive terms as president ad infinitum, while also building the now-notorious CECOT “terrorism confinement” prison, where torture and sexual abuse have become daily occurrences.

When Bukele met with President Trump at the White House during his first term, it was clear that the admiration was mutual. Trump could, of course, only dream of exercising the kind of control Bukele by then wielded over all three branches of the Salvadoran government. In 2025, after Trump’s second inauguration, he and Bukele met again and struck a deal: The United States would pay El Salvador $6 million to imprison 250 mostly Venezuelan immigrants to this country in the CECOT mega prison. The transfer of those men (over the objections of a US federal judge) was chronicled in carefully-produced videos of Salvadoran soldiers frog-marching their shackled captives into CECOT, pushing them to their knees, and forcibly shaving their heads.

As investigations would later reveal, those men were not, as claimed by the Trump administration, members of Venezuela’s quasi-gang Tren de Aragua, but ordinary citizens caught up in Immigration and Customs Enforcement roundups. Except for a few Salvadoran citizens, who remain in CECOT to this day, they were eventually freed. Those who were released, however, described weeks of torture and sexual abuse in, among other places, a CBS "60 Minutes" report that was, for a time, spiked by the new editor-in-chief of CBS News, Trump admirer Bari Weiss.

In truth, though, $6 million was chump change to a Salvadoran government used to hundreds of millions of dollars of largesse from Washington. In this case, however, Bukele got something he wanted a lot more than money. The US was holding a group of nine extradited MS-13 leaders, and MS-13 wanted them returned to El Salvador. Hoping to keep the retributive killing in his country down, Bukele wanted them back, too. There was, as The Washington Post reported in October 2025, only one problem: Some of those prisoners were US informants, who had assisted the FBI in disrupting MS-13 activity in this country. Federal law prohibited turning them over to El Salvador, but Trump assigned Secretary of State Marco Rubio to work things out with Bukele. According to the Post:

To deport them to El Salvador, Attorney General Pam Bondi would need to terminate the Justice Department’s arrangements with those men, Rubio said. He assured Bukele that Bondi would complete that process and Washington would hand over the MS-13 leaders.

Rubio’s extraordinary pledge illustrates the extent to which the Trump administration was willing to meet Bukele’s demands as it negotiated what would become one of the signature agreements of President Donald Trump’s early months in office.

Not surprisingly, repression against the press and civil society continues in El Salvador to this day. Many opposition journalists have had to flee the country. In May 2025, human rights attorney Ruth López Alfaro, head of Cristosal’s Anti-Corruption and Justice unit, was arrested. She remains in prison as of this writing. Shortly after that, Cristosal made the difficult decision to move its offices to Guatemala in order to continue its human rights work in greater safety.

Eyes on El Salvador

These days, it’s all eyes on Iran. But while President Trump is ever more desperately focused on the Middle East, maybe some of us should still be focusing on El Salvador. President Bukele (elected democratically like Donald Trump) is following the same strongman handbook that Trump has been using. The steps are the same for aspiring autocrats around the world, whether in Hungary, Russia, or the United States. Here are a few bits of guidance from that metaphorical manual:

• Attack the judiciary, as Trump & Company have done every time they get an adverse federal ruling;
• Capture the legislature and make it do your will, whatever gerrymandering or electoral finagling it takes in Trump’s case;
• Attack the press and civil society organizations, labeling them, as Trump has, “enemies of the people” and “domestic terrorists”; and
• Plan to rule indefinitely, as Trump repeatedly hints he’d like to do.

Oh, and it doesn’t matter how evil your partners in crime turn out to be, whether it’s Bibi Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin, or Nayib Bukele. In his eagerness to play the strongman, Donald Trump has climbed into bed with the world’s coolest dictator—and the criminals of Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13.

But, as Noah from Cristosal told our little gathering the other day, we have to keep on walking through the dark, knowing that every act of solidarity and resistance brings the dawn that much closer.

