As the 2024 Paris Olympics come to a close, it’s heartbreaking to see that instead of celebrating the unity these games are meant to inspire, we were forced to collectively watch the opposite—a deepening divide among us. The original values of Olympism were to “encourage effort,” “preserve human dignity,” and “develop harmony.” And it seems when presented with those opportunities, we failed on all three of those fronts as a society.

As a trans woman, I am deeply disturbed by the narrative that was allowed to surround Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, whose victory against Italian boxer Angela Carini in the women’s welterweight boxing tournament was overshadowed by baseless accusations and transphobic conspiracy theories. These attacks were given a national stage by conservative figures, who falsely claimed that Khelif is biologically male, feeding into the ugly rise of a conspiracy theory known as “transvestigations.”

These so-called “transvestigations” are a disturbing form of misogyny, and part of another category of transphobia known as transmisogyny, targeting women under the guise of protecting womanhood. Khelif is a cisgender woman, assigned female at birth, and identifies as a woman. Yet, her victory, that should have been internationally lauded, was met with a wave of online harassment and accusations.

When we allow fear and hatred to dictate who counts as a “real woman,” we undermine the very foundation of women’s rights.

This is the chilling reality of the world we live in: Anti-trans and transphobic narratives have seeped into the mainstream, reaching a global stage. Now, it’s not just trans women who are under attack by those with nothing better to do than police gender and spread disinformation, but cis women too—anyone whose womanhood doesn’t fit an impossible standard.

“Transvestigations” didn’t start with Khelif, and unfortunately, they won’t end with her. It’s a new label for an old problem—misogyny rebranded, now weaponized against both cis and trans women. It’s a way to attack women while pretending to defend them. It uses language that claims to protect women’s rights but only protects women who fit a certain mold. Many other Olympic athletes—especially women of color—have been subjected to having their gender analyzed because of their strength, abilities, and looks. And when birth certificates, health records, or hormonal testing aren’t enough to satiate this mob of “transvestigators,” they move the goalpost further, constantly redefining what it is to be a woman.

It concerns me to know that cis women are now being persecuted in the same way myself and my trans sisters have been since the beginning of time. As these persecutions intensify, the barometer and measure of “womanhood” will continue to be pushed and challenged. Are we going to start declaring that women with conditions like polycystic ovary syndrome, or women who undergo IVF, aren’t “real” women? Are we going to label women who choose not to have children as less of a woman? Are we going to question the gender of our mothers, sisters, and aunts who have undergone breast augmentation after cancer? Are we going to no longer consider our grandmothers who receive hormonal therapy during menopause to be women? Are we going to let these harmful, misogynistic, arbitrary definitions of womanhood continue to divide us? If you are a woman or care about women and girls, this should worry you as well.

Khelif won the gold, but at what cost? She defended herself in the ring but entered an even bigger battle having to defend her human dignity. She spoke out after her quarterfinal win, urging spectators to refrain from bullying athletes, highlighting the devastating impact such attacks have on mental health. She said, “It can destroy people, it can kill people’s thoughts, spirit, and mind. It can divide people. And because of that, I ask them to refrain from bullying.”

If this is the impact on a cis woman, imagine the daily mental toll on trans women who face this scrutiny not just in sports, but in every aspect of their lives. Transgender people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to experience violent victimization. Forty-three percent of transgender youth have been bullied on school property, compared with 18% of cisgender youth. And now, many human rights organizations are declaring an epidemic of violence against trans people in the United States because of the uptick in attacks, an explosion in violent and hateful rhetoric aimed at the LGBTQ+ community, and the onslaught of discriminatory legislation.

As a trans woman, I know all too well the pain of having my humanity debated, politicized, and threatened. But the harm doesn’t stop with trans women. When we allow these narratives to flourish, when we let public opinion dictate who is “woman enough,” we are all at risk. Consider the growing number of anti-trans bills in the U.S. that seek to police gender in ways that hurt everyone. In states like Idaho, Arizona, and Georgia, these laws are putting young girls at risk, subjecting them to invasive exams to “prove” their gender, such as genital exams, before they can compete in sports.

This is not protection—it’s abuse. It’s a violation of bodily autonomy, and it’s a betrayal of everything women have fought for. The sad truth is that these policies, framed as protecting women, do the exact opposite. They endanger all women and girls, creating an environment where no one is safe from scrutiny.

The reality is that transphobia and transmisogyny don’t just harm the trans community—they harm everyone. When we allow fear and hatred to dictate who counts as a “real woman,” we undermine the very foundation of women’s rights. We allow the patriarchy to pit us against each other. They are creating infighting against an imaginary enemy, saying trans women are the true threat to feminism, distracting us from uniting against the real forces that oppress us all.

Imane Khelif’s story is a powerful reminder of what’s at stake. But this is not just about her—it’s about all of us. It’s about the girls and women who will come after her, who will face the same scrutiny if we don’t stand up now and stand up together. Cis women must join us in this fight against having our bodies and gender debated and defined.

This fight isn’t just for trans women—it’s for all women. It’s for anyone who believes in the right to define our own identities, free from the fear of harassment, discrimination, and violence. I hope that out of this, we will see more allies, more voices speaking out against the dangerous rhetoric of “transvestigations.” I hope that cis women will join us on the frontlines and join us in declaring it is not up to the government or the public to define our womenness, or moreso, our humanness.

An observation from George Orwell—“those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future”—is acutely relevant to how President Biden talked about Gaza during his speech at the Democratic convention Monday night. His words fit into a messaging template now in its eleventh month, depicting the U.S. government as tirelessly seeking peace, while supplying the weapons and bombs that have enabled Israel’s continual slaughter of civilians.

“We’ll keep working, to bring hostages home, and end the war in Gaza, and bring peace and security to the Middle East,” Biden told the cheering delegates. “As you know, I wrote a peace treaty for Gaza. A few days ago I put forward a proposal that brought us closer to doing that than we’ve done since October 7th.”

It was a journey into an alternative universe of political guile from a president who just six days earlier had approved sending $20 billion worth of more weapons to Israel. Yet the Biden delegates in the convention hall responded with a crescendo of roaring admiration.

A political reflex has been in motion from top U.S. leaders, claiming to be peace seekers while aiding and abetting the slaughter. Normalizing deception about the past sets a pattern for perpetrating such deception in the future.

Applause swelled as Biden continued: “We’re working around-the-clock, my secretary of state, to prevent a wider war and reunite hostages with their families, and surge humanitarian health and food assistance into Gaza now, to end the civilian suffering of the Palestinian people and finally, finally, finally deliver a ceasefire and end this war.”

In Chicago’s United Center, the president basked in adulation while claiming to be a peacemaker despite a record of literally making possible the methodical massacres of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

Orwell would have understood. A political reflex has been in motion from top U.S. leaders, claiming to be peace seekers while aiding and abetting the slaughter. Normalizing deception about the past sets a pattern for perpetrating such deception in the future.

And so, working inside the paradigm that Orwell described, Biden exerts control over the present, strives to control narratives about the past, and seeks to make it all seem normal, prefiguring the future.

The eagerness of delegates to cheer for Biden’s mendaciously absurd narrative about his administration’s policies toward Gaza was, in a broader context, the convention’s lovefest for the lame-duck president.

Hours before the convention opened, Peter Beinart released a short video essay anticipating the fervent adulation. “I just don't think when you’re analyzing a presidency or a person, you sequester what’s happened in Gaza,” he said. “I mean, if you’re a liberal-minded person, you believe that genocide is just about the worst thing that a country can do, and it’s just about the worst thing that your country can do if your country is arming a genocide.”

Beinart continued: “And it’s really not that controversial anymore that this qualifies as a genocide. I read the academic writing on this. I don’t see any genuine scholars of human rights international law who are saying it's not indeed there. . . . If you’re gonna say something about Joe Biden, the president, Joe Biden, the man, you have to factor in what Joe Biden, the president, Joe Biden, the man, has done, vis-a-vis Gaza. It’s central to his legacy. It's central to his character. And if you don’t, then you’re saying that Palestinian lives just don’t matter, or at least they don’t matter this particular day, and I think that’s inhumane. I don’t think we can ever say that some group of people’s lives simply don't matter because it’s inconvenient for us to talk about them at a particular moment.”

Underscoring the grotesque moral obtuseness from the convention stage was the joyful display of generations as the president praised and embraced his offspring. Joe Biden walked off stage holding the hand of his cute little grandson, a precious child no more precious than any one of the many thousands of children the president has helped Israel to kill.

While the next President faces a wide range of pressing tax policy choices to make — from the expiration of much of 2017’s Trump tax law to international corporate taxation and beyond — a relatively silly idea has become the tax focus on the campaign trail: exempting tips from taxes. Despite its embrace by the candidates from both major parties, this policy idea would do little to help the roughly 4 million people who work in tipped occupations while creating a host of problems.

Exempting tips from taxes isn’t a new idea. It’s been proposed before and always abandoned because it’s practically impossible to do without creating new avenues for tax avoidance.

Lower-paid service employees definitely deserve support. However, altering the tax code in this manner is a very leaky way of achieving that. It’s an approach that rich people with accountants and lawyers would surely be able to abuse. Fund managers, attorneys, and other high-paid professionals could easily reclassify their fees — or at the very least, some percentage of them — as mandatory tips for performance.

This proposal treats households with similar levels of income differently based on profession. Servers and bartenders, for example, receive a large portion of their income through tips and thus would receive a large tax exemption. Teaching assistants or health care workers might receive similar overall income but would not receive the same exemption.

Finally, these proposals create incentives to drive even more low-paid service employees into the tipped worker category, harming many workers and their families. Tipped workers have more unstable incomes than non-tipped workers, are more likely to live in poverty, and are more vulnerable to wage theft, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).

The good news is that lawmakers have designed way better ways of helping working families. EPI and other experts on work and wages have put forth many ways to better help working families, from eliminating the sub-minimum wage that allows workers who receive tips to be paid a paltry $2.13 an hour, to raising all minimum wages above the $7.25 where it has been mired for a decade and a half, to making it easier for workers to unionize. In terms of tax solutions, lawmakers rightfully concerned about low-wage workers should instead consider expanding the Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit (and especially making the latter stronger for workers without children in the home).

August 19, 2024 Phil Donahue – for years the number one rated network television daily talk show host – was the greatest defender and enabler of our Constitution’s First Amendment right of free speech in 20th century America. Given the frequency of his programs and the size of his live television audiences, he gave early…

How precisely will election deniers try to undermine the results in 2024? Will we see a rerun of 2020’s parade of falsehoods—rigged voting machines, USB drives masquerading as breath mints, and bamboo-laced ballots from China? Or will they premiere some new tricks this election season? One answer has come into sharper focus in recent weeks. Will our system be ready? That remains to be seen.

We all learned in 2020 that we do not have one election, or even 50 state elections. Decisions are made by hundreds of county boards and officials. Usually that is routine. Just after voting takes place, poll workers and local election officials begin a rigorous, multistep process to accurately determine the results. This is all “ministerial.” Two plus two equals four. We have a winner! The voters vote, the results are tabulated, you affirm the numbers, and you go home.

All of which points to Georgia, where alarms are ringing. Rogue officials there are already preparing the ground to ignore voters in November.

Election deniers have quietly infiltrated county boards across the country. In Nevada, one official in the state’s second-largest county recently refused to certify her own election. Stop the steal!

You may remember former U.S. President Donald Trump’s rally at Georgia State University on August 3. That was the speech in which he attacked Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and, for good measure, Kemp’s wife. What was noteworthy, though, was the fellow Republicans he praised. He lauded three newly appointed members of the state election board. “They’re on fire. They are doing a great job,” he declared.

Three days later we learned why he was so effusive. The state officials announced a new rule to require county officials across Georgia to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” before they can certify results.

That is a permission slip for subversion. In May, a board member who oversees elections in Fulton County—home of Atlanta, the biggest Black-majority city in the state—refused to certify a primary result, and to press her case, she sued her own election board. It turned out she is an organizer for Cleta Mitchell, a participant in Trump’s notorious “I just want to find 11,780 votes” phone call to Raffensperger in January 2021.

Indeed, election deniers have quietly infiltrated county boards across the country. In Nevada, one official in the state’s second-largest county recently refused to certify her own election. Stop the steal!

Even before the new Georgia rule went into effect, the Brennan Center and other voting rights groups went to court to support advocates working to protect the vote in Fulton County. We represent the Georgia NAACP and the League of Women Voters of Georgia.

That’s the thing: When a county official refuses to certify the votes because of... vibes, it’s not just antidemocratic. It’s unlawful. The Georgia Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that local officials don’t have a choice.

And for good reason. In the rough-and-tumble early years of our republic, elections were messy, and it was not uncommon for rogue local officials to interfere with certification to benefit their preferred candidate. Early American state courts and legislatures took notice. As my colleague Lauren Miller Karalunas explains in a widely cited law review article, they shaped election certification into a mandatory duty precisely so that officials like those in Fulton County couldn’t take election results into their own hands. In the prescient words of the Oklahoma Supreme Court in 1909, allowing local certifying officials to reopen election returns and investigate the election itself “would afford temptation and great opportunity for the commission of fraud.”

In 2020, the election deniers were improvisational and slapdash. Now they are systematic, organized, and well funded. Trump already falsely claims that millions of noncitizens are preparing to vote. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) asserts that “we all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But,” he admits, “it’s not been something that is easily provable.” The House passed legislation purportedly cracking down on the nonexistent plague of noncitizen voting. All of this creates an atmosphere of suspicion and panic—the very vibes that can be exploited by unscrupulous officials to delay certification and derail the vote.

At his Georgia State rally, Trump praised the election officials as “pit bulls” who sought “victory.” It will be up to courts to stand up for something other than “victory”—democracy, fairness, and the rule of law.

Josh and Amanda Zurawski thought they had the American Dream going for them; they’d gotten married a year earlier and bought a beautiful Austin, Texas home with views of a lake and golf course. And Amanda was pregnant; they were looking forward to their first child.

And then they ran afoul of the tradwife obsession that motivates the Texas Republican Party.

Amanda’s zygote hadn’t attached itself to the wall of her uterus; it was instead growing in, on, or near her fallopian tube, something called an ectopic pregnancy. Ectopic pregnancies kill women virtually 100% of the time if not aborted early.

But when Amanda went to the hospital, she was turned away because a bundle of cells in the microscopic zygote were twitching in a way that the anti-abortion tradwife movement calls a “fetal heartbeat” (in reality, there was not yet a heart), and a physician in Texas who performs an abortion when there’s a “heartbeat” faces 91 years in prison.

Three days later she was literally dying, having gone into sepsis, and was just hours away from dying when the hospital finally relented and removed the “baby,” to use Sam Alito’s language from the Dobbs decision. It ruined her fallopian tube, so now if she wants to have children she’ll have to resort to an expensive, invasive, and extremely painful IVF procedure.

While many in the anti-abortion movement argue that they’re just trying to “save (unborn) lives,” their behavior exposes a much more sinister aspect to their motivation. Their real goal is to disempower women and elevate the role and power of men in the home, the workplace, and in politics.

The argument these Republicans make is that American women should become traditional wives, or tradwives, devoted to serving their husbands’ every need, setting aside their life’s goals for housekeeping and childrearing, and living a life of economic and political impotence.

Right at the top here, let’s stipulate that there’s nothing wrong with a woman wanting to become a tradwife. It’s a lifestyle with a long history that goes all the way back to women’s roles specified in the Bible.

There’s an entire tradwife movement that’s been growing across the conservative social media world, including a major presence on Reddit and Facebook.

My mother was a tradwife — she stayed home and raised 4 boys (and then two grandchildren) for most of her life — and appeared to love the life she and my dad had. It was her choice, not something my father had imposed on her.

And that’s the key: choice.

It’s one thing to argue that American society is and should be accepting of a wide variety of lifestyles for men and women, from academia to a working life to being a tradwife; it’s another thing altogether to reorganize society so one of those lifestyles is imposed on people by the force of law.

And that’s exactly what the GOP is trying to do.

From Trump saying, “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America,” to telling Esquire magazine that “arm candy” is essential for a successful businessman (“You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass”) to sarcastically calling Kamala Harris “a beautiful woman,” the billionaire has long made clear his thoughts on the role of women.

JD Vance has similarly pushed the tradwife meme, arguing that:

“I think that we should fight for the right of every American to live a good life in the country they call their own, to raise a family and dignity on a single middle-class job.”

That “single” job is the key; he’s not talking about economic advancement in the middle class but, rather, pitching the idea that dad should work and mom should stay home and cook, clean, and attend to the kids.

Some Republicans will openly say they just want to return America to the Leave It To Beaver world of June Cleaver, the happy homemaker of 1960s TV. What they don’t like to point out, though, is that in the 1960s most women didn’t have much of a choice.

When Republicans say that your grandmother stayed with your grandfather and should be your role model, they fail to point out that women three generations ago really had few choices unless they were independently wealthy.

Employers could refuse to hire women because of their gender as recently as 1964; home sellers and real estate agents could refuse to sell a house to women up until 1974; it wasn’t until 1988 that the law said landlords could no longer refuse to rent to women. Spousal rape wasn’t criminalized until 1993.

When Louise and I got married in 1972, she couldn’t get a credit card or sign a mortgage without the signature of me, her brother, or her father. She couldn’t serve on a jury, get a no-fault divorce, or enroll in an Ivy League college. And if she’d had an unwanted pregnancy, she’d be out of luck until 1973’s Roe v Wade decision.

In 20 states, Republicans have succeeded in removing from women one of the most important options that allow them to stay in the workplace: abortion of an accidental or unwanted pregnancy. Now they’re going after birth control. And their war on DEI is just another aspect of their war on women, as white women are the main beneficiaries of the DEI programs they’re demanding that corporations end.

Republicans are even working hard on ending no-fault divorce: as JD Vance said, women should stay home and serve their husbands even when those men are physically or emotionally abusive.

They ignore the reality of an 8 to 16% decrease in female suicides after states enacted no-fault divorce laws, a roughly 30% decrease in intimate partner violence, and a 10% drop in women murdered by their partners. Or maybe they just don’t care.

Republican legislators are also pushing back hard against equal-pay-for-equal-work laws, again arguing that women shouldn’t be on the job in the first place.

Motivations for pushing women into tradwife roles vary within the GOP:
— Some are men who want submissive wives.
— Others are white supremacists who think tradwifery will produce more white babies (the movement is largely confined to white conservatives).
— Many, like Vance, argue or imply that women in the workplace drive down wages by competing with men for jobs.

The bottom line is that tradwifery should be an option for women (and men, for that matter: I was a stay-at-home dad for almost two years while Louise ran one of our businesses). But it shouldn’t be the only option.

On August 17, a group of committed migrant activists set forth on a three-day march from Silicon Valley to San Francisco, highlighting the choices for progressive candidates in the coming November election. Should their campaigns amplify the hysteria about an immigration “crisis,” or should they speak the truth to the American people about the border and the roots of migration? Even more important, these marchers are providing a practical way for activists and political leaders to advocate for rights as they work to defeat the threat of MAGA racism.

The question at hand is whether to support the compromise immigration enforcement bill negotiated between centrist Democrats and Republicans last year, and to campaign against former U.S. President Donald Trump from the right, attacking him for undermining Republican support for the enforcement measures it contained.

In that bill, President Joe Biden agreed that he would close the border to asylum applicants if their number rose beyond 5,000 per day, while making it much harder to gain legal status for those even allowed to apply. Biden said he would cut short the time for screening asylum applicants by asylum officers, which would make winning permission to stay much more difficult.

Winning public understanding of immigration is the only way to decisively defeat this anti-immigrant hysteria, rather than caving into its illogic, and to the media frenzy and the onslaught of Republicans and MAGA acolytes.

To keep people imprisoned while their cases are in process, instead of releasing them, Biden proposed an additional $3 billion for more detention centers, a euphemism for immigrant prisons. There are already over 200, according to the group Freedom for Immigrants. Under a law signed by former President Barack Obama, Congress required that 34,000 detention beds be filled every night. At the end of 2023, those beds held 36,263 people, and another 194,427 were in “Alternatives to Detention,” which required wearing the hated ankle bracelets that bar travel for more than a few blocks. Over 90% of these jails are run for profit by private companies like the Geo Group, (formerly the Pinkerton Detective Agency).

These proposals respond to a media-driven frenzy that constantly refers to an immigration “crisis” and calls the border “broken.” That media coverage, and the response by centrist Democrats and Republicans, treats migrants as criminals, as an enemy. Political operatives in Washington then take polls, announce that the public wants draconian enforcement, and advise candidates that going against this tide will lead to election losses.

Yet this accepted political “wisdom” in Washington is not actually based on facts.

Let’s Look at the Numbers

Department of Homeland Security statistics show that over the decades the number of people crossing the border, and subject to deportation, rises and falls, while displacement and forced migration remain constant. In 2022, about 1.1 million people were expelled after trying to cross, and another 350,000 deported. In 1992, about 1.2 million were stopped at the border and 1.1 million deported. Over a million people were deported in 1954 during the infamous “Operation Wetback.” Arrests at the border have totaled over a million in 29 of the last 46 years.