Live Today at 12 noon Eastern:

Have a question for Ted and/or co-host Jamarl Thomas? Join the hosts of “DeProgram” for a full hour of nothing but LIVE Q&A! Any topic, any question, goes—it’s up to you. Q&A extras are every Monday and Wednesday at 12 noon Eastern time.

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 Q&A | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

On May 6, 1866, exactly one hundred and sixty years ago today, Thaddeus Stevens, US Congressman from Pennsylvania and the leading Radical Republican in the House of Representatives, rose to introduce the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution on the floor of the. Stevens, chair of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, was also co-chair of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction set up by Congress, in late 1865, to promote a radical Reconstruction, a program advanced over the consistent objections of President Andrew Johnson.

Here is how Stevens introduced the Amendment:

Congress tasked the committee with reconstructing the nation and setting new constitutional baselines for post-Civil War America; this is difficult work; above all, we are trying to write the Declaration of Independence’s promise of freedom and equality into the Constitution. But I beg gentlemen to consider the magnitude of the task which was imposed upon the committee. They were expected to suggest a plan for rebuilding a shattered nation—a nation which though not dissevered was yet shaken and riven by the gigantic and persistent efforts of six million able and ardent men; of bitter rebels striving through four years of bloody war. It cannot be denied that this terrible struggle sprang from the vicious principles incorporated into the institutions of our country. Our fathers had been compelled to postpone the principles of their great Declaration, and wait for the full establishment till a more propitious time. That time ought to be present now. But the public mind has been educated in error for a century. How difficult in a day to unlearn it. In rebuilding, it is necessary to clear away the rotten and defective portions of the old foundations, and to sink deep and found the repaired edifice upon the firm foundation of eternal justice. If, perchance, the accumulated quicksands render it impossible to reach in every part so firm a basis, then it becomes our duty to drive deep and solid the substituted piles on which to build. It would not be wise to prevent the raising of the structure because some corner of it might be founded upon materials subject to the inevitable laws of mortal decay. It were better to shelter the household and trust to the advancing progress of a higher morality and a purer and more intelligent principle to underpin the defective corner.

The Amendment passed in the House on June 13, by a vote of 138 in favor and 36 opposed, having passed in the Senate five days earlier, on June 8, by a vote of 33 in favor and 11 opposed. In other words, roughly a quarter of US Representatives and Senators, serving in houses of Congress that did not include representatives from the seceded Confederate states, voted against the amendment.

It is tempting to imagine that the establishment of egalitarian citizenship in the aftermath of a bloody Civil War fought in its name proceeded as a matter of course. But it did not. It was bitterly contested, by everyone aligned with the Confederacy, but also by many Northern Democrats, who rallied behind Andrew Johnson’s efforts to quickly reincorporate the eleven defeated Southern states without substantially empowering emancipated formerly enslaved people or enforcing any form of retributive justice. And it is been bitterly contested ever since.

Stevens and his Radical Republican allies in Congress understood the strength of the opposition to their vision of a multi-racial and non-racist democracy, and they fought a decade-long battle on its behalf, centered on both enforceable legal and civic equality and land reform designed to empower formerly-enslaved agricultural laborers. They succeeded in many ways, passing numerous bills designed to support the civil rights and economic opportunities of emancipated Blacks, and securing passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. Yet the gains were short-lived, betrayed by the infamous Compromise of 1877 that placed Republican Rutherford Hayes in the White House and ending the final remnants of the Union’s military occupation of the South, leading in short order to the reinstitution of Black subordination via the new Jim Crow system of racial segregation and extortionate share-cropping. (While there have been many fine histories of this period, to my mind the best is Eric Foner’s award-winning Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877.)

The Fourteenth Amendment was the cornerstone of the effort to truly reconstruct the postwar nation on the foundations of non-racial citizenship. In the words of historian T.J. Stiles, it was “The Constitutional Amendment That Reinvented Freedom”: “It established birthright citizenship, required ‘due process’ and ‘equal protection’ of the law for everyone, and put the federal government in the business of policing liberty. It removed race and ethnicity from the legal definition of American identity.”