Last year the number arrested at the border was higher: about 2.5 million. But the reality is that the migration flow has not stopped and will not stop anytime soon. What, then, is the “crisis”? New York Times reporter Miriam Jordan says, “In December alone, more than 300,000 people crossed the southern border, a record number.” They all believe, she says, that “once they make it into the United States they will be able to stay. Forever. And by and large, they are not wrong.”

In fact, the number of refugee admissions in 2022 was 60,000. In 1992, it was 132,000. According to Jordan, applicants are simply released to live normal lives until their date before an immigration judge. That will certainly be news to families facing separation and the constant threat of deportation. But this is what Republicans and anti-immigrant Democrats call an “invasion” and threaten to “shut the border.”

Criminalizing the Undocumented

Should Trump win election in November, he promises to reinstitute the notorious family separation policy. Children who survive the crossing might easily be lost, as so many were, in the huge detention system. Senator James Lankford (R-Okla.) wants to reintroduce the “Remain in Mexico” policy, under which people wanting asylum were not allowed to enter the United States at all, to file their applications. The Mexican government was forced to set up detention centers just south of the border to house them while they waited.

Trump and other Republicans would imprison all migrants who face a court proceeding that allows them to apply to stay or stop a deportation. Pending cases now number in the millions, because the immigration court system is starved for the resources for processing them.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has pushed through a law that makes being undocumented a state crime. Republicans in Congress last year proposed to build more border walls, create barriers to asylum, force the firing of millions of undocumented workers, and permit children to be held in detention prisons with their parents. Centrist Democrats are very willing to agree to modified proposals like these.

No money, running from something or someone, trying to keep a family together and give it a future, or just needing a job at whatever wage—these are the commonalities of the thousands who arrive at the U.S. border every year. Winning public understanding of immigration is the only way to decisively defeat this anti-immigrant hysteria, rather than caving into its illogic, and to the media frenzy and the onslaught of Republicans and MAGA acolytes.

Roots of Migration

President Obama made some acknowledgement of the poverty and violence that impels people to come but drew the line at recognizing this migration’s historical roots, much less any culpability on the part of the U.S. government. President Biden sent Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic candidate for president, to Central America in his first year in office with a similar message—don’t come.

So far, the new presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris has not taken a different direction. In Arizona she gave a speech recommitting to the Biden-brokered compromise and criticizing Trump for killing it. In a new TV ad, she promised to hire thousands of additional border patrol agents. The three enforcement arms of the Department of Homeland Security—the Border Patrol, Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement today account for 52,300 officers, making it the largest law enforcement agency in the country. The numbers mushroomed by 22,000 in the past 20 years; the Border Patrol alone tripled from 2,700 to 8,200.

The rationale for this huge increase is that immigrants must be met with deterrence and enforcement to stop them from coming. Today an unwillingness to look at U.S. responsibility for producing displacement and migration is starkest in relation to Haitians and Venezuelans, who have made up a large percentage of the migrants arriving at the Rio Grande in the last two years.

No matter how many walls and migrant prisons the government builds, people will come.

After Haitians finally rid themselves of the U.S.-supported Duvalier regime and elected Jean Bertrand Aristide president, the United States put him on an outbound plane in 2004, as it did with Miguel Zelaya in Honduras. A string of U.S.-backed corrupt but business-friendly governments followed, which pocketed millions while Haitians went hungry and homeless by the tens of thousands after earthquakes and other disasters. The treatment of Haitian migrants is a form of institutionalized racism.

Survival in Venezuela became impossible for many as its economy suffered body blows from U.S. political intervention and economic sanctions. If the United States moves further to increase sanctions in response to the recent elections, it will produce even more migration.

These interventions produce migrants and then criminalize them. In 2023, the Border Patrol took 334,914 Venezuelans into custody, along with 163,701 Haitians. And while promoting military intervention in Haiti and regime change in Venezuela, the Biden administration put people on deportation flights back home, in the hope that this would discourage others from starting the journey north.

The disconnect is obvious to anyone born south of the Mexican border. Sergio Sosa, a Guatemalan exile who heads the Heartland Workers Center in Omaha, observes: “People from Europe and the U.S. crossed borders to come to us, and took over our land and economy. Migration is a form of fighting back. We’re in our situation, not because we decided to be, but because we’re in the U.S.’s backyard.” While former President Bill Clinton was the author of many anti-immigrant measures, he did recognize this historic truth, and apologized to the Guatemalan people for the U.S. support of the military dictatorships that massacred thousands.

The Democrats have to tell people the truth, and political campaigns are the times when this is most important. Agreeing with Trump that immigrants are the enemy to be detained at the border, and then only disagreeing on the numbers and methods, contradicts any commitment to a fact-based policy, while making immigrant communities scapegoats.

As they march from Silicon Valley, immigrant rights campaigners are reminding the Democratic Party of this truth and are calling for a commitment to the welfare of the 11 million people already in the United States who lack legal immigration status. That commitment has been all but lost in the border “crisis” hype.

An Alternative Approach

The goal of these marchers is to win support for a bill that could make a profound difference in the lives of millions of people. Today, anyone who entered the United States without a visa before January 1, 1972 can apply for legal permanent residence. From 2015 to 2019, however, only 305 people received legal status this way because over 90% of undocumented immigrants came after that date. As the years go by, ever fewer numbers qualify.

Known as the Registry Bill, HR 1511 would allow anyone in the country for seven years to apply for legal status. Emma Delgado, a leader of Mujeres Unidas y Activas (United and Active Women) in San Francisco says, “I haven’t seen my children in many years because there is currently no way for me to apply for legal residency.” She called the family separation produced by current immigration law “immoral.”

Angelica Salas, director of the Coalition for Humane Immigration Reform in Los Angeles, challenges the idea that Democrats can’t campaign for it during an election year, and that a Republican majority in the House dooms it. “Think of all the millions of U.S. citizens who have immigrant parents,” she urges, “and how many have had their fathers or mothers deported. All over the country. Immigrant workers are a big part of the workforce. They’re all part of a base that can force change. We can’t depend on political winds or what people tell us is possible.”

No matter how many walls and migrant prisons the government builds, people will come. Over the years they will become part of communities here, and with progressive immigration policies, eventually voting citizens. Democrats need a long-term vision that sees the future in organizing and defending them, in turning those old anti-immigrant arguments around, rather than reinforcing them.

Phil Donahue passed away Sunday night, after a long illness. He was beloved by those who knew him and by many who didn’t.

He started as a local reporter in Ohio, was a trailblazer in bringing social issues to a national audience as a daytime broadcast TV host, and then he was pretty-much banished from TV by MSNBC because he—accurately, correctly, and morally—questioned the horrific U.S. invasion of Iraq.

In the 1970s, Phil took progressive issues and mainstreamed them to millions through his syndicated daytime show. He was a pioneer in syndication. He also pioneered on the issues; his most frequent guests on his daytime show were Ralph Nader, Gloria Steinem, and Rev. Jesse Jackson. They appeared dozens of times as Phil boosted civil rights, women’s rights, and consumer rights. He regularly hosted Dr. Sidney Wolfe warning of the greedy pharmaceutical industry and unsafe drugs. Raised a Catholic, he also featured advocates for atheism.

Mainstream media obits will likely focus on his daytime TV episodes that included male strippers or other titillation, but Phil was serious about the issues—and did far more than most mainstream TV journalists to address the biggest issues.

I was a senior producer on Phil’s short-lived MSNBC primetime show in 2002 and 2003. It was frustrating for us to have to deal with the men Phil called “the suits”—NBC and MSNBC executives who were intimidated by the Bush administration and resisted any efforts by NBC/MSNBC to practice journalism and ask tough questions of Washington before our young people were sent to Iraq to kill or be killed. Ultimately, Phil was fired because—as the leaked internal memo said—Donahue represented “a difficult public face for NBC at a time of war.”

But before we were terminated, we put guests on the screen who were not commonly on mainstream TV. We offered a full hour with Barbara Ehrenreich on Labor Day in 2002; a full hour with veteran journalist Studs Terkel; interviews with progressive members of Congress, including Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich; and segments with the "maverick" Texas Observer columnist Molly Ivins; and offered platforms to foreign policy experts like Phyllis Bennis and Laura Flanders as well as Palestinian advocates, including Hanan Ashrawi.

No one on American television cross-examined Israeli leaders like Phil did when he interviewed then-Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, and later, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. They seemed stunned—never having faced such questioning from a U.S. journalist.

But “the suits” ruined our show when they took control and actually mandated a quota system favoring the right wing: If we had booked one guest who was antiwar, we needed to book two that were pro-war. If we had one guest on the left, we needed two on the right. When a producer suggested booking Michael Moore—known to oppose the pending Iraq war—she was told she’d need to book three rightwingers for political balance.

Three weeks before the Iraq war started, and after some of the biggest antiwar mobilizations the world had ever seen (which were barely covered on mainstream TV), the suits at NBC/MSNBC terminated our show.

- YouTube youtu.be

Phil was a giant. A huge celebrity who supported uncelebrated indy media outlets. He loved and supported the progressive media watch group FAIR (which I founded in the mid-1980s.)

Phil put Noam Chomsky on mainstream TV. He fought for Ralph Nader to be included in the 2000 presidential debates. He went on any TV show right after 9/11 that would have him to urge caution and to resist the calls for vengeful, endless warfare that would pointlessly kill large numbers of civilians in other countries. He opposed active wars and the Cold War with the Soviet Union. He supported war veterans and produced an important documentary on the topic: “Body of War,” on the life and death of Tomas Young.

Phil Donahue made his mark on our society. He fought for the underdog. He did it with style and grace and a wonderful sense of humor. He changed my life. And others’ lives.

He was inspired by the consciousness-raising groups he saw in the feminist movement and he sought to do consciousness-raising on a mass scale . . . using mainstream corporate TV. He did an amazing job of it.

While many are earnestly pointing at the devastation of war, the rampant human rights violations and the deliberate relegation of international and humanitarian law, there are those who see war from an entirely different perspective: profits.

For the merchants of war, the collective pain and misery of whole nations is dwarfed by the lucrative deals of billions of dollars generated from weapons sales.

The great irony is that some of the loudest advocates of human rights are, in fact, the ones who are facilitating the global arms trade. Without it, human rights would not be violated with such impunity.

The blood of Arabs, Africans, Asians, and South Americans should not be spilled to sustain the economies of Western countries.

The Geneva Academy, a legal research organization, says that it currently monitors about 110 active armed conflicts worldwide. Most of these conflicts are taking place in the Global South, though many of these cases are either exacerbated, funded or, managed by Western powers or Western multinational corporations.

Of the 110, more than 45 armed conflicts are taking place in the Middle East and North Africa region, more than 35 in the rest of Africa, 21 in Asia, and six in Latin America, according to the academy.

The worst and bloodiest of these armed conflicts is currently taking place in Gaza, one of the poorest and most isolated regions in the world.

To estimate the future death toll resulting from the war in Gaza, one of the world's most respected medical journals, The Lancet, undertook a thorough research entitled "Counting the Dead in Gaza: Difficult but Essential."

The approximation was based on the death toll figure produced as of June 19, when Israel had then reportedly killed 37,396 Palestinians.

The Lancet's new number was horrifying, even though the medical journal said that its conclusions were based on conservative estimates of indirect deaths vs direct deaths that often result from such wars.

Should the war end today, meaning June 19, 7.9% of the population of the Gaza Strip will die because of the war and its aftermath. That's "up to 186,000 or even more deaths," according to The Lancet.

Palestinians in Gaza are not dying because of an untraceable virus or a natural disaster, but in a merciless war that can only be sustained through massive shipments of arms, which continue to flow to Israel despite the international outcry.

On January 26, the International Court of Justice resolved that it had enough evidence to suggest that genocide was being committed in Gaza. On May 20, Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, added his voice, this time speaking of deliberate acts of "extermination" of Palestinians.

Yet, weapons continued to flow, mostly coming from Western governments. The main source of weapons is, unsurprisingly, the United States, followed by Germany, Italy, and Britain.

Despite announcements by some European countries that they are curtailing or even freezing their weapons supplies to Israel, these governments continue to find legal caveats to delay the outright ban. Italy, for example, insists on respecting "previously signed orders," and the U.K. has suspended the processing of arms export licenses "pending a wider review."

Washington, however, remains the main supplier of arms to Tel Aviv. In 2016, both countries signed another Memorandum of Understanding that would allow Israel to receive $38 billion of U.S. military aid. That was the third MoU signed between the two countries, and it was intended to cover the period between 2019 to 2028.

The war, however, prompted U.S. policymakers to go even beyond their original commitment, by assigning yet another $26 billion ($17 billion in military aid), knowing full well that the majority of Gaza victims, per United Nations estimates, are civilians, mostly women and children.

Therefore, when the U.S. urges an end to the war in Gaza while continuing to flood Israel with more weapons, the logic seems utterly flawed and entirely hypocritical.

The same hypocrisy applies to other, mostly Western countries, which brazenly pose as defenders of human rights and international peace.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute ( SIPRI), the world's top 10 exporters of major arms between 2019 and 2023 include six Western countries. The U.S. alone has a 42% share of global arms exports, followed by France at 11%.

The total arms export of the top six Western states amounts to nearly 70% of the global share.

If we consider that the vast majority of armed conflicts are all taking place in the Global South, the obvious conclusion is that the very West that purportedly champions global peace, democracy, and international law is the very entity that also fuels wars, armed conflicts, and genocide.

For the Global South to take charge of its future, it must fight against this obvious injustice. They cannot allow their continents to continue to serve as mere markets for Western arms. The blood of Arabs, Africans, Asians, and South Americans should not be spilled to sustain the economies of Western countries.

True, it will take much more than limiting the arms trade to end global conflicts, but the free flow of weapons to conflict zones will continue to feed the war machine, from Gaza to Sudan and from Congo to Burma and beyond.

One can continue to argue that Israel must respect international law, and that Burma must respect human rights. But what use are mere words when the West continues to provide the murder weapon, with no moral or legal accountability?

Two former leaders of major South Asian countries have reportedly accused the United States of covert regime change operations to topple their governments. One of the leaders, former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan, languishes in prison, on a perverse conviction that proves Khan’s assertion. The other leader, former Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheik Hasina, fled to India following a violent coup in her country. Their grave accusations against the U.S., as reported in the world media, should be investigated by the UN, since if true, the U.S. actions would constitute a fundamental threat to world peace and to regional stability in South Asia.

The two cases seem to be very similar. The very strong evidence of the U.S. role in toppling the government of Imran Khan raises the likelihood that something similar may have occurred in Bangladesh.

In the case of Pakistan, Donald Lu, Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia and Central Asia, met with Asad Majeed Khan, Pakistan’s Ambassador to the U.S., on March 7, 2022. Ambassador Khan immediately wrote back to his capital, conveying Lu’s warning that PM Khan threatened U.S.-Pakistan relations because of Khan’s “aggressively neutral position” regarding Russia and Ukraine.

The Ambassador’s March 7 note (technically a diplomatic cypher) quoted Assistant Secretary Lu as follows: “I think if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington because the Russia visit is being looked at as a decision by the Prime Minister. Otherwise, I think it will be tough going ahead.” The very next day, members of the parliament took procedural steps to oust PM Khan.

On March 27, PM Khan brandished the cypher, and told his followers and the public that the U.S. was out to bring him down. On April 10, PM Khan was thrown out of office as the parliament acceded to the U.S. threat.

We know this in detail because of Ambassador Khan’s cypher, exposed by PM Khan and brilliantly documented by Ryan Grim of The Intercept, including the text of the cypher. Absurdly and tragically, PM Khan languishes in prison in part over espionage charges, linked to his revealing the cypher.

The U.S. appears to have played a similar role in the recent violent coup in Bangladesh. PM Hasina was ostensibly toppled by student unrest, and fled to India when the Bangladeshi military refused to prevent the protestors from storming the government offices. Yet there may well be much more to the story than meets the eye.

According to press reports in India, PM Hasina is claiming that the U.S. brought her down. Specifically, she says that the U.S. removed her from power because she refused to grant the U.S. military facilities in a region that is considered strategic for the U.S. in its “Indo-Pacific Strategy” to contain China. While these are second-hand accounts by the Indian media, they track closely several speeches and statements that Hasina has made over the past two years.

On May 17, 2024, the same Assistant Secretary Liu who played a lead role in toppling PM Khan, visited Dhaka to discuss the US Indo-Pacific Strategy among other topics. Days later, Sheikh Hasina reportedly summoned the leaders of the 14 parties of her alliance to make the startling claim that a “country of white-skinned people” was trying to bring her down, ostensibly telling the leaders that she refused to compromise her nation’s sovereignty. Like Imran Khan, PM Hasina had been pursuing a foreign policy of neutrality, including constructive relations not only with the U.S. but also with China and Russia, much to the deep consternation of the U.S. government.

To add credence to Hasina’s charges, Bangladesh had delayed signing two military agreements that the U.S. had pushed very hard since 2022, indeed by none other than the former Under-Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, the neocon hardliner with her own storied history of U.S. regime-change operations. One of the draft agreements, the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA), would bind Bangladesh to closer military-to-military cooperation with Washington. The Government of PM Hasina was clearly not enthusiastic to sign it.

The U.S. is by far the world’s leading practitioner of regime-change operations, yet the U.S. flatly denies its role in covert regime change operations even when caught red-handed, as with Nuland’s infamous intercepted phone call in late January 2014 planning the U.S.-led regime change operation in Ukraine. It is useless to appeal to the U.S. Congress, and still less the executive branch, to investigate the claims by PM Khan and PM Hasina. Whatever the truth of the matter, they will deny and lie as necessary.

This is where the UN should step in. Covert regime change operations are blatantly illegal under international law (notably the Doctrine of Non-Intervention, as expressed for example in UN General Assembly Resolution 2625, 1970), and constitute perhaps the greatest threat to world peace, as they profoundly destabilize nations, and often lead to wars and other civil disorders. The UN should investigate and expose covert regime change operations, both in the interests of reversing them, and preventing them in the future.

The UN Security Council is of course specifically charged under Article 24 of the UN Charter with “primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security.” When evidence arises that a government has been toppled through the intervention or complicity of a foreign government, the UN Security Council should investigate the claims.

In the cases of Pakistan and Bangladesh, the UN Security Council should seek the direct testimony of PM Khan and PM Hasina in order to evaluate the evidence that the U.S. played a role in the overthrow of the governments of these two leaders. Each, of course, should be protected by the UN for giving their testimony, so as to protect them from any retribution that could follow their honest presentation of the facts. Their testimony can be taken by video conference, if necessary, given the tragic ongoing incarceration of PM Khan.

The U.S. might well exercise its veto in the UN Security Council to prevent such a investigation. In that case, the UN General Assembly can take up the matter, under UN Resolution A/RES/76/, which allows the UN General Assembly to consider an issue blocked by veto in the UN Security Council. The issues at stake could then be assessed by the entire membership of the UN. The veracity of the U.S. involvement in the recent regime changes in Pakistan and Bangladesh could then be objectively analyzed and judged on the evidence, rather than on mere assertions and denials.

The U.S. engaged in at least 64 covert regime change operations during 1947-1989, according to documented research by Lindsey O’Rourke, political science professor at Boston Collage, and several more that were overt (e.g. by U.S.-led war). It continues to engage in regime-change operations with shocking frequency to this day, toppling governments in all parts of the world. It is wishful thinking that the U.S. will abide by international law on its own, but it is not wishful thinking for the world community, long suffering from U.S. regime change operations, to demand their end at the United Nations.

The Kamala Harris campaign is slicing and dicing its support among such identity groups as “Black Women for Harris” and “White Dudes for Harris” in a way never seen before.

The post Bisexual Methodists for Harris first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Trees are allies in the struggle against climate change, and regrowing forests to capture carbon may be cheaper than we thought. According to new research published in Nature Climate Change, a strategic mix of natural regrowth and tree planting could be the most cost-effective way to capture carbon.

Researchers analyzed reforestation projects in 138 low- and middle-income countries to compare the costs of different reforestation approaches. They found it’s possible to remove 10 times more carbon at $20 per metric ton, and almost three times more at $50, compared to what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had previously estimated.

"It's exciting that the opportunity for low-cost reforestation appears much more plentiful than previously thought."

Neither natural regeneration nor tree planting consistently outperforms the other. Instead, the most cost-effective method varies depending on local conditions. Natural regeneration, which involves letting forests regrow on their own, is cheaper in about 46% of suitable areas. Tree planting, on the other hand, is more cost-effective in 54% of areas.

“Natural regeneration is more cost-effective in areas where tree planting is expensive, regrowing forests accumulate carbon more quickly, or timber infrastructure is distant,” said lead author Jonah Busch, who conducted the study while working for Conservation International. “On the other hand, plantations outperform in areas far from natural seed sources, or where more of the carbon from harvested wood is stored in long-lasting products.”

The research team estimates that by using the cheapest method in each location, we could remove a staggering 31.4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over 30 years, at a cost of less than $50 per metric ton. This is about 40% more carbon removal than if only one method was used universally.

“It’s exciting that the opportunity for low-cost reforestation appears much more plentiful than previously thought; this suggests reforestation projects are worth a second look by communities that might have prejudged them to be cost prohibitive,” said Busch. “While reforestation can’t be the only solution to climate change, our findings suggest it should be a bigger piece of the puzzle than previously thought.”

To reach these conclusions, the research team gathered data from hundreds of reforestation projects and used machine-learning techniques to map costs across different areas at a 1-kilometer (0.6-mile) resolution. This detailed approach allowed them to consider crucial factors such as tree growth rates and potential species in different regions.

Ecologist Robin Chazdon, who wasn’t involved in the research, praised the comprehensive approach but highlighted important considerations beyond cost-effectiveness.

“These eye-opening findings add nuance and complexity to our understanding of the net costs of carbon storage for naturally regenerating forests and monoculture plantations,” Chazdon said. However, she emphasized that “the relative costs of carbon storage should not be the only factor to consider regarding spatial planning of reforestation.”

Chazdon pointed out some of the ecological trade-offs involved in different reforestation methods. Monoculture tree plantations, while potentially cost-effective in certain areas, often create excessive water demand and provide poor opportunities for native biodiversity conservation. In contrast, naturally regenerating forests typically offer a wider range of ecosystem services and better support local biodiversity.

“Ultimately, these environmental costs and benefits — which can be difficult to monetize — need to be incorporated in decisions regarding how and where to grow plantations or foster natural regeneration,” Chazdon said.

The study’s authors acknowledge these limitations and suggest several directions for future research. They propose extending the analysis to high-income countries and exploring other forms of reforestation, such as agroforestry or planting patches of trees and allowing the rest of an area to regrow naturally.

Additionally, the researchers emphasize the need to integrate their findings on cost-effectiveness with data on biodiversity, livelihoods and other societal needs to guide reforestation efforts in different contexts.

While the study’s findings are promising, the researchers caution that reforestation alone won’t solve the climate crisis. Even at its maximum potential, reforestation would only remove as much carbon dioxide in 30 years as eight months of current global emissions.

Reforestation is very important, but it won’t solve climate change on its own, Busch said. Ultimately, “we still need to reduce emissions from fossil fuels.”

Twenty-four years ago, Business Week magazine conducted a poll of the American people on whether corporations have too much control over their lives. Over seventy percent of them said YES! Since 2000, big businesses and their CEOs have gotten bigger, richer, less taxed and exercised far more power over the lives of workers, consumers, patients, children, communities, the two major political parties and our national, state and local governments.

That reality answers the question of why our corporate Congress has declined to hold public hearings confronting lawless corporate power with proposed legislation – the first step toward shifting more power to the people.

Weissman has put together a powerful legislative agenda to restore the rule of law over raw power.

Robert Weissman, President of Public Citizen, demands ten key Congressional hearings – naming the Committees that can hold them – in the just-published edition of the Capitol Hill Citizen (to obtain a print copy only, go to capitolhillcitizen.com).

Here is a summary of them:

1. Rebuild democracy by ending big money in elections. Besides exploring public financing for elections, the Committees, for example, would make the connections between Big Pharma’s money and charging the highest drug prices in the world, despite the large subsidies given to the drug companies. Also, witnesses would give testimony to strengthen voting rights and eliminate partisan gerrymandering, among other measures.

2. Taxing corporations and the Super-Rich at least to the level of the prosperous 1960s. Tax financial speculation (see: greedvsneed.org), close “a raft of loopholes” and impose a wealth tax on “the outrageously wealthy.” Weissman writes: “How exactly did Jeff Bezos pay $1.1 billion in federal tax from 2006 to 2018, as his wealth grew by $127 billion?” How do so many giant, profitable companies get away with zero income tax for years at a time?

3. Anti-monopoly hearings to strengthen venerable antitrust laws, to catch up with many new forms of monopolization and protect small business, competition and innovation. New legislation should also “restore the rights of victims of anti-competitive practices – whether competitors or consumers – to sue monopolists.”

4. Roll back rampant corporate welfare by exposing the hundreds of billions of dollars a year in subsidies, handouts, giveaways and bailouts. From greatly inflated government contracts – as in the defense industry – to giveaways of public land resources, government-guaranteed giant capitalism must stop, and the savings devoted to public services in great need.

5. More and deeper hearings on corporate-driven climate disruptions. Congressional committees have had numerous hearings, but far more should be regularly held on how the corporate-driven climate crisis is harming people and property around the country, how efficient are the ways to mitigate or prevent such fossil-fuel-led disasters, and how the law must be toughened with stronger enforcement and budgets to forestall this omnicidal destruction that gets worse every year.

6. “Winning Medicare for All” hearings to show how other countries spend far less per capita and get better patient outcomes with far less paperwork, waste, over-billing and denials of care. Weissman notes how conditions are getting worse with “private equity investors rushing to buy up everything from nursing homes to emergency care companies.”

7. Legislative hearings to enact laws that end the over-pricing of prescription drugs in the U.S. that are “roughly three times what they are in other rich countries.” This would build on Senator Bernie Sanders’ hearings by fundamentally changing the conditions that breed ever-worsening “pay or die” unregulated drug industry price dictates.

8. Hearings that place the most obstructive anti-union formation laws in the Western world under reform spotlights. Union-busting law firms and consultants should be subpoenaed to give testimony, produce documents, and answer questions under oath. Long overdue are hearings on the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act (1947) to allow card checks and faster procedures between union certification and contracts with employers.

9. Also, long overdue are Congressional hearings that “shine a light on the victims of corporate wrongdoing who have been denied their day in court or the ability to obtain fair compensation.” On the table would be a “Corporate Accountability and Civil Justice Restoration Act” that protects the constitutional right of trial by jury that has been severely eroded by corporate lawyers and corporate judges.

10. Hearings by the Senate Judiciary Committee to confront the surging corporate crime wave with a modernized, comprehensive federal corporate criminal law. One that is adequately empowered and resourced to deter, punish and hold corporate crooks and their companies accountable through a variety of proven mechanisms. Present laws are pathetically weak, easily gamed, and allow ever more widespread immunities for these comfortable fugitives from justice.

Weissman has put together a powerful legislative agenda to restore the rule of law over raw power. He has a Congress Watch group staffed by public interest lobbyists who can swing into action daily on Capitol Hill equipped with a combination of invincible rhetoric rooted in irrebuttable evidence to benefit all the American people.

It is up to you the citizens to demand such investigations by your senators and representatives.

I would add serious hearings on the bloated, redundant military budget. Absorbing over half of all federal operating expenditures, this vast appropriation is in violation of federal law since 1992 requiring audited budgets be sent to Congress yearly. The Pentagon is presently out of sight by members of Congress and out of control even by the Army, Air Force and Navy.

Another basic hearing is needed by the Joint Committee on Printing aimed at restoring the printing of Congressional hearings and reports for maximum distribution in depository libraries and use by citizens. Hearing transcripts and very tardy online hearing records give corporate lobbyists an advantage in lobbying Congress. They can afford to pay for rapid access transcripts or personally go to the hearings that citizens may not be able to easily attend. Few citizens can afford such luxuries. (See the February/March 2024 issue of the Capitol Hill Citizen).

By the way, voters should demand that Congress be in session five days a week instead of three days a week with long recesses. More hearings, and the critical information work of our national legislature, requires a full week’s work, for which they get fully paid. (We will have additional proposals for blockbuster hearings in the future.)

There is now widespread controversy surrounding the Venezuelan presidential election on July 28th. The National Electoral Council says that current President Nicolás Maduro was reelected with a 51% majority. The opposition, led by Maria Corina Machado, claims that its candidate, Edmundo González, won with an overwhelming majority of the votes cast. The primary questions being asked in the media are “who really won?” and even “how can Maduro be made to step aside?”

Instead the question US observers should be asking is, “what business is this of ours?”

The United States government constantly criticizes elections around the world that it deems to be undemocratic. It claims to support an “international rules based order” and maintain a foreign policy with human rights at its center. But the United States of America isn’t exactly a fair arbiter. It is without question the most hyper-interventionist country in the history of the world. It has repeatedly intervened in the internal affairs of governments it doesn’t like, often invading and overthrowing them, ostensibly, for the cause of democracy. It does not, however, criticize the antidemocratic behavior of its allies, like apartheid Israel or the absolute monarchy that rules Saudi Arabia. As in Orwell’s famous novel, America may claim that all animals are equal. But it’s clear that it believes some animals are more equal than others.

On July 27th, a day before the Venezuelan election, the People’s Forum, a New York City movement incubator, released a letter warning that, “a Western media narrative is already being spun to present the election as inevitably fraudulent – and pave the way for a new regime change operation if the right-wing opposition does not prevail at the ballot box.”

That letter has come under criticism for asserting that, “the campaign has seen energetic participation all across the country and vigorous, democratic debate,” and that since 2002, “Venezuela has held over 30 elections that have been conducted professionally and impartially.” In the days after the most recent election international organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and a fact-finding mission from the United Nations have disagreed, citing reports of politically motivated arrests, assaults, intimidation, and even deaths. The governments of Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil are calling for more transparency.

But the credibility of Venezuela’s elections should not be the main issue in question. The main issue is that criticism is used as an excuse to promote US intervention and regime change or to justify more deadly sanctions that kill Venezuelan people. True to form, on Thursday August 1st the U.S. State Department announced that it recognized González as the winner.

In one egregious example of media promoting intervention, a July 31st editorial in the Boston Globe called on the Biden Administration to intervene, saying, “It’s in U.S. interests for the Biden Administration to help deliver the regime change Venezuelans have voted for.” It endorsed the policy of former President Donald Trump, suggesting that President Biden should revive the office of special representative to Venezuela and later quoted the man who held that office under Trump, Elliott Abrams.

But it failed to provide extremely important context about Mr. Abrams. In 1991 Elliott Abrams, who still serves in government, pled guilty to two counts of lying to the US Congress about his knowledge of the Iran-Contra affair, a secret deal to illegally sell arms to Iran and use the proceeds to fund right-wing militias trying to overthrow the left wing government of Nicaragua. Congress had explicitly forbidden military assistance for the purpose of overthrowing the Nicaraguan government. A man who was deeply involved in the attempted overthrow of a Central American government is not a credible voice on Venezuelan democracy.

The United States has a terrible record when it comes to supporting self determination, globally, in Latin America, and in Venezuela specifically. The U.S. has interfered with the affairs of Cuba, Nicaragua, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Bolivia, Venezuela, and more. Focusing on Venezuela alone there are multiple instances of interference just in the 21st century.