Stevens was one of the principal legislative proponents of the Amendment. And, as President Johnson consistently sought to obstruct such efforts, he was one of the ring leaders of the 1868 effort to impeach Johnson. Indeed, he succeeded in this effort—Johnson was famously impeached by the House on February 24, 1868, by a vote of 126-47-- though Johnson was eventually acquitted in the Senate by the narrow margin of 35-19, one short of the 2/3 majority necessary to convict.

As Bruce Levine notes in his terrific 2021 political biography, Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice, Stevens was reviled and calumnied by opponents of Reconstruction, both in his lifetime and long into the 20th century. William A. Dunning, the dean of “Lost Cause” historians, described Stevens in 1907 as “truculent, vindictive, and cynical.” Writing in 1931, James Truslow Adams called Stevens “the most despicable, malevolent and morally deformed character who has ever risen to power in America.” James G, Randall, writing in his influential 1937 The Civil War and Reconstruction, similarly described him as “filled with ‘vindictive ugliness, unfairness, intolerance, and hatefulness,’” a view carried over into the 1969 edition of the book, co-edited with David Donald, the textbook assigned in the Civil War class I took at Queens College in 1976. The most enduring image of Stevens was produced not in a book but in a film, D.W. Griffith’s 1915 “Birth of a Nation,” one of whose chief protagonists, Austin Stoneman—an ugly, club-footed, lecherous hypocrite—was clearly modeled on Stevens.

Woodrow Wilson was only slightly less harsh, writing on “The Reconstruction of the Southern States” in The Atlantic in 1901: “He had no timidity, no scruples about keeping to constitutional lines of policy, no regard or thought for the sensibilities of the minority, — being rough-hewn and without embarrassing sensibilities himself, — an ideal radical for the service of the moment.”

It is true that Stevens seemed to have little timidity, and appears to have been something of a pit bull in his refusal to let the cause of Reconstruction go. It is also true that he had “no scruples about keeping to constitutional lines of policy,” but only in this sense: he sought, with his colleagues, to revolutionize the “constitutional lines of policy” that had already been decimated by a Civil War, and to use the Constitution’s own Article V process to amend the Constitution. Stevens was a constitutional revolutionary—the point of Levine’s brilliant book--and thus “an ideal radical for the service of the moment.”

Like everything about the Constitution, the Fourteenth Amendment was hardly self-enforcing. This was understood by its drafters, which is why they included the language of Section 5: “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article” (both the Thirteen and the Fifteenth Amendments contain similar language). Every aspect of the Amendment remained hotly contested for a century after its passage. But in the 1960’s, after decades of intense struggle by a civil rights movement that faced daily attacks on life and limb, Congress finally passed two pieces of legislation designed to enforce the 14th and the 15th Amendments—the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Like the above-mentioned amendments, these landmark pieces of legislation faced strong opposition, and did not pass without legislative battle. The first passed in the House by a vote of 290-130 and in the Senate by a vote of 73-27; the second passed the House by a vote of 328-74 and the Senate by a vote of 79-18. And as is well known, the passage of these laws helped to generate a powerful backlash against any form of racial liberalism.

That said, both the basic intent behind the acts, and the federal bureaucracies established to enforce them, became more or less settled features of US law for the past half-century—until now.

To be fair, the Voting Rights Act has been besieged ever since the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby v. Holder decision. The Court’s 6-3 decision this week in Louisiana v. Callais further eviscerated the Act.

At the same time, we are currently witnessing a wholesale assault on the 14th Amendment, and the entire legal system established to enforce it, by the Trump administration. The examples are loud and clear: the outright attack on birthright citizenship, which is currently before the Court; the obvious suspension of due process by the DHS-ICE regime of arrest, detention, and deportation that in the past year has swept up well over 500,000 Americans; and the use of the Justice Department—first established in 1870 to oversee the rule of law in the formerly-Confederate states—to threaten and punish “political enemies.”