In 2002 the Bush Administration sanctioned a coup attempt against Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez. In March of 2015 the Obama Administration unilaterally levied harsh economic sanctions on Venezuela. President Obama declared that Venezuela posed an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” The effects of such sanctions, and even more punitive ones imposed by the Trump Administration, were studied by the Government Accountability Office in 2021. They found that the sanctions have already killed tens of thousands of people in Venezuela, due to restricted access to food and medicine.

In 2019 the Trump Administration recognized 35 year old opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the legitimate president of Venezuela, despite the fact that he never ran for the office. They then handed over control on Venezuela’s assets in the United States to Guaidó, a move that the New York Times called, “one of Washington’s most overt attempts in decades to carry out regime change in Latin America.”

Given the exhaustive record of U.S. interference and intervention in the politics of Latin American countries, it’s just common sense to be skeptical about pronouncements from Washington regarding Venezuela’s election. That’s asking the fox's opinion on the management of the henhouse. To be clear, this is not to say that the Venezuelan government is perfect or to endorse the fairness of the July 28th election. It is to say that Venezuelan political disputes should be settled by Venezuelans, not by the United States.

With its own presidential election less than three months away, the U.S. has enough on its plate. The recent history of presidential elections in the United States is less than stellar. Two of the last six presidential elections were won by the candidate who received less votes (George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald J. Trump in 2016). In 2000 Bush had a co-chair of his campaign purge 173,000 voters from voting rolls as Florida Secretary of State, in a key election decided by 500 votes. Trump tried to stay in power after losing the 2020 election to President Joe Biden. His followers famously stormed the Capitol Building in an effort to stop the certification of that election on January 6th 2021.

The bottom line? We have authoritarianism at home. When it comes to taking action abroad to “defend democracy” America would do well to adhere to the motto recommended by Founding Grandfather Benjamin Franklin: “Mind your business.”

For most of us a “near miss”—whether a car wreck or a marriage breakup—calls on us to ask, “Why” and to seek answers. So, certainly the near assassination of former U.S. President Donald Trump calls for similar digging into root causes we can address.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans agree that crime is a big, national problem, and no doubt this near tragedy reinforces our worry. But what many of us may not grasp is how much more serious our crime challenge is relative to nations we assume to be our peers. In assassinations alone, we are one of just three countries sharing top place for the number of presidents killed between 1875 and 2004.

The U.S. by far leads the world in gun ownership per capita, with a rate of 121 guns per 100 people. With under 5% of the world’s population, the U.S. has 40% of the world’s civilian-owned guns. Among our peer countries, Canada is second with 35 guns per 100 people, or roughly one-third our rate. But note this big difference: Canada suffers just over two gun-related deaths per 100,000 while our rate is 11 deaths. Closely following Canada in number of guns owned are Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland. All have fewer than three gun-related deaths per 100,000 people. That’s almost a quarter of our rate.

Since the solution to gun violence goes well beyond addressing mental health, let’s begin with the most basic gun reforms advocated by the Democratic Party: strengthening background checks and keeping guns out of the hands of those with a history of violent crime.

Our country is also plagued by mass shootings—defined as the killing or injuring of four or more. By this measure, in 2023 America experienced almost two a day—totaling more than 650 such shootings.

Among the young in America—those 1 to 17—more now die from firearms than by any other type of injury or illness; and this death rate doubled in just eight years, from 2013 to 2021. And Black, Latino, and Indigenous people in the U.S. are more than 10 times, more than two times, and nearly 3.5 times (respectively) to die of homicide by firearms compared with whites.

So, what are possible solutions?

We can start by seeking lessons from our peer countries.

In Canada stricter gun control includes a ban on civilian ownership of automatic weapons. Handguns require a permit that is issued only on a temporary basis, and only for gun-club members and gun collectors and anyone demonstrating a need for self-defense purposes. Magazine capacity is limited to 10 rounds. Purchase of rifles and shotguns requires an official certificate and involves a 28-day waiting period. Purchase is denied to people with certain criminal histories or who have mental-health disorders associated with violence. Canada also has “red flag” laws, where an emergency prohibition can be issued for anyone judged to be a danger to themselves or others.

In Finland, gun ownership requires a license and registration, an aptitude test for the license, and a minimum age of 20. Guns can only be carried for a specific purpose, and gun owners bear the responsibility for ensuring that the gun and ammunition don’t end up in the wrong hands.

In Norway, semiautomatic weapons are banned, a license is required by the police, as well as a “valid” reason for obtaining it—such as membership in a gun club or use for hunting. Self-defense isn’t considered a valid reason. An applicant also must pass an exam after extensive firearm training, and firearms must be securely stored in an approved safe. With a 48-hour notice, police are allowed to enter to inspect the safe.

In the U.S., domestic abusers can now be barred from owning a firearm, as well as felons, fugitives, drug users, those involuntarily hospitalized for mental health, and those dishonorably discharged from the military. Youth under 18 cannot possess a handgun, but they can still own a rifle or shotgun in the majority of states. Prohibited firearms include those with serial numbers erased, machine guns produced after 1986, short-barreled shotguns or rifles, and silencers. Federal law doesn’t require licenses or permits to own firearms, but 10 states do require them, dependent on completing background checks.

Note that federal law now requires background checks only on purchases from a federally licensed gun dealer. So, more background checks could help.

The problem? Only 40% of gun sales in the U.S. are through such a federally licensed dealer.

Note that the 17 states that now do require prior universal background checks also require all sales of firearms to go through a licensed dealer who can perform such checks prior to sale.

Additional protection could come from expanding bans on the most dangerous weapons. For example, approximately two-thirds of U.S. states allow civilian ownership of machine guns.

Note that, overall, gun laws vary widely by state—with California being the strongest with a score of 89.5 out of 100 while most southern states receive a score of 20 and below.

Might gun violence ultimately be a mental health problem, as Republicans like to claim? It’s true that Finland and Norway, among the happiest nations, have a low rate of gun violence. On the other hand, Canada—ranking lower than the U.S. in mental health—has much lower rates of gun-related deaths despite having among the world’s highest rates of gun ownership. Of course when it comes to suicide, the link between mental health and gun violence is undeniable. As evidence, Greenland has a high suicide rate and gun-related deaths (18 deaths per 100,000 people) despite its low gun-ownership rate.

And if poor mental health is one root of the problem, all the more reason to pass laws requiring tougher mental health screenings for gun ownership. Currently, a person can be barred if declared mentally incompetent by a court or government body. And if Republicans truly believe gun violence is a mental health problem, they need to actually vote for government support for mental health initiatives rather than defunding them.

Plus, if better mental health is foundational to reducing gun violence, all of us should also be backing policies to alleviate stress created by low wages and high-housing costs, for example—precisely the changes that Republicans resist.

Since the solution to gun violence goes well beyond addressing mental health, let’s begin with the most basic gun reforms advocated by the Democratic Party: strengthening background checks and keeping guns out of the hands of those with a history of violent crime or posing a danger to themselves or others, such as domestic abusers.

Our upcoming national election offers a great opportunity to highlight these crucial steps for public safety, as the Democratic candidate for vice-president—Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz—became a gun-control advocate in response to the 2018 Parkland high-school shooting.

Commonsense gun reforms are the least we can do as a nation to protect ourselves—especially children in schools, the minority members of our population, and our own politicians—while still protecting our right to bear arms.

I stroke the unknown...

Bear with me as I finish my short walk. I was ambling through my neighborhood the other day, wielding a pair of walking sticks, “forcing myself,” you might say, to enjoy the beautiful afternoon but actually just plodding forward, in a hurry to get back to the house and be done with this bit of exercise.

But then, oh so briefly, I paused in my hurry-upness, took a deep breath, and continued slowly, deliberately on my way. Suddenly I was no longer in a pointless hurry, but, my God, surprisingly awake and present in this beautiful moment of sky and grass and sidewalk concrete. I felt the air fill my lungs and revered every step I took, knowing that one of them—someday—would be my last.

This moment, of what I sometimes call “blue pearl awareness,” lasted—what? Maybe a minute or so. I was almost home. I picked up a small plastic bag on a neighbor’s lawn, relishing the chance to do some good in the world. Then I was home. Now what? The moment was essentially over. I could hear the usual internal voices return—the scolding and worry and giveuptitude—but nevertheless I knew that something wondrous had just happened. I embraced it as best I could: Life is good, right now, at this very spark of time.

Then I went online, started scanning bits of news, which of course is always emotionally difficult. I had just had a moment that seemed “normal” in a way that transcended the usual way in which we (meaning I) shrug normalcy off as no big deal. In the embrace of this awareness, the actual universe is continuing to happen, one nanosecond, or whatever, at a time. In its absence, we have something far less: the news of the day, the limited world defined by collective agreement—a world of winners and losers, good guys and bad guys. A world, you might say, that we must continually put in an emotional cage just because it’s so annoying.

As I updated myself on the state of things, I came upon a scrap of data that suddenly thrust me back into larger awareness—but not joyfully, not willingly. This was just a small bit of “normal” from across the world, a single moment in the far, far larger context of war. Specifically, the hellish war in—on—Gaza.

The story hit me, as I say, at a time when I still felt open and present and, dare I say, connected to the evolving universe. So I couldn’t immediately shove the boy’s death or its surrounding context of horror into the stats bin.

What happened was just another Israeli bombing in Rafah. For some reason, a park had been targeted. Kids were playing in the park. Those killed included four members of one particular family: the mom, her daughter, and two sons, the youngest of whom was 18 months old.

The surviving dad is quoted in the story: “I saw the bodies of my wife Faten, and daughter Huda, my son Arkan, and my baby Ahmad. I was told he was headless. I just peeked inside the body bag and saw his body without a head, and I couldn’t stand to see it anymore.”

The story later informs us: “Ahmad’s head has not been found since his violent death, and Abdul Hafez was forced to bury his son without it. He was buried next to his mother and siblings amid Gaza’s ruins.”

Let me repeat: Ahmed’s head has not been found...

And here are the words of one of the surviving siblings: “I hope to be killed so I can join him in heaven.”

The story hit me, as I say, at a time when I still felt open and present and, dare I say, connected to the evolving universe. So I couldn’t immediately shove the boy’s death or its surrounding context of horror into the stats bin: 40,000 (or more) Palestinians have been killed so far; this is one of them. Instead, I felt a deep spiritual explosion... the Big Bang had just happened again.

I don’t know what more to say, what conclusion to draw. So I conclude, instead, with a somewhat recent poem I wrote, called “The Gods Get in Touch with Their Feminine Side”:

I stroke the unknown,
the dark silence, the
soul of a mother. I
pray, if that’s what
prayer is: to stir the certainties of
pride and flag and brittle
God, to stir
the hollow lost.
I pray open
the big craters
and trenches of
obedience and manhood.
Now is the time
to cherish the apple,
to touch the wound and love even
the turned cheeks and bullet tips,
to swaddle anew
the helpless future
and know
and not know
what happens next.

Steve Kress’s smile lit up the dusk as research assistants at least 50 years younger than him regaled him with tales of their vigilance to save tern chicks on Stratton Island, Maine.

For an hour, all talk centered around a mortal enemy of tern chicks: the black-crowned night heron. The latter is a beautiful, stocky wetland bird with glowing red eyes and two delicate white plumes shooting out the back of its head. A nocturnal hunter, lucky photographers can catch it at dusk or dawn along rivers and ponds snapping fish out of the water in a split second.

Stratton Island is three miles out to sea from Orchard Beach, Maine. The Audubon Seabird Institute, formerly known as Project Puffin, began restoring terns here in the 1980s. Kress founded the project in 1973.

“The fact that this project is a success is a reason to not get distraught about all the destruction all around us.”

On this island, in the dead of the night, the heron has other prey on the menu. It includes a precious colony of least terns, the smallest tern in the world, with a striking black cap and bright yellow bill. The tern was nearly wiped out on the East Coast in the late 19th century for hat feathers.

Despite their recovery from that slaughter—a recovery aided by the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty—least terns are listed today as an endangered bird in Maine. It nests on sandy beaches, which often puts it in competition with human development and recreation. That fragility makes it critical to keep herons out of tern colonies as one heron can kill many chicks in hours. In 2022, just 14 chicks fledged out of 91 nests on Stratton. Last year, maybe four chicks survived to fledge off Stratton.

The team of Ben Becker, Kay Garlick-Ott, Tiffany Christian, Ellie Bretscher, Katelyn Shelton, and Joe Sweeney told Kress they are always “on edge” for the heron attacks and do everything possible to scare off herons. They use lights and lasers and make every kind of noise possible with bangers, screamers, and pot banging.

Kress chimed in that crews have also tried (in vain) to use a mannequin to startle the herons. There was one researcher years ago who dressed up as the action film character Rambo to hunt a heron that was terrorizing chicks. Another attempt to use lights to see herons resulted in federal authorities roaring out to Stratton in a boat, on a tip that it was a landing strip for drug runners.

Sadly, right after this visit, a heron evaded the crew and unleashed another lethal attack, reducing the number of least tern chicks from more than 60 to less than 20. The moment was symbolic of how Kress’s original vision for Project Puffin evolved dramatically over the years.

Protecting Tern Chicks From Predators and Other Threats

All Kress had wanted to do a half-century ago was restore just one species, the Atlantic puffin, to Eastern Egg Rock, one small island off the coast of Maine. Puffins were hunted off nearly every island in Maine in the 1880s. Kress hoped that once he reestablished the bird, with chicks translocated from Canada, it could maintain itself and that would be the end of the project.

He came to realize that breeding puffins and eventually other birds, such as terns, requires people to guard them for the entire 3 to 4 months of their breeding season. Whatever the ecosystem was centuries ago that allowed puffins and terns to thrive in Maine, now there are just too many threats. Some threats are other birds that thrive thanks to major conservation victories. For example, herring gulls, which also were slaughtered for hat feathers, recovered with the 1918 treaty. Bald eagles and peregrine falcons are flourishing again after the 1972 banning of the pesticide DDT. Other threats are tied to human sloppiness: Gulls went beyond recovery to crowding out other birds on Maine islands, boosted by banquets of coastal landfills and fishing waste.

It may all be part of a larger struggle of birds competing for dwindling habitat in the face of development, climate change, pesticides, industrial agriculture, and pollution. A 2019 study in the journal Science found that North America has lost more than a quarter of its bird population since 1970; there are nearly 3 billion birds less than there used to be.

“I had no idea we would face this complexity of the ongoing need for management,” Kress said. “It’s a myth that islands are separate from everything else. We can’t walk away from [the restorations], or they would eventually unravel.”

Passing on the Torch at Project Puffin

They have not unraveled. The project has had at least 700 research assistants. At 28 years old, Becker, Garlick-Ott, and Christian are the same age that Kress (now 78) and his colleagues were when they started Project Puffin 51 years ago. The half-century age gap punctuates the success of Kress effectively sharing his vision with young researchers and entrusting them to carry out the mission. (That is exceedingly elusive in other spheres. For example, a 2008 Harvard Business School paper estimated that 4 of every 5 founders or co-founders are eventually forced out as CEOs. The long list includes founders or co-founders of Apple, JetBlue, Tesla, Zipcar, Twitter, Uber, PayPal, OpenAI, and Yahoo!.)

As Kress’s co-author and photographer on two books about Project Puffin, this aspect, the passing on of the founder’s torch, has enthralled me as much as the birds. Garlick-Ott, a former island supervisor who studies tern aggression on Stratton for her doctorate at the University of California Davis, said, “You get a quick sense that the torch is constantly being passed. It’s empowering and humbling at the same time. I feel like I have a purpose and a place in this project. When I became a supervisor, I wanted so badly to do what my supervisor did. I really wanted to be like her.”

Keenan Yakola, 31, is in his 11th summer with Project Puffin and the Seabird Institute. A former island supervisor and now a doctoral student at Oregon State University, he leads the GPS tagging of puffins, terns, and storm petrels to study where they feed. The Gulf of Maine is one of the fastest warming seas on Earth. He hopes the tracking will indicate how seabirds adapt to ocean heatwaves and help offshore wind developers site facilities to avoid conflict with birds.

One or more of the methods used by Project Puffin, such as the translocation of chicks, decoys, taped bird calls, and mirrors, have now been used in more than 850 projects in 36 countries to restore (or relocate from danger or competition with other animals), 138 seabird species.

Yakola said he learned early on that Project Puffin patiently welcomed innovation by college-age assistants. Perhaps that was because Kress himself almost did not get the chance to restore puffins. At first, a top Canadian official balked at the idea that Newfoundland puffin chicks would return to Maine as adults. Even after getting permission, it took eight years until Kress, then an Audubon camp bird instructor, reestablished puffin breeding on Eastern Egg Rock. His first artificial burrows for chicks were too hot or they flooded. The puffin chicks he raised in 1973 and 1974 disappeared into the Atlantic, never to be seen again.

“My first summer on the project, I didn’t feel I had a particular contribution to make other than to be a good intern and collect data,” Yakola said. “I just thought it was cool being with birds. But when I asked about analyzing diet data for my undergraduate thesis [at the University of Massachusetts Amherst], Paula [Shannon, the institute’s seabird sanctuary manager)] simply said, ‘Yeah, sure. Just ask Steve.’”

Shannon, 48, a former island supervisor who first began working with the project in 2002 and co-authored a 2016 paper with Kress showing how puffin diet was changing with the warming Gulf of Maine, seconded Yakola. She talked about how crews kept repositioning common murre decoys on Matinicus Rock until the first egg in more than a century was laid on that island in 2009. A cousin of the puffin, common murres, were also hunted in the 1800s until there were no breeding pairs left in Maine. Last year, a dozen murre chicks fledged off Matinicus Rock.

Kress once asked Shannon and others a question about an extinct bird.

“What would you do if a Great Auk showed up with the puffins?” he said.

She laughed and replied to him, “We’d probably take a picture and send the bird on its way because no one would believe us.” The question was both in jest and a suggestion that trying new things can have unforeseen victories in science.

The Great Auk indeed will never come back, but Kress’s restoration of puffins and murre have helped conservationists all over the world bring back seabirds from the brink of extinction. One or more of the methods used by Project Puffin, such as the translocation of chicks, decoys, taped bird calls, and mirrors, have now been used in more than 850 projects in 36 countries to restore (or relocate from danger or competition with other animals), 138 seabird species. Some restored species were thought to be extinct, such as the Chinese crested tern.

Sue Schubel, 62, has been associated with the project for most of the last 40 years. In 1996, she advised the placing of murre decoys, mirrors, and recorded calls atop a northern California sea stack. A colony of 2,900 breeding murre had been wiped out by an oil spill a decade earlier. The day after decoys were installed, murres returned and began breeding again.

Affectionately known as Seabird Sue, current research assistants say they are inspired by her ceaseless energy. She is an assistant sanctuary manager; decoy project manager; a logistics expert for all the boats that get crews, provisions, and gear on and off the islands; public educator; and artist. When she first joined the project, she herself fed off the sense that “everybody was willing to do everything for the birds.”

A Culture of Caring for the Birds, for Each Other

Kress and Schubel came out to Eastern Egg Rock this summer to see what has become of his original project island. The crew of supervisor Theresa Rizza, 28, and assistants Arden Kelly, 25, Coco Deng, 19, Camryn Zoeller, 20, and Anson Tse, 27, said they know they are in a special world.

“This is an island and project of hope,” Zoller said. “The fact that this project is a success is a reason to not get distraught about all the destruction all around us.”

Rizza added, “The puffins are proof that as long as someone wants to try, good things can happen.”

Kress himself said he did not intentionally set out to pass on a culture of such caring, but as it turns out, he looks at that culture as the “greatest hope” for seabirds.

Arden said, “You really see the can see the passion that is still in their eyes. You want to be your own Steve Kress.”

The sentiments were echoed 32 miles away in the Gulf of Maine out on Seal Island, another island where puffins were restored after a century’s absence. The crew there consisted of supervisor Coco Faber, 30, and assistants Amiel Hopkins, 19; Liv Ridley, 26; Reed Robinson, 19; and Nacho Gutierrez, 24.

Faber, in her ninth summer with the project, has seen some of the most volatile years of boom and bust for seabirds with the warming Gulf of Maine. “With climate change, the threats feel so amorphous and big, it’s hard to know where to go,” she said. “There are no more normal years. I now wonder every summer, what am I going to witness. When I [feel] down, I think of Steve and all his optimism, and how he threw spaghetti at the wall to bring these birds back.”

Ridley added, “They say one person can only do so much,” Ridley said, “But here, with [Kress’s] legacy you know you’re carrying on. You’re inspired to say I’m going to give my life to seabirds.”

Kress retired from the project in 2019, handing it over to Don Lyons, a tern researcher from Oregon State. Lyons said Kress left behind “community and continuity” that he could not find a comparison to.

“Steve is very focused on thanking people for their contributions,” Lyons, 59, said. “That includes a new researcher who lugged a boat up onto rocks or other seemingly menial tasks like data entry. It makes people feel valuable.”

So valuable that back on Stratton Island, Tiffany Christian, who lives the rest of the year in the Chicago area and is in her first summer on a Maine research island, said the magic of being surrounded by seabirds on an island was like being in “an ornate castle built in the sky.” She said the project’s legacy and the camaraderie “gives me a new awareness of what I want to do in the future.”

Kress himself said he did not intentionally set out to pass on a culture of such caring, but as it turns out, he looks at that culture as the “greatest hope” for seabirds. “Wherever I go, China, Ecuador, I see the same type of person,” he said. “There is this idea of healing the earth. I sure didn’t create that, but perhaps there’s something about this project that captured that.

“It helps that this project is such a conspicuous success that people are today surrounded by come-back birds, baby birds, all this life. I hope that future generations of seabird stewards continue this amazing story. You can’t avoid the feel-good part of it. I don’t need to say anything. The birds constantly remind the researchers that they are part of a miracle.”

Read more about Puffin Island and the efforts to save seabirds in Maine here and here.

Political cartoonists and analysts Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) take on the week in politics.

The 2024 presidential campaign settles into the new reality following the withdrawal of Joe Biden and the ascension of Vice President Kamala Harris. Donald Trump, 78, is having trouble pivoting and accepting going from a six-point lead to a three-point deficit. Vice Presidential candidates Walz and Vance prepare for a pair of debates next month. Economic policies, all populist but vaguely formed and seemingly untethered to basic economic philosophies, are beginning to emerge from both sides—and Harris is lifting the Trump ones she likes best.

The Russo-Ukraine conflict has entered a new phase as Ukrainian forces invade Russia and seize territory in the rural Kursk region. At the same time, Russian forces are advancing inside Ukraine. What next?

 

The post DMZ America Podcast Ep 160 | August 17, 2024: Kamala Takes the Lead, Ukraine Takes a Risk first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The Democratic ticket of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is sparking a level of enthusiasm among party supporters and the general American public reminiscent of former President Barack Obama's transformative election in 2008. This excitement is palpable, driven by a combination of Harris' historic candidacy and Walz's grounded Midwestern appeal, on top of their strong records and qualifications.

Yet, maintaining this momentum requires more than charisma, qualifications, and historical firsts; it demands a robust policy platform that addresses the urgent needs of Americans and reflects the core values of the Democratic base.

This election will ultimately come down to turnout of the Democrat's working-class base. Harris signaled she understands this through her selection of Walz as her running mate, over "safer" bets more appealing to conservatives in swing states.

As Democrats gather in Chicago, the Harris/Walz ticket has a golden opportunity to present a bold, transformative platform that can energize the party and win big.

But for many "base voters" struggling to make ends meet, an exclusively anti-Trump message simply wonʻt cut it. Our communities are looking for common-sense solutions to the most fundamental problems we face. As the Democratic National Convention approaches in Chicago, it's crucial that the Harris/Walz ticket prioritizes three key pillars to solidify, expand, and energize their support base to show up big through November.

1. Cut the Cost of Living and Make Housing Affordable

Across the nation, Americans are grappling with rising housing costs that are increasingly out of step with their incomes. For too many, the dream of homeownership—or simply the security of affordable rent—is slipping away. The Democratic platform must commit to bold measures that ensure housing is not a privilege of the rich but a right accessible to all. This includes expanding funding for affordable and social housing projects, offering incentives for cities and states to cut red tape that hinders construction, and implementing rent controls to keep predatory landlords in check. By making housing affordability a cornerstone of their campaign, Harris and Walz can address a fundamental source of economic anxiety for millions.

2. Invest in Union Jobs, Public Infrastructure, and the Environment

The climate crisis poses one of the greatest threats to our health and safety. Tackling this issue head-on presents an opportunity to revitalize the American economy and workforce. While the historic Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act represent a solid step, the Harris/Walz ticket must champion further public investments that not only aim to drastically reduce carbon emissions but also transform our food and transportation systems. These initiatives should be designed to create high-paying, unionized jobs that provide lasting employment across the country. Furthermore, environmental justice must be at the forefront of this plan, ensuring that communities historically impacted by pollution and climate change are the first to benefit from these new opportunities.

3. Promote Peace and Diplomacy Abroad

Foreign policy is often a contentious and overlooked area of presidential platforms, but this year, it's risen to a deciding factor for the super majority of likely Democratic voters in key states. The ongoing conflict in Gaza and the substantial U.S. military support for Israel demand urgent reevaluation. Harris and Walz should courageously pivot U.S. foreign policy by advocating for a cessation of arms sales to Israel, focusing on diplomatic resolutions to the conflict, and underscoring the importance of human rights and international law. This stance would not only align with the values of a significant portion of the Democratic base but also position the United States as a leader in ethical foreign policy.

As Democrats gather in Chicago, the Harris/Walz ticket has a golden opportunity to present a bold, transformative platform that can energize the party and win big. By committing to these three critical areas—housing affordability, green jobs, and a new direction in foreign policy—they can offer a vision of a fairer, more prosperous, and more just America. This is the path to not just winning an election, but to making historical progress that will resonate for generations to come.

Vice President Kamala Harris’ bold proposal to eliminate medical debt offers a window into the approach that informs the entire progressive economic agenda the Democratic nominee for President unveiled August 16.

In addition to the proposals for re-instating and expanding the child tax credit with a baby bonus for new parents, federal support for affordable housing construction and a subsidy down payment for first time home buyers, much of the new focus and attacks have centered on what the Washington Post labeled the “first ever” ban on price gouging for groceries and food.

What makes that idea especially noteworthy is its correlation to the medical debt plan and caps on prescription drug costs and rent increases. A central cause of those inflated costs goes well beyond the usual claims of supply chain bottlenecks, government spending on social programs, and the disruption of the pandemic. In every case, there is a direct link to monopolization and big corporations exploiting those factors to jack up charges to extract higher, often record, profits, well beyond their own costs to produce or provide them.

Unpacking the crisis and main source of medical debt as well as for health care costs overall, including for prescription drugs, provides the tell.

For over two decades California Nurses Association/National Nurses United researchers have studied how hospitals inflate charges over their costs. Overall, the conclusion has been that hospital profit taking, augmented by corporate mergers, is a clear driver of medical debt.

A 2020 NNU study found that some hospitals had hiked their charges by as much as 18 times over their costs, exploding profits by 411 percent over the prior two decades. NNU’s forthcoming update on hospital charges will show that some hospitals by 2022/2023 were now setting charges at almost 24 times over their costs, doubling their charges over the past 20 years. Further, the biggest for-profit hospital chains set the highest prices and make the most profits from them. Among the 100 top hospitals with the highest charges, hospital giant HCA had six hospitals alone with a combined profit of almost $400 million for that fiscal year.

Big Pharma is the gold medal winner in profiteering which is why drug costs have become such a national scandal. The U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, chaired by Sen. Bernie Sanders, issued a Majority Staff Report in February documenting how three of the biggest pharmaceutical giants, Johnson & Johnson (J&J), Merck, and Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS), have prioritized profits over patient need, collectively piling up $112 billion in profits in 2022 through “unethical pricing strategies, relentless price hikes, manipulative patent tactics, and extensive lobbying efforts.”

That lobbying blocked years of efforts to allow Medicare to use its bulk purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices, as most other industrial countries have achieved. It’s why President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act to permit Medicare to bargain lower prices for 10 of the highest cost drugs that treat heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and blood clots was such a dramatic success. The White House this week announced it will save millions of Medicare recipients $1.5 billion in the first year of the program.

Grocery and housing prices

There’s a similar story of predatory corporate practices on grocery and housing prices. No they’re not just set by market supply and demand. “Is Harris right on the economics?” asked political economist Robert Kuttner on Friday in response to the announcement of Harris' plan.

"A detailed study by Groundwork Collaborative found that corporate concentration and increased profits accounted for more than half of the inflation felt by consumers in 2022 and 2023," Kuttner wrote. "First, it vividly connects with the issue of inflation where ordinary people feel it… Second, the plan reframes the issue … to how corporate concentration opportunistically drives price hikes…Third, the approach recasts the struggle as ordinary people vs. predatory corporations.”

“Today, everywhere consumers turn, whether they are shopping for groceries at the local Kroger or for plane tickets online, they are being gouged,” wrote David Dayan and Lindsay Owens in the lead to a major American Prospect series in June. “Landlords are quietly utilizing new software to band together and raise rents.”

In the “40 years from 1979 to 2019, nonfinancial corporate profits cumulatively drove about 11.4 percent of price growth. From April to September of last year,” Dayan and Owens continued, “that number was 53 percent.” Factors include corporate concentration, high-tech pricing practices, utilizing “technological innovations such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and surveillance targeting” of consumers to collect extensive personal information.

Jarod Facundo described a panoply of corporate grocery pricing practices including dominance of shelf space by the biggest chains, surge pricing, repackaging goods without changing prices, and tech driven personalizing pricing “for each shopping cart” that have been “the path to higher margins,” increased costs, and, of course, bigger profits.

Food company profit increases since inflation peaked, notes former labor secretary Robert Reich, include Cal-Maine, the largest U.S. producer and distributor of fresh shell eggs, whose profits soared 471 percent. Monopolization has also driven food inflation, Reich says: Just four companies control 85 percent of beef processing, 80 percent of corn seed distribution, 77 percent of fertilizer production, and 69 percent of grocery sales.

In an investigative report in October, 2022, ProPublica’s Heather Vogell described how Texas-based RealPage’s software facilitated price inflation on rental units. “Property managers across the United States have gushed about how the company’s algorithm boosts profits,” she wrote. “The nation’s largest property management company, Greystar, used the software to price tens of thousands of apartments.”

In the American Prospect, Luke Goldstein also zeroed in on the effect of RealPage’s practices to “maximize profits” in rental markets. “Clients accept the RealPage recommendations over 80 percent of the time, and the company includes provisions in its contracts to ensure rent hikes. It heavily pushes adoption to new clients of an ‘auto-accept’ feature that forces price increases automatically.”

Corporate price gouging has not gone unnoticed by the Biden administration, as Dayen and Owens note, citing the work of its agencies to aggressively target algorithmic price-fixing, corporate mergers and other practices, such as junk fees and corporate care interest rates that spark inflation.

Harris has been a voice on those initiatives as well, which have contributed to her economic proposals today. The proposals will face considerable assault from corporate lobbyists and the politicians they influence, of course, which will require a lot of political organizing to support.

Among those praising her initiative was Sen. Sanders, as staff writer Jake Johnson reported Friday for Common Dreams. Sanders called the Harris plan “an important step forward in making our country a fairer and more just society. I look forward to working with Vice President Harris when she becomes president to implement her economic agenda, and more, within her first 100 days in office."