Perhaps nothing better symbolizes this Trumpist rejection of the 14th Amendment than the second Trump presidency itself. We should not forget that very powerful arguments were advanced, by numerous reputable conservative legal scholars, including J. Michael Luttig, to justify keeping Trump off several state ballots in 2024, on the grounds that his incitement of the January 6, 2021 insurrection violated the 14th Amendment’s Section 3. In spite of these arguments, the Supreme Court ruled against such moves in March 2024, holding that only Congress could attempt such a maneuver. Trump, his candidacy bolstered, went on to win the 2024 election, and then proceeded, on day one of his second term, to pardon or commute the sentences of every one of the over 1200 people who had been convicted of crimes on for their role in the January 6 insurrection.

Under Trump 20.0, even the barest lip service to the notion of equal justice under the law has been abandoned with contempt.

It is a sad irony of history that this is all happening as the nation prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and that Trump goes about the task of destroying constitutional democracy even as he makes extravagant plans to celebrate “America 250.”

And it is simply sad, and outrageous, that 160 years after Thaddeus Stevens announced the intention “to write the Declaration of Independence’s promise of freedom and equality into the Constitution,” Donald Trump is doing his best to trample on the Declaration, the Constitution, and the very idea of liberal democracy.

In the span of a month, two stories have laid bare an uncomfortable truth about progressive politics: Too many people will protect powerful men at the expense of the women they harm, whether to protect a movement, a party, or because they’ve been conditioned to believe this is how power works.

Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) announced his resignation from Congress last Month after multiple women came forward with allegations of sexual harassment and assault. March’s revelation by Dolores Huerta that iconic labor leader Cesar Chavez sexually abused girls and women for decades is still reverberating through communities that revered him. In both cases, the pattern is the same: Whisper networks carried warnings for years, but survivors who came forward were silenced or discredited for the sake of the “greater good.”

Why? Because Swalwell was seen as a rising Democratic star, a useful weapon against President Donald Trump. Because Chavez was a civil rights icon whose legacy anchored an entire movement. Because people convinced themselves that exposing the truth would do more damage than burying it.

They were wrong. Silence doesn’t protect movements, it protects oppressors. It tells every woman who has been harassed, groped, or assaulted by a powerful man on “our side” that her pain is an acceptable cost of doing business.

Letting people in power abuse women is never acceptable, regardless of party, regardless of legacy, regardless of how inconvenient the timing might feel.

We have seen this calculation before—the quiet bargain where accountability is sacrificed on the altar of political convenience. It never works. The truth always surfaces. And when it does, the cover-up inflicts its own damage, compounding the harm to survivors and eroding the moral authority these movements depend on.

Consider the moment we’re in. We have a president who was found liable by a jury for sexually abusing a woman, and accused by at least 28 others, and has faced no meaningful consequences for it. A president who has made clear, through word and policy, that he believes powerful men can do whatever they want. His administration is rolling back decades of progress on combatting sexual harassment and assault in workplaces and schools; gutting protections against discrimination; and dismantling the legal infrastructure women depend on for safe, equitable workplaces. The Supreme Court, made up of one-third of Trump appointees, is the first since the 1950s to rule against women and people of color in a majority of civil rights cases.

This is the landscape women are navigating right now. And into this landscape, we are supposed to accept that the men or other abusers on “our side” get a pass? No.

If we are serious about building a world where women have equal power—economic, political, and personal—then we have to be serious about accountability within our own ranks. Not because it’s easy, but because the alternative is corrosive. Every time we look the other way, we tell the next generation that a woman’s safety matters less than a man’s career. We weaken the very movements we claim to be protecting.

The women who came forward about Swalwell, including content creators who had no institutional backing, no legal team—just their own platforms and conviction—showed extraordinary courage. So did the survivors who finally broke decades of silence about Chavez. They did what the political establishment was unwilling to do. They chose the truth.

The lesson here is not that our movements are broken. It’s that they are only as strong as our willingness to hold everyone in them accountable. Letting people in power abuse women is never acceptable, regardless of party, regardless of legacy, regardless of how inconvenient the timing might feel.

We are in a fight for women’s futures in this country. That fight requires moral clarity. It requires us to stop treating accountability as a threat and start treating it as the foundation. Good things, lasting things, come from doing what is right, even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard.