In Richard Connell’s popular short story “The Most Dangerous Game,” hunter Sanger Rainsford goes overboard while sailing to the Amazon, washing up on an island owned by deceivingly charismatic General Zaroff. Rainsford expects Zaroff to help him off the island, but instead, Zaroff invites him to participate in a hunt.

A hunt, to Rainsford’s utter disbelief, in which he is the prey.

Our reckless pursuit of economic growth has become society’s “most dangerous game.” It keeps us trapped on an island of inequality, environmental degradation, and corporate power, all while convincing us there’s still a chance we can win if we continue to play.

To win this game, we can’t keep playing by the rules, but rewrite them entirely. We can start by challenging one of the most dominant rules of the growth model: Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

But there is no “winning” in a game dependent on the exploitation of people and nature. As long as “growth” is defined by profits and production, people and the planet will always lose.

That is, unless you are one of the few Zaroffs of the world: According to an Oxfam report, the world’s top 1% own more wealth than 95% of humanity, and over the past 30 years, income inequality has steadily risen to the point where many economists believe wealth is more stratified today than any time since the Gilded Age.

If economic growth doesn’t deliver its promised benefits, then why do we continue to play? Because those who preach economic growth as a path to prosperity—usually the same people who bag the most benefit—have engineered a game of forced “choice:” Hunt, or be hunted. As Zaroff explains to Rainsford, “I give him his option, of course.” But if they decline, he hands them over to his servant for torture. “Invariably,” Zaroff muses, “they choose the hunt.”

The same logic is used to silo economic and environmental objectives, perpetuating the false premise that reducing poverty and raising living standards must come at the cost of climate action. Such “choice” is equally manufactured—if economic growth is truly a means of improving societal well-being, shouldn’t actions that secure and sustain access to basic necessities be a vital part of our economy?

Even Americans seem to agree that economic growth is an incomplete measure of prosperity. In a nationally-representative survey of 3,000 participants, conducted by survey organization Verasight between October 21 and November 5, only 12.8% (with a 2.3% margin of error) responded that economic growth is a “mostly accurate” way of assessing societal well-being. The rest were skeptical, with 50.8% calling it “somewhat accurate” and 36.5% deeming it inaccurate altogether.

And yet, despite the dissatisfaction, dissonance, and destruction that our economic model begets, pundits and policymakers “invariably” brandish growth as the hallmark of prosperity. Meanwhile, the Zaroffs of the world continue to indulge their unchecked appetite for profit, capitalizing off the preservation of the status quo.

To win this game, we can’t keep playing by the rules, but rewrite them entirely. We can start by challenging one of the most dominant rules of the growth model: Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

GDP is a measure of aggregate production, not a reflection of progress and well-being. It excludes the costs of pollution and exploitation and ignores 16.4 billion hours of unpaid labor, much of which is performed by women. It also omits many non-materialistic goods (health, family, and equality) that define happiness and quality of life. In fact, economists have always warned against conflating GDP with societal well-being—even one of its founders, Simon Kuznets, told Congress that GDP was a poor tool for policymaking.

As Robert Kennedy put it in his 1968 election speech, GDP “measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.” By adopting more inclusive measures of progress that consider health, equality, and environmental well-being, we can move beyond the flawed metric of GDP as a measure of prosperity. In doing so, we build economies that prioritize people and the planet instead of outrageous profits.

Such measures are already gaining traction in the U.S. and across the globe. For example, India’s Ease of Living Index assesses the well-being of 114 Indian cities, using a total of 50 indicators that fall under three pillars: Quality of Life, economic ability, and sustainability. At the international scale, the United Nations is working to advance a “Human Rights Economy” that anchors all economic decisions in human rights. In the U.S., Vermont became the first state to adopt an alternative to GDP called the “Genuine Progress Indicator” in 2012, shortly followed by Maryland and 19 other states.

These measures aren’t perfect, nor should they be the only way we address a system that continues to inflict irreparable damage on global ecosystems and communities. However, they play a crucial role in disrupting our current growth paradigm, establishing an economic model where well-being isn’t exclusive to the wealthy, and where societal and environmental objectives are aligned.

It’s time we expose the injustices of our economic system, rewrite the rules, and beat the Zaroffs of the world at their own game.

The killing of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson was wrong. Vigilante justice is wrong. Dangerous. Bad. Scary. Let the record show, I was not among the people who celebrated the killing of Brian Thompson in any way whatsoever. But I have a few ideas about why some folks did celebrate it. And I have no desire to shame them for it. I want to listen. To understand. Just as I did years ago, working with the violent offenders who were court-mandated to see me.

Violence can be the language of the unheard or oppressed, a statement so “loud” it can no longer be ignored. It can be a way to try to bring balance to an imbalanced power dynamic when one feels powerless. I’d argue the gleeful memes and the posts, celebrating the horrible murder of a health insurance company CEO, come from the same place, albeit vicariously.

Many people have been horrified at the celebration: “My God, have we lost our humanity?!” But those same people don’t seem to also clutch their pearls when an unknown medical reviewer in a health insurance company keeps us or our loved ones or our friends or neighbors or co-workers from getting the care we need because it doesn’t fit their treatment algorithm, despite what the licensed medical doctor who knows us says. Some reviewers have admitted they don’t even look at a doctor’s clinical notes, solely making approval decisions based on that algorithm.

You can deeply listen in an effort to understand something and effect change without excusing it or condoning or glorifying it, and also without shaming it.

Health insurance companies market themselves as being there to help us when we need it most—when we’re sick, injured, dying, at our most vulnerable, or when we’re trying to stay healthy. But at the same time, the fact that lives are ruined or lost or our savings are drained because of denials or delays is seen as the “cost of doing business.” A private health insurance company’s reason to exist is to make money for itself. It doesn’t expand coverage, it most certainly doesn’t expedite care, and ultimately it doesn’t appear to give two shits about us. We, the collateral damage, know this. We live this.

Preventing access to timely healthcare because you’re more focused on making money for shareholders and CEOs is inhumane. Profits at the expense of people, especially in a care-based industry, are inhumane. Having to spend untold hours and days and weeks and months navigating health insurance obstacles, literally begging for care, especially when one is ill or taking care of someone who is ill, is inhumane. And when one feels so totally devalued, it’s easier to not be our best selves—or to be our shittiest selves—and devalue others in one way or another. When this human devaluation is couched in business, it’s okay, but when it’s a meme or a post, it’s not. And that double standard, that inequity, is more evident by the day, and has pushed some to their breaking point.

People are hungry for accountability. Desperate for it. Aching for it. We see what’s all around us and we know what’s coming. We want someone to fight for us.

It’s crazy-making, watching the old guard Democratic leadership not meet the moment as they work to maintain the status quo with platitudes and calls for playing nice when mere weeks ago they were calling U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and his Project 2025 fascist. We’re seeing corporate media completely fail us, continuing to describe the horrifying things Trump and his minions are saying and doing with vague euphemisms, if they cover these things at all. We’ve watched Trump’s slam-dunk court cases go away one by one. Sure, he’s an adjudicated rapist, but as I wrote here, what does it say that an adjudicated rapist can win an election to become the most powerful person on Earth after he was found liable for rape? Not exactly accountability. Corporations and their CEOs are making huge profits, often by price gouging the masses. They’re using that money to enrich themselves with staggering salaries and bonuses, and they’re buying elections in hopes of further enriching themselves. All the while they can’t seem to find the money to pay their workers a livable wage.

And so, the violent, horrible murder of a man whose company represents the literal pain and suffering and sometimes death of countless thousands, as he allegedly participated in insider trading, living the millionaire good life, represented a form of accountability for some. As perverse and skewed as it may seem, it was David defeating the bully, Goliath. It’s decidedly not how I want accountability, but as a psychotherapist I totally get where the sentiment comes from.

If we’re not going to be heel-dragging Democrats, liberals, or progressives who keep us forever stuck in a status quo that clearly isn’t working, if we truly want to help people, if we want to win elections, we need to take the energy we’re spending clutching those pearls and actually listen to the folks who are gleeful because of Brian Thompson’s death.

We need to hear the decades-in-the-making frustration, the unmet needs, the longing for a decent life, the pain, the fear, the stories of untreated illness, the loss, the profound feeling of powerlessness, the anger at the breathtaking inequality, and, most importantly, the seeming unwillingness of our leaders to do anything meaningful about it, that is bubbling just below the surface of all the gleeful memes and posts about a rich health insurance company CEOs murder.

You can deeply listen in an effort to understand something and effect change without excusing it or condoning or glorifying it, and also without shaming it. I’ve done it for decades in my psychotherapy practice.

Let’s give it a try.

Now is the time to prepare anticipatory strategies against what the vengeful, avaricious, lawless Trump and his Trumpsters have boasted out loud about daily. Don’t wait until Trump’s inauguration. A short list of suggestions follows:

1. The civil servants and their unions better organize a personal presentation to their new bosses, most of whom are ignorant about the agencies they head other than to want to dismantle or enfeeble them. Be proactive or you will be always playing defense.
2. Daring peaceful resisters in marches and rallies, beware of infiltrating provocateurs promoting violence. If you’re engaging in non-violent, civil disobedience, beware that Trump can’t wait to call you “terrorists” and use unbridled police power for arrests and prosecutions demanding long sentences.
3. Trump and the Trumpsters, with his militias in waiting, as on the border, will contrive a phony threat from what they will label domestic “terrorists” to pulverize or intimidate their opponents. Trump thrived on the MAGA extremists and will give them “red meat,” if only to keep them occupied and loyal. They will demand action based on Trump’s wild campaign rhetoric.
4. Being a convicted criminal himself, Trump will take federal cops off the corporate crime beat, reduce taxes on the wealthy and giant companies, ignore climate violence, add more bloat to the wasteful military budget, and increase pandemic threats with fake dismissals of looming perils. Don’t count on the business guys. They don’t like daily chaos, disruption and uncertainty that goes with Trump’s insatiable daily ego that must be fed constantly, but most CEOs won’t criticize Trump.
5. Trump fears the Israeli lobby and their genocidal leader Netanyahu. His first term proved that in spades. Now he’ll back whatever Netanyahu, the Israeli war criminal, does. Annexing the West Bank, demanding more billions from American taxpayers to continuing the bombing, killing and pillaging in the Middle East region is just the tip of the iceberg.
6. Lastly, Trump will drive a level of White House dictatorial lawlessness never before seen. His rhetoric and record strengthen this prediction. Remember his July 2019 declaration “With Article II, I can do whatever I want as President.” He acted on that all the time. (See prior columns at nader.org and also read “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All” by Mark Green and Ralph Nader).

The anticipatory strategies here must be diverse, covering all three branches of government, and vectored toward the GOP. The citizen groups may have to work weekends, alongside the labor unions hated by Trump.

Trumpy Dumpty is thin on the facts, policies and programs, but he is as cunning as a hungry shark in detecting weakness in his opponents, especially the Democratic Party. Attached is a fable I wrote in 2022 that portrays how he might think about the Party of the Donkey. Given what happened up to and on November 5, 2024, it’s still useful to read today.

What Could Donald Trump Be Thinking About the Democratic Party?
October 21, 2022

Imagine Donald Trump dining with two of his supposed political advisers. Being an advisor to Donald means you soak up Donald’s political comments and feed them back to him. At this dinner, Donald was spouting off about the Democratic Party.

“Hey guys, know why the GOP is ahead in the polls?” “Why?” the two advisors replied in unison. Donald responded, “Because the Democrats are busy losing all by themselves, backtracking out of fear. Fearing a Party they are supposed to be fighting is what I call ‘beating themselves.’”

“Tell us more,” urged the two advisers.

“The Democrats are beyond stupido. They’ve contracted out their campaigns to consultants who, with their loyalties to their other corporate clients, have sold the Dems a strategy of caution – otherwise known as cutting off your cajones. Candidates without balls can’t think for themselves and just follow the script. Lots of Dems don’t want to appear with Bernie Sanders – the one guy I didn’t want to debate – who gets huge votes in conservative Vermont. What chickens!”

“This is all so beautiful, so gorgeous for us. Dems without balls means they campaign every day with their political antennae flailing, afraid they’ll say the politically incorrect phrase and upset the word police or deviate from their consultant’s finger-waving “no-no’s” if they want to rake in big money.”

“Imagine me contracting out my run to a consultant. ‘Donald, say this, don’t do that, do this, don’t say that.’ And paying them big bucks. Never! My people want the unfiltered Donald. That’s why they turn out in standing-room-only droves compared to the empty-seat Dems.”

Adviser #1 pipes up: “And the NY Times reports that the Dems are so afraid of our blaming them for inflation that they’ve shut up on their most popular ‘bread and butter’ positions, like freedom for women, health and safety for kids, good jobs and pay for more workers, increasing Social Security benefits. You know ‘bleeding heart stuff.’”

“Stupido Fabuloso!” Trump sneered, almost choking on his sirloin steak. “They don’t know who they are or worse who they WERE! FDR clobbered the Republicans with Social Security, minimum wage, and unemployment compensation, and he pushed for unions, taxed the rich and went after business crooks. He taunted the GOP. They called him a ‘traitor to his class,’ and he said he welcomed their hatred.”

“These issues are still very popular today, but the Dems aren’t pulling their base. The idiots even let me take the word ‘populist’ from their shaky hands – me the very core of Big Business.”

“They’ve mostly gagged themselves, leaving poor little Joe Biden alone talking about his infrastructure/jobs projects. Some Dems are so cowardly they don’t want to be seen campaigning with Delaware Joe.”

Adviser #2: “The Dems don’t learn from The Trumper. In politics, you got to boast. Politics is fatal for wimps.”

Trump cupped his mouth adding – “Jeez, I boast about things that aren’t even true, just like my casino ads. The Dems aren’t puffing about what is true. On paper, they support FDR’s New Deal updated to give everyone health insurance and voting rights for everyone, even felons. But where it counts – on the road, they’re in a driverless car. Ha, ha, ha – see? They’re beating themselves.”

“Because we are with the Winners, we’re against all the ‘communist’ things the masses drool over. And we are still winning. Why? Because we are masters at controlling what the media wants to cover – outrageous charges, flagrant behavior and all kinds of red meat the profit-obsessed media barons can’t resist. I told them as much in 2016. Still, they bit. Hilarious.”

“The GOP has got the offensive down to a science. Driving Dems nuts with ‘critical race theory’ (what’s that anyway?), ‘defunding the police’ (hah, we’ve defunded the federal regulator cops big time), ‘open borders,’ ‘radical judges,’ ‘over-regulation,’ ‘high taxes,’ ‘socialism’ – these are short enraging words that stick with our people. Like deer in the headlights, the Dems freeze, mumble and fret. Remember our old mentor Lee Atwater who said ‘When you’re explaining, you’re losing.’”

Adviser #1: “The big hole the Dems dug came long ago when they wrote off half the country as being too conservative and stopped spending money on their candidates in red districts. They don’t have the energy we have – look at how we’ve beaten them in the gerrymandering fights. It’s the energy gap. Remember 2009-2010?”

Trump broke in: “David, don’t get carried away. The biggest thing was their stupidity. Dems would spend more on a single Pennsylvania Senate seat than on six Senate seats combined in the Mountain states. Those states used to have Democratic Senators. Now GOP dominates there. Year after year, they don’t listen. I don’t listen either, to be frank. But I’m a very stable genius, while they are, as New Yorkers say, ‘Tone deaf.’”

Adviser #2: “Also the Republicans listen to their outside allies. Like Heritage, Cato, and Norquist. The Dems lean on their control-freak consultants and give progressive groups the cold shoulder. I have a progressive friend who tells me horror stories. She just gave me a copy of a blockbuster collection of very practical ways – down to the rebuttals and slogans – the Dems can use to landslide us in November. I started sweating until she told me most of the Dems are not rushing to use it. Most don’t even know about the two dozen citizen leaders who put it together, edited down to fiercely powerful persuasions by wordsmith Mark Green – a long-time Dem from New York City. It’s available to the world on winningamerica.net, but Green is confident that we will never pick it up.”

Trump: “Hmm, Winning America? – Nice ring to it. This fellow Green. I remember meeting him at a fundraiser when he was running for Mayor twenty years ago. He was all business, no small talk. He scared me then.”

It is easy to lose sight of humanity in numbers, particularly large numbers, but we can also gain moral clarity using the exactness of numbers and mathematical calculations.

Here is a self-test:

Question #1: The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have bombed apartment buildings, hospitals, and schools in Gaza almost daily for more than a year. Hypothetically, if sounds could travel worldwide, how long would it take for victims’ cries to reach Washington. The speed of sound is 770 miles per hour. The distance between Gaza and Washington D.C is 5,878 miles.

Question #2: Would your answer be the same if Joe Biden, Donald Trump or Kamala Harris were president?

Question #3: In the year following October 7, 2023, the U.S. has sent more than $20 billion worth of military aid to Israel. In this period the IDF killed more than 44,000 Gazans. In other words, it roughly costs U.S. taxpayers $454,545 for each Gazan killed by the IDF in a year. How was this number calculated?

Question #4: A terrorist group is defined as one that “may be motivated by political, religious, racial, or other ideological goals and threatens or commits violent acts against civilian targets.”

4a: In addition to killing more than 44,000 people, mostly civilians, the IDF has injured more than 100,000, largely women and children. Many are amputees or with other lifelong challenges. Based on the definition above, is the IDF a terrorist organization?

4b: If so, would it be correct to say that U.S. companies manufacturing weapons sent to the IDF profit from terrorism? Are our governmental leaders by supplying planes, bombs, weapons, and munitions guilty of supporting terrorism? If so, is this a violation of U.S. and international law?

Question #5: How many defenseless people must be injured or killed before a force becomes a terrorist organization? Does your answer depend on who is carrying out the violence or the identity of the victims? Does your answer differ based on the numbers of children killed or losing limbs?

Question # 6: On October 7, 2023, Hamas and related groups committed terrible acts of terrorism including the murder and kidnapping of civilians: 1,200 were killed and more than 250 taken hostage. They included children, women, and the elderly. After prisoner exchanges, deaths, and a handful of rescues, it is estimated 60 survivors remain in captivity languishing under cruel and abusive conditions. Many Israelis believe their release should be the paramount goal of negotiations. Since October 7 Israel has locked up more than 9,400 “security detainees” including men, women, and children without access to lawyers or respect for legal rights. They are held in appallingly crowded cells. According to a United Nations report, in addition to beatings, many have been subjected to “waterboarding, sleep deprivation, electric shocks, dogs set on them, and other forms of torture.”

If “x” = Israelis and “y” = Palestinians, calculate the value of “y” for a given “x” based on widely available data. Convert your answer into plain English—that is, how many times greater is the value of Israelis and the hostages compared to Palestinians and security detainees?

Question #7: There were 10 commandments. The sixth commandment was abolished. How many commandments remain?

I worked hard my whole career and retired feeling secure. Then I lost every last dime in a scam. I was left with $1,300 a month in Social Security benefits to live on in an area where monthly expenses run about $3,700.

I’m a smart woman, but scams against older Americans are increasing in number and sophistication. Whether through scams, strained savings, or costs of living going up, half of older Americans—that’s 27 million households—can’t afford their basic needs.

And suddenly I became one of them. The experience has taught me a lot about the value of a strong social safety net—and why we’ll need to protect it from the coming administration.

We have the tax dollars—the question is whether we have the political will to invest in seniors, workers, and families, or only for tax cuts for the very rich.

I was ashamed and frightened after what happened, but I scraped myself up off the floor and tried to make the best of it.

I’d worked with aging people earlier in my career, so I was familiar with at least some of the groups who could help. I reached out to a local nonprofit and they came through with flying colors, connecting me to life-saving federal assistance programs.

I was assigned a caseworker, who guided me through applying for public programs like the Medical Savings Plan (MSP), the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), subsidized housing, Medicare Part D, and Medicaid.

It’s hard to describe my relief at getting this help.

Before receiving the MSP, I’d been paying for medications and health insurance—which cost about $200—out of my monthly Social Security check. With MSP, that cost is covered. I also found an apartment I liked through subsidized housing, and I have more money for groceries through SNAP. Now it’s easier to afford other necessities, like hearing-aid batteries and my asthma inhaler.

But I’m worried about the incoming administration’s plans to cut programs like these, which have helped me so much. They’re proposing slashing funding and imposing overly burdensome work and reporting requirements. Studies show that requirements like these can cause millions of otherwise eligible people to lose critical assistance.

President-elect Donald Trump has also indicated that he favors increased privatization of Medicare, which would result in higher costs and less care. And his tax promises are projected to move up the insolvency date of Social Security.

All told, the federal budget cuts the incoming Republican majority in Congress has put forward would slash healthcare, food, and housing by trillions over the next 10 years, resulting in at least a 50% reduction in these services. And they plan to divert those investments in us into more tax cuts for the nation’s very wealthiest.

I want lawmakers of each party to know how important these social investments are for seniors and families. Older Americans—who’ve worked hard all our lives—shouldn’t be pushed out onto the streets, forced to go without sufficient food or healthcare due to unfortunate circumstances.

We have the tax dollars—the question is whether we have the political will to invest in seniors, workers, and families, or only for tax cuts for the very rich. If we do the latter, that’s the real scam.

The U.S. national debt just passed $36 trillion, only four months after it passed $35 trillion and up $2 trillion for the year. Third quarter data is not yet available, but interest payments as a percent of tax receipts rose to 37.8% in the third quarter of 2024, the highest since 1996. That means interest is eating up over one-third of our tax revenues.

Total interest for the fiscal year hit $1.16 trillion, topping $1 trillion for the first time ever. That breaks down to $3 billion per day. For comparative purposes, an estimated $11 billion, or less than four days’ federal interest, would pay the median rent for all the homeless people in America for a year. The damage from Hurricane Helene in North Carolina alone is estimated at $53.6 billion, for which the state is expected to receive only $13.6 billion in federal support. The $40 billion funding gap is a sum we pay in less than two weeks in interest on the federal debt.

The current debt trajectory is clearly unsustainable, but what can be done about it? Raising taxes and trimming the budget can slow future growth of the debt, but they are unable to fix the underlying problem—a debt grown so massive that just the interest on it is crowding out expenditures on the public goods that are the primary purpose of government.

Borrowing Is Actually More Inflationary Than Printing

Several financial commentators have suggested that we would be better off if the Treasury issued the money for the budget outright, debt-free. Martin Armstrong, an economic forecaster with a background in computer science and commodities trading, contends that if we had just done that in the first place, the national debt would be only 40% of what it is today. In fact, he argues, debt today is the same as money, except that it comes with interest. Federal securities can be posted in the repo market as collateral for an equivalent in loans, and the collateral can be “rehypothecated” (re-used) several times over, creating new money that augments the money supply just as would happen if it were issued directly.

Chris Martenson, another economic researcher and trend forecaster, asked in a November 21 podcast, “What great harm would happen if the Treasury just issued its own money directly and didn’t borrow it?… You’re still overspending, you still probably have inflation, but now you’re not paying interest on it.”

The argument for borrowing rather than printing is that the government is borrowing existing money, so it will not expand the money supply. That was true when money consisted of gold and silver coins, but it is not true today. In fact borrowing the money is now more inflationary, increasing the money supply more, than if it were just issued directly, due to the way the government borrows. It issues securities (bills, bonds, and notes) that are bid on at auction by selected “primary dealers” (mostly very large banks). Quoting from Investopedia:

Because most modern economies rely on fractional reserve banking, when primary dealers purchase government debt in the form of Treasury securities, they are able to increase their reserves and expand the money supply by lending it out. This is known as the money multiplier effect.

Thus, “the government increases cash reserves in the banking system,” and “the increase in reserves raises the money supply in the economy.” Principal and interest on the securities are paid when due, but they are paid with borrowed money. In effect, the debt is never repaid but just gets rolled over from year to year along with the interest due on it. The interest compounds, an increasing amount of debt-at-interest is generated, and the money supply and inflation go up.

U.S. Currency Should Be Issued by the U.S. Government

Well over 90% of the U.S. money supply today is issued not by the government but by private banks when they make loans. As Thomas Edison argued in 1921, “It is absurd to say that our country can issue $30 million in bonds and not $30 million in currency. Both are promises to pay, but one promise fattens the usurers and the other helps the people.”

The government could avoid increasing the debt by printing the money for its budget as President Abraham Lincoln did, as U.S. Notes or “Greenbacks.” Donald Trump acknowledged in 2016 that the government never has to default “because you print the money,” echoing Alan Greenspan, Warren Buffett, and others. So writes Prof. Stephanie Kelton in a Dec. 2, 2024 blog. Alternatively, the Treasury could mint some trillion dollar coins. The Constitution gives Congress the power to coin money and regulate its value, and no limit is put on the value of the coins it creates. In legislation initiated in 1982, Congress chose to impose limits on the amounts and denominations of most coins, but a special provision allowed the platinum coin to be minted in any amount for commemorative purposes. Philip Diehl, former head of the U.S. Mint and co-author of the platinum coin law, confirmed that the coin would be legal tender:

In minting the $1 trillion platinum coin, the Treasury Secretary would be exercising authority which Congress has granted routinely for more than 220 years… under power expressly granted to Congress in the Constitution (Article 1, Section 8).

To prevent congressional overspending, a budget ceiling could be imposed— as it is now, although the terms would probably need to be revised.

Eliminating the Debt

Those maneuvers would prevent the federal debt from growing, but it still would not eliminate the trillion-dollar interest tab on the existing $36 trillion debt. The only permanent solution is to eliminate the debt itself. In ancient Mesopotamia, when the king was the creditor, this was done with periodic debt jubilees—just cancel the debt. (See Michael Hudson, And Forgive Them Their Debts.) But that is not possible today because the creditors are private banks and private investors who have a contractual right to be paid, and the U.S. Constitution requires that the government pay its debts as and when due.

Another possibility is a financial transaction tax, which could replace both income and sales taxes while still generating enough to fund the government and pay off the debt. See Scott Smith, A Tale of Two Economies: A New Financial Operating System for the American Economy (2023) and my earlier article here. But that solution has been discussed for years without gaining traction in Congress.

Another alternative is to have the Federal Reserve buy the debt as it comes due. For the last few years, the Treasury has been issuing an estimated 30% of its debt as short-term bills rather than 10-year or 30-year bonds. As a result, in 2023 approximately 31% of the outstanding debt came due for renewal. As usual, it was just rolled over into new debt. But the nearly one-third coming due in FY2025 could be bought in the open market by the Federal Reserve, which is required to return its profits to the government after deducting its costs, making the debt virtually interest-free. Interest-free debt carried on the books and rolled over does not raise the federal deficit. If a third of the outstanding debt is too much to monetize in one year to avoid inflation, this maneuver could be spread out over a number of years.

Mandating that action by an “independent” Fed would require an amendment to the Federal Reserve Act, but Congress has the power to amend it and has done so several times over the years. The incoming administration is proposing more radical moves than that, including eliminating the income tax, ending the Fed, auditing the Fed, or merging it with the Treasury. The federal interest tab nearly doubled after April 2022, when the Fed initiated “Quantitative Tightening.” It reduced its balance sheet by selling over $2 trillion in federal securities into the economy, reducing the money supply, and by hiking the federal funds rate to as high as 5.5%. Arguably the Fed has overtightened and needs to reverse that trend by buying federal securities, injecting new money into the economy.

Alarmed economists contend that a Weimar-style hyperinflation is the inevitable outcome of government-issued money. But as Michael Hudson points out, “Every hyperinflation in history has been caused by foreign debt service collapsing the exchange rate. The problem almost always has resulted from wartime foreign currency strains, not domestic spending.”

Issuing the money directly will not inflate prices if the funds are used to increase the domestic supply of goods and services. Supply and demand will then go up together, keeping prices stable. This has been illustrated historically, perhaps most dramatically in China. The People’s Bank of China manages the money supply by a variety of means including just printing currency. In 28 years, from 1996 to 2024, China’s money supply (M2) grew by 52 times or 5,200%, yet hyperinflation did not result. Prices remained stable because the funds went into increasing GDP, which went up along with the money supply.

Price inflation during the Covid-19 crisis has been blamed on the Fed monetizing congressional fiscal payments to consumers and businesses, increasing demand (the circulating money supply) without increasing supply (goods and services). But the San Francisco Fed concluded that the surge in global shipping and transportation costs due to Covid-19 along with delivery delays and backlogs, were a greater contributor than this fiscal stimulus to the run-up of headline inflation in 2021 and 2022. The supply of goods could have been increased—producers could have increased production to respond to the increase in demand—were it not for the shutdown of more than 700,000 productive businesses labeled “non-essential,” resulting in the loss of 3 million jobs.

Swapping Debt for Productive Equity

Money printing is not inflationary if the money is issued for productive purposes, raising GDP in lockstep; but how can we be sure that the new money will be used productively? Today the banks and other large institutions that first receive any newly-issued money are more likely to invest it speculatively, driving up the price of existing assets (homes, stocks, etc.) without creating new goods and services.

Economic blogger Martin Armstrong observes that one solution pursued by debt-ridden countries is to swap the debt for equity in productive assets. This has been done by Mexico, Poland, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and the United States itself. It was the solution of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton in dealing with the overwhelming debt of the First U.S. Congress. State and federal debt was swapped along with gold for shares in the First U.S. Bank, paying a 6% dividend. The Bank then issued U.S. currency at up to 10 times this capital base, on the fractional reserve model still used by banks today. Both the First and the Second U.S. Banks were designed to support manufacturing and production, according to Hamilton’s Report on Public Credit.

Following the Hamiltonian model is H.R. 4052, the National Infrastructure Bank Act of 2023 (NIB) now pending in Congress. The NIB proposal is to swap privately-held federal securities (Treasury bonds) for non-voting preferred stock in the bank. Interest on the bonds would continue to go to the investors, along with a 2% stock dividend. That would not eliminate the debt or the interest, but if the Federal Reserve were to buy federal securities on the open market and swap them for NIB stock, the securities would essentially remain interest-free, since again the Fed is required to return its profits to the Treasury after deducting its costs.

Lending Directly to Productive Businesses

Another possibility for using newly issued money to increase the supply of goods and services is for the Federal Reserve to make loans directly to productive businesses. That was actually the intent of the original Federal Reserve Act. Section 13 of the Act allows Federal Reserve Banks to discount notes, drafts, and bills of exchange arising out of actual commercial transactions, such as those issued for agricultural, industrial, or commercial purposes—in other words, lending directly for production and development. “Discounting commercial paper” is a process by which short-term loans are provided to financial institutions using commercial paper as collateral. (Commercial paper is unsecured short-term debt, usually issued at a discount, used to cover payroll, inventory, and other short-term liabilities. The “discount” represents the interest to the lender.) According to Prof. Carl Walsh, writing of the Federal Reserve Act in The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Newsletter in 1991:

The preamble sets out very clearly that one purpose of the Federal Reserve Act was to afford a means of discounting commercial loans. In its report on the proposed bill, the House Banking and Currency Committee viewed a fundamental objective of the bill to be the “creation of a joint mechanism for the extension of credit to banks which possess sound assets and which desire to liquidate them for the purpose of meeting legitimate commercial, agricultural, and industrial demands on the part of their clientele.”

Cornell Law School Professor Robert Hockett expanded on this design in an article in Forbes in March 2021:

[T]he founders of the Federal Reserve System in 1913… designed something akin to a network of regional development finance institutions… Each of the 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks was to provide short-term funding directly or indirectly (through local banks) to developing businesses that needed it. This they did by ‘discounting’—in effect, purchasing—commercial paper from those businesses that needed it… [I]n determining what kinds of commercial paper to discount, the Federal Reserve Act both was—and ironically remains—quite explicit about this: Fed discount lending is solely for “productive,” not “speculative” purposes.

Today discounting commercial paper is big business, but the lenders are private and the borrowers are large institutions issuing commercial paper in denominations of $100,000 or more. Except for its emergency Commercial Paper Funding Facility operated from 2020 to 2021 and from 2008 to 2010, the Fed no longer engages in the commercial loan business. Meanwhile, small businesses are having trouble finding affordable financing.

In a sequel to his March 2021 article, Hockett explained that the drafters of the Federal Reserve Act, notably Carter Glass and Paul Warburg, were essentially following the Real Bills Doctrine (RBD). Previously known as the “commercial loan theory of banking,” it held that banks could create credit-money deposits on their balance sheets without triggering inflation if the money were issued against loans backed by commercial paper. When the borrowing companies repaid their loans from their sales receipts, the newly created money would just void out the debt and be extinguished. Their intent was that banks could sell their commercial loans at a discount at the Fed’s Discount Window, freeing up their balance sheets for more loans. Hockett wrote:

The RBD in its crude formulation held that so long as the lending of endogenous [bank-created] credit-money was kept productive, not speculative, inflation and deflation would be not only less likely, but effectively impossible. And the experience of German banks during Germany’s late 19th century Hamiltonian ‘growth miracle,’ with which the German immigrant Warburg, himself a banker, was intimately familiar, appeared to verify this. So did Glass’ experience with agricultural lending in the American South.

Prof. Hockett suggested regionalizing the Fed, expanding it from the current 12 Federal Reserve banks to many banks. He wrote in August 2021:

In time, we might even imagine a proliferation of public banks, patterned more or less after the highly successful Bank of North Dakota model, spreading across multiple states. These banks could then both afford nonprofit banking services to all, and assist the Fed Regional Banks in identifying appropriate recipients of Fed liquidity assistance.

The result, he said, will be “a Fed restored to its original purpose, a Fed responsive to varying local conditions in a sprawling continental republic, a Fed no longer over-involved with banks whose principal if not sole activities are in gambling on price movements in secondary and tertiary markets rather than investing in the primary markets that constitute our ‘real’ economy. It will mean, in short, something approaching a true people’s bank, not just a banks’ bank.”

By Ralph Nader December 13, 2024 Now is the time to prepare anticipatory strategies against what the vengeful, avaricious, lawless Trump and his Trumpsters have boasted out loud about daily. Don’t wait until Trump’s inauguration. A short list of suggestions follows: The civil servants and their unions better organize a personal presentation to their new…

Donald J. Trump is about to become the first president since Grover Cleveland to serve one term, lose a reelection bid and then run a third time successfully for a second term. What has Trump and his team learned from his first term? How will he govern differently? This time he has added progressives like Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to his team, drawing from the left of the Democratic Party in a way that he didn’t do the first time around; how will they impact his policies? As a lame duck with no possibility of running for reelection, his only real concern for the future is for passing the torch of the MAGA movement, potentially to JD Vance. Is Trump now more free to do what he wants, and if so, what does he want?

TMI Show co-hosts Ted Rall and Robby West (filling in for Manila Chan) are joined by Angie Wong for an inside view into the new administration by an old president.

The post TMI Show Ep 37: “Trump 45 vs. Trump 47” first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 37: “Trump 45 vs. Trump 47” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

When global soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo this week tweeted, “Congratulations to all my friends in Saudi, I know how proud you all are today and I am sure @Saudi2034 will be historic” it was hard not to wince.

The Portuguese icon’s celebration of the announcement that Saudi Arabia would host the 2034 men’s World Cup was hardly a surprise. In 2023 he signed a whopping $200 million-per-year deal with Saudi club Al Nassr FC. At the time, Amnesty International implored Ronaldo to take a stand on human rights, but to no avail. Instead, he soaked up Saudi cash and even enjoyed the opening of a “CR7 Signature Museum” at the garish Boulevard World tourist development in Riyadh.

Fast forward to Wednesday when FIFA, the world governing body for soccer, handed Saudi Arabia its crown-jewel tournament, the men’s World Cup. FIFA President Gianni Infantino declared, “The 2034 FIFA World Cup…will be a spectacular event. What Saudi Arabia has put forward in their bid is absolutely incredible.”

If by “incredible” Infantino meant lacking credibility, he was right. Ahead of the vote, FIFA changed its rules to make voting on the 2030 and 2034 men’s World Cups a package deal where vote-splitting was not allowed. There was no debate ahead of the vote, which was held over Zoom. Voting members made their preference known via a simple raising of their hands; their images could be seen on a panel of tiny Zoom boxes behind Infantino as he opened up an envelope with a card bearing Saudi Arabia’s name. It was a sham vote brazenly sprayed around the world.

Not only does sport create a space where [the Saudi crown prince] can plunge surplus capital derived from oil revenues, but it is a tremendous vehicle for pro-Saudi propaganda, even capable of drowning out the sound of a bone-saw.

Moreover, handing the tournament to Saudi Arabia cues up a torrent of terrible tidings that clash mightily with FIFA’s stated commitment to human rights. According to Minky Worden, the director of global initiatives at Human Rights Watch, “FIFA is willfully blind to the country’s human rights record, setting up a decade of potentially horrific human rights abuses preparing for the 2034 World Cup.” This view is co-signed by a slew of human-rights organizations. Steve Cockburn, Amnesty International’s head of labor rights and sport, noted, “FIFA’s evaluation of Saudi Arabia’s World Cup bid is an astonishing whitewash of the country’s atrocious human rights record.” He added, “Fundamental human rights reforms are urgently required in Saudi Arabia, or the 2034 World Cup will be inevitably tarnished by exploitation, discrimination and repression.”

FIFA’s move to choose Saudi Arabia to host the 2034 World Cup is an apex moment for sportswashing: when political leaders use sports to legitimize themselves on the global stage while stoking nationalism and diverting attention from human rights woes at home. This was a brash sportwash executed out in the open for all to see. But the announcement also helps advance authoritarianism at a moment of rising autocracy across the globe. In fact, FIFA itself is sliding deeper into an autocracy, regularly ignoring its own guiding principles and increasingly resembling the very authoritarian governments with whom it collaborates.

Let’s be clear: sportwashing is an equal opportunity exploiter. The United States is just as capable of carrying out sportswashing as Saudi Arabia. For instance, to secure the 2028 Summer Olympics, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti vowed to Seth Meyers on late-night television, “I’m confident by the time the Olympics come, we can end homelessness on the streets of L.A.” Meanwhile, homelessness continues to ravage human lives in LA, a humanitarian crisis in plain sight.

In fact, we can expect an onslaught of sportswashing in the US in the coming years. After all, FIFA President Gianni Infantino openly adores recently re-elected President Donald Trump. Infantino wasted no time congratulating Trump on his electoral victory, even before the Electoral College votes were in, posting on Instagram, “We will have a great FIFA World Cup and a great FIFA Club World Cup in the United States of America!” Infantino shared six photos of himself and Trump, a montage of sycophancy. More recently he cozied up to Trump and Elon Musk at the reopening of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris.

Let’s be clear: sportwashing is an equal opportunity exploiter. The United States is just as capable of carrying out sportswashing as Saudi Arabia.

Infantino caused a media kerfuffle in 2022 when, at the opening match of the Qatar World Cup, he was nabbed on camera chuckling it up with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The Crown Prince has placed sport at the center of his global charm offensive. Not only does sport create a space where he can plunge surplus capital derived from oil revenues, but it is a tremendous vehicle for pro-Saudi propaganda, even capable of drowning out the sound of a bone-saw.

Research carried out by investigative journalist Karim Zidan and Stanis Elsborg of the Danish group Play the Game documented Saudi Arabia’s enormous—and ever-growing—sport footprint. Their exhaustive research report, “Saudi Arabia’s Grip on World Sports,” catalogs more than 900 sponsorships and 1,400 strategic positions that comprise the juggernaut of influence that Saudi Arabia has conjured to sportswash its global image. MBS is a man with a plan, and that plan involves sport.

And Mohammed bin Salman has made it clear that he has no qualms about sportswashing, stating directly on Fox News that he will “continue doing sport washing” regardless of public pushback. He “doesn’t care” about accusations of sportswashing. What other countries deign to deny, he openly welcomes. President Joe Biden’s notorious “bloody fist bump see around the world” only greased the path.

But not everyone is standing idly by. In October, a group of more than 100 prominent women’s soccer players wrote a letter to FIFA, denouncing the group for its sponsorship deal with Saudi Aramco, the Saudi Arabian oil firm. Describing the agreement as a “middle finger to women’s soccer,” the athletes raised concerns over gross human-rights violations, singling out anti-LGBTQ and anti-women practices in the country. CBC columnist Shireen Ahmed wrote, “There is no doubt that FIFA's connection deserves to be challenged and it is no surprise that women are leading the way.”

Now it’s time for the biggest stars of men’s soccer to follow their lead. Cristiano Ronaldo might be a lost cause, but it’s not too late to take a stand for what’s right. It’s not an exaggeration to say that lives are on the line.

Liberals hate U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, no question about it. He’s the definition of illiberal: authoritarian, racist, sexist, and downright nasty. Not only that, he’s a living repudiation of the liberal delusion that America runs on meritocracy.

But you want to know a dirty, little secret? In back alleys, encrypted group chats, and off-the-record conversations, liberals will still support Trump on a case-by-case basis. Of course, they’d never vote for the guy, but they’ll give two cheers for some of his policies.

I discovered this ugly truth during Trump’s last term while writing an article on the shift in U.S. policy toward China from lukewarm engagement to hostile decoupling. The general consensus among the foreign policy elite was that, at least in terms of relations with Beijing, Trump was a useful idiot for slowing China’s roll with harsh rhetoric and tariffs.

Trump 2.0 is going to be the same but worse, like a strong cheese voted out of the refrigerator only to grow ever more pungent as it moldered in a dark corner of Florida.

“Trump is a madman, but I want to give him and his administration their due,” one prominent liberal intellectual told me. “We can’t keep playing on an unlevel playing field and take promises that are never delivered on. It’s really China’s turn to respond, and it’s long overdue.”

It wasn’t just China. For years, liberals and conservatives alike were, for instance, pushing the concept of burden-sharing: getting U.S. allies to cover more of the bill for their security needs. But it was only Trump who really made it happen by blackmailing NATO members and other U.S. partners into doing so.

Sure, few warmed to the idea of the United States actually pulling out of NATO, but even many of our European allies, though they publicly grumbled, were secretly happy about The Donald’s gaiatsu. That’s the Japanese word for outside pressure that enables a leader to force through unpopular changes by blaming it all on foreigners. The self-described liberal leader of NATO, Dutch politician Mark Rutte, even came out in the open after Trump’s reelection to praise the American president for making European countries more militarily self-sufficient.

It wasn’t just liberals who thrilled to Trump’s unorthodox foreign policy during his first term either. Some of those further to the left also embraced Trump the engager (with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un), Trump the isolationist (and his threats to close U.S. military bases globally), and Trump the putative peacemaker (for concluding a deal with the Taliban to end the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan).

Trump, in other words, was not just an unanticipated crisis; he was also an opportunity. Deep in their hearts, anyone unhappy with the status quo will support a disrupter. Quite a few Democrats disgusted with this country’s border policies, inflation, and its coastal elites even crossed over to vote for Trump in November because they wanted change, regardless of the consequences.

Trump 2.0 is going to be the same but worse, like a strong cheese voted out of the refrigerator only to grow ever more pungent as it moldered in a dark corner of Florida. The latest version of Trump has promised more violence and destruction the second time around, from mass deportations to mass tariffs. And he’s planning to avoid appointing anyone to his administration who might have a contrary thought, a backbone to resist him, or the least qualification to enact sensible policy.

In the face of such a vengeful and truculent force returning to the White House, surely, you might think, it will be impossible to find any liberals embracing such anarchy the second time around.

Think again. This is how American politics works, if only for liberals. The modern Republican Party routinely boycotts Democratic administrations: blocking Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination, working overtime to shut down the federal government, voting en masse against legislation it would have supported if introduced by a Republican administration. The MAGA crowd has, in fact, turned noncooperation into something of an art form.

Liberals, on the other hand, pride themselves on bipartisanship, on getting things done no matter who’s in power. So, inevitably, there will be cooperation with the Trump team as it sets about the “deconstruction of the administrative state” (as Trump cheerleader Steve Bannon once put it). Worse, there will even be some silver-lining liberals (and a few leftists) who pull up a seat to applaud the wrecking ball—not perhaps for its wholesale destruction of neighborhoods but at least for its demolition of a select number of buildings that they deem irreparable.

Each time such destruction takes place, the self-exculpatory comment from such silver-liners will be: “Well, somebody had to come along and do something!” If Trump is the only tool in the governing toolbox, some liberals will indeed try to use him to pound in a few nails they think need hammering.

Burning Bridges with China

In his 2024 State of the Union address, President Joe Biden argued that he did a better job than Donald Trump of standing up to China. He certainly devoted more Pentagon dollars to containing China. And not only did he not roll back Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products, but he added some of his own, including a 100% tax on Chinese electric vehicles. Biden also made concrete moves to decouple the U.S. economy from China’s, especially when it came to the supply chains for critical raw materials that Beijing has sought to control. “I’ve made sure that the most advanced American technologies can’t be used in China,” he insisted, adding, “Frankly for all his tough talk on China, it never occurred to my predecessor to do any of that.”

Biden’s moves on China, from export controls and subsidies for chip manufacturers to closer military relationships with Pacific partners like Australia and India, received the enthusiastic support of his party. No surprise there: It’s hard to find anyone in Washington these days who has a good word to say about engaging more with China.

So, when Trump takes office in January, he won’t actually be reversing course. He’ll simply be taking the baton-like stick from Biden while leaving all the carrots in the ground.

That said, Trump’s proposed further spike in tariffs against China (and Canada and Mexico and potentially the rest of the world) does give many liberals pause, since it threatens to unleash an economically devastating global trade war while boosting prices radically at home. But trade unions backed by such liberals support such measures as a way to protect jobs, while the European Union only recently imposed stiff tariffs of their own on Chinese electrical vehicles.

So, yes, neoliberals who embrace free trade are going to push back against Trump’s economic policies, but more traditional liberals who backed protectionist measures in the past will secretly (or not so secretly) applaud Trump’s moves.

Back to the Wall

On taking office, Joe Biden rolled back his predecessor’s harsh immigration policies. The rate of border-crossings then spiked for a variety of reasons (not just the repeal of those Trump-era laws) from an average of half a million to about 2 million annually. However, in 2024, those numbers plummeted, despite Trump’s campaign claims—but no matter. By then, many Democrats had already been reborn as border hawks.

That new, tougher attitude was on display in executive actions President Biden took in 2024 as well as the border security bill that Democrats tried to push through Congress earlier this year. Forget about finding a path to citizenship for the millions of undocumented immigrants who keep the American economy humming, Biden’s immigration policy focused on limiting asylum petitions, increasing detention facilities, and even allocating more money to build Trump’s infamous wall.

As Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, pointed out on the eve of the November election, “What we are seeing is that the center of the Democratic Party is now adopting the same policies, the same postures, that MAGA Republicans were fighting for about six years ago.”

When things go disastrously south, laws are broken, and the government begins to truly come apart at the seams, it’s vitally important that no left-of-center fingerprints be found at the scene of the crime.

And yet such punitive policies still weren’t harsh enough for MAGA Republicans and their America First followers. The bottom line was that immigration-averse voters didn’t want to support Democrats pretending to be MAGA Republicans. When it came to the White House, they wanted the real thing.

As politics change hands in Washington next January, it’s going to be difficult to find any Democrats who will support the mass detentions and deportations Trump is promising. Yet many liberals, like the unprecedented number of Latinos who pulled the lever for Trump in 2024, do want major changes at the border with Mexico. In Arizona, Democrat Ruben Gallego won a squeaker of a Senate election by emphasizing border security and even backing a border wall (in certain areas). Such liberal border hawks will be happy when the Republican president does the dirty work so that Democrats don’t suffer the political fallout that is sure to follow.

Remapping the Middle East

On the face of it, the Abrahamic Accords were a liberal nightmare. The brainchild of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, they promised to repair relations between Israel and the major authoritarian regimes in the region: Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Morocco, and Sudan. The deal was a reward for illiberal leaders, particularly Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. The primary losers would, of course, be the Palestinians, who would have to give up their hopes for a separate state in exchange for some Saudi handouts, and the Sahrawi people who lost their claim to the Western Sahara when the United States and Israel recognized Moroccan sovereignty over the entire region.

Instead of shelving the Accords, however, the Biden administration pushed ahead with them. After roundly criticizing Saudi autocrat Mohammed bin Salman for, among other things, ordering the murder of a U.S.-based Saudi journalist, Biden mended ties, fist-bumping that rogue leader, and continuing to discuss how and when the Kingdom would normalize relations with Israel. Nor did his administration restrict Washington’s staggering weapons deliveries to Israel after its invasion and utter devastation of Gaza. Yes, Biden and crew made some statements about Palestinian suffering and tried to push more humanitarian aid into the conflict zone, but they did next to nothing to pressure Israel to stop its killing machine (nor would they reverse the Trump administration’s decision on the Western Sahara).

The liberals who support Israel (come what may) like Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, New York Congressman Ritchie Torres, and the New Democrat Coalition in the House of Representatives are, of course, going to be enthusiastic about Trump’s ever tighter embrace of Netanyahu next year. But there are also likely to be quiet cheers from other corners of the liberal-left about the harder line Trump is likely to take against Tehran. (Remember Kamala Harris’s assertion during her presidential run that Iran was the main adversary of the United States?) The Arab Spring is long gone, and a strong man in the White House needs to both schmooze with and go toe to toe with the strong men of the Middle East—or so many liberals will believe, even as they rationalize away their relief over Trump’s handling of a thoroughly illiberal region.

Looking Ahead (Or Do I Mean Behind?)

Anyone to the left of Tucker Carlson will certainly think twice about showing public enthusiasm for whatever Trump does. Indeed, most liberals will be appalled by the new administration’s likely suspension of aid to Ukraine and withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, not to mention other possible hare-brained maneuvers like sending U.S. troops to battle narcotraffickers in Mexico.

Trump will attract liberal support, however quietly or even secretively, not because of his bridge-building genius—in reality, he couldn’t even get a bridge-building infrastructure bill through Congress in his first term—but because all too many liberals have already moved inexorably rightward on issues ranging from China and the Middle East to immigration. The MAGA minority has seized the machinery of power by weaponizing mendacity and ruthlessly breaking rules, in the process transforming politics much the way the Bolshevik minority did in Russia more than a century ago. In the pot that those Republicans put on the stove, the water has been boiling for more than a decade and yet the left-of-center frogs barely seem to recognize just how altered our circumstances have become.

“Fascism can be defeated,” historian Timothy Snyder wrote immediately after the November elections, “but not when we are on its side.”

In normal times, finding overlapping interests with your political adversaries makes sense. Such bedrock bipartisanship stabilizes fractious countries that swing politically from center left to center right every few years.

These are, however, anything but normal times and the second-term Trump team anything but center-rightists. They are extremists bent on dismantling the federal government, unstitching the fabric of international law, and turning up the heat drastically on an already dangerously overcooking planet.

In 2020, I raised the possibility of a boycott, divestment, and sanction (BDS) movement against the United States if Trump won the elections that year. “People of the world, you’d better build your BDS box, paint ‘Break Glass in Case of Emergency’ on the front, and stand next to it on November 3,” I wrote then. “If Trump wins on Election Day, it will be mourning in America. But let’s hope that the world doesn’t mourn: it organizes.”

Four years later, Trump has won again. Do I hear the sound of breaking glass?

Here, in the United States, a stance of strict non-engagement with Trump 2.0, even where interests overlap, would not only be a good moral policy but even make political sense. When things go disastrously south, laws are broken, and the government begins to truly come apart at the seams, it’s vitally important that no left-of-center fingerprints be found at the scene of the crime.

Let’s be clear: The Trump administration will not be playing by the rules of normal politics. So, forget about bipartisanship. Forget about preserving access to power by visiting Mar-a-Lago, hat in hand, like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg or the hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “Fascism can be defeated,” historian Timothy Snyder wrote immediately after the November elections, “but not when we are on its side.”

So, my dear liberal-left, which side are you on?

It’s been a bad year for advocates of ranked-choice voting reforms.

Legislatures in five states banned the reform outright, as did voters in Missouri. And voters in four states—Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, and Oregon—rejected referendums on adopting the new system. Only in the District of Columbia did a majority vote in favor of adopting the reform, and Alaskans chose to keep ranked-choice voting by a remarkably close 0.25% margin.

However, Democratic strategists and funders behind this year’s push for RCV may be able to learn from the losses. In three of the four ballot measure states, RCV initiatives were combined with a proposal for open primaries, flipping typical supporters to opponents. In Colorado and Nevada, where RCV was combined with open primaries, progressive groups joined the opposition, and business interests flooded the coffers of the PACs supporting the measures.

Despite recent setbacks, the coalition advocating in favor of ranked-choice voting appears to be changing.

The pushback against ranked-choice voting (RCV)—which allows voters to rank candidates according to their preference instead of choosing just one—is typically part of a larger Republican-aligned effort to restrict voting rights by limiting voting by mail, banning ballot drop boxes, and raising the threshold for passage of popular ballot initiatives.

MAGA groups oppose the practice as likely to favor Democrats and moderate Republicans over their candidates. Indeed, “election integrity” groups associated with Leonard Leo and Cleta Mitchell have been attacking ranked-choice voting options in their larger sweep to restrict voting rights, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the right-wing bill mill, has developed and circulated model legislation to prohibit it.

“Special interests are pushing a novel and complicated election process called ranked-choice voting,” ALEC’s model bill states. The group contends that the alternative voting system creates “a conflict between local and state election processes,” a claim legal scholars rebut. ALEC also highlights ranked-choice voting as systematically undermining the nation’s election systems in its annual “essential policy solutions” report for 2025.

At ALEC’s annual meeting in 2023, the custom hotel room keys featured anti-RCV branding. Key card sponsors gain access to lawmakers and VIP events at the conference, according to sponsorship materials obtained and reviewed by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD).

Red State Legislatures Ban RCV

Republicans, with some exceptions, have historically opposed ranked-choice voting. After former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) lost a special House election in 2022—which was decided through ranked-choice voting—Republicans railed against it, with party leaders denouncing it as a “scam.” The Republican National Committee called for banning RCV “in every locality and level of government.”

Since then there has been a surge of interest in banning RCV for local, state, and federal elections. This year alone, bans passed in Louisiana (SB 101), Alabama (SB 186), Mississippi (SB 2144), Oklahoma (HB 3156), and Kentucky (HB 44), where the legislature overrode the governor’s veto of the bill. Previously, bans have been passed in Florida (SB 524, 2022), Idaho (HB 179, 2023), Montana (HB 598, 2023), South Dakota (SB 55, 2023), and Tennessee (SB 1820, 2022). Anti-RCV bills were introduced but never made it out of committee in Ohio and South Carolina.

In Missouri, the legislature paired RCV with a redundant measure to outlaw voting by noncitizens—which is already illegal in all federal elections—and sent it out to voters in what critics dismissed as partisan “ballot candy.”

In South Carolina (HB 4591, 2024), one of the bill’s two primary sponsors, Bill Taylor, is an ALEC member, as was the primary sponsor of the South Dakota bill (SB 55, 2023) that banned RCV.

Colorado

In Colorado, the failed effort to adopt ranked-choice voting—Proposition 131, which also would have eliminated single-party primaries—was primarily backed by Colorado Voters First, which received significant funding from industry and business interests.

Colorado Voters First received $2 million from Ben Walton, heir to the Walmart fortune; $600,000 from the Colorado Chamber of Commerce; $500,000 from Chevron; $100,000 from Kimbal Musk, Elon Musk’s brother; $496,000 from Voters for the American Center; and nearly $550,000 from private equity executives.

The largest donations came from Kent Thiry, a former healthcare executive who is board co-chair of Unite America, a large nonprofit that has spent significantly on ranked-choice voting ballot measures across the country. He donated a total of nearly $6 million to Colorado Voters First, while Unite America donated a total of $5.8 million.

Thiry has become a major player in Colorado politics, and has successfully fought for election reform ballot measures since 2016.

The main group opposing the proposition, Voters Rights Colorado, raised approximately $380,000, with its largest contributions coming from labor groups such as AFSCME and the National Education Association (NEA), as well as civic groups.

The coalition behind the no vote argued that the measure would disproportionately hurt progressive and pro-labor candidates, and most opposing groups were primarily concerned with the implementation of “jungle” primaries, not RCV.

The Colorado Working Families Party called the proposition “snake oil of the highest order” and expressed concern that it would “increase the role of big money in Colorado politics.”

The proposition risks “giving an even greater advantage to wealthy candidates and a bigger voice to special interests,” said Aly Belknap, Executive Director of Colorado Common Cause.

Some, however, worry about RCV more generally.

“There’s this feeling among progressives that ranked-choice voting is good for us, but here in Colorado, we fundamentally disagreed that Proposition 131 would help progressives, at least at the state level,” said Sean Hinga, deputy director of AFSCME Colorado. He believes the measure would “harm our ability to get labor candidates elected.”

AFSCME and Common Cause supported the RCV measure in Oregon.

Colorado voters rejected the RCV proposition 53.5% to 46.5%.

Idaho

Idaho’s Proposition 1 would have both instituted ranked-choice voting and ended closed primaries. The GOP-controlled legislature had tried to preemptively ban the measure from ever coming up for a vote, and the legislature had banned RCV the previous year. If it had passed, the ballot measure would have repealed the state law.

The initiative was supported by the Idaho Education Association and Idahoans for Open Primaries, which received $3 million from national PACs such as Unite America and a related group ($1.8 million), Article IV ($2.2 million), and Way Back PAC ($250,000), according to campaign finance disclosures.

Article IV, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit based in Virginia, is led by George Wellde III, a former Goldman Sachs investor. Working alongside Democratic operatives is the group’s treasurer, Cabell Hobbs, who has been the subject of a Federal Elections Commission complaint for helping a pro-Trump super PAC make illegal campaign contributions. Article IV is not required to publicly disclose its donors.

Way Back PAC, a hybrid PAC (also known as a Carey Committee), is based in Wyoming and mostly focuses on supporting independent and Democratic candidates in Western states.

The state GOP and many Republican representatives opposed the measure. Idaho Rising, the main opposition group, spent $321,000 on media advertising against the measure, according to its disclosures, and a constellation of smaller groups, including Secure Idaho Elections and Idaho Fair Elections, also worked to oppose it. One Person One Vote—a PAC that raised $250,000 in the four months it existed before the election—raised half of its funds from local Idahoan Larry Williams, the subject of a campaign finance complaint.

Nearly 70% of voters in Idaho voted against the measure.

Nevada

This year Nevada voters reversed their position on ranked-choice voting. In 2022, a majority of voters supported RCV, whereas this year, 53% voted against the proposition, known as Question 3, which was paired with a proposal for open primaries. Since the Nevada constitution requires voters to approve a ballot question twice before it is enacted, its failure to pass this year prevents it from becoming law.

Both state parties opposed the measure. The Nevada ACLU took no position on it.

Vote Yes on 3, the main group supporting the measure, received $13 million from Article IV, $6.4 million from Unite America, and $250,000 from Wynn Resorts, according to the group’s financial disclosures.

The opposition campaign, spearheaded by Protect Your Vote Nevada, raised approximately $2 million from a single group called Nevada Alliance, a progressive-leaning organization that is not required to disclose its donors.

Oregon

Nearly 57% of Oregon voters rejected Measure 117, which would have established statewide ranked-choice voting.

Yes on 117 PAC, the main group supporting the measure, spent nearly $9.4 million on the campaign, and received over $5.8 million from the 501(c)(4) nonprofit Oregon Ranked Choice Voting, by far the largest contributor to the PAC. It also received $2.8 million from Article IV, as well as funding from labor organizations and the Sierra Club.

The major group opposing the measure—Concerned Election Officials—raised a total of $1,380.

Alaska

Alaskans voted to retain ranked-choice voting—voting no on Ballot Measure 2—by only 743 votes.

Yes On 2, the primary PAC advocating for repeal of RCV, raised approximately $117,000 between July and October, with the largest donations being $10,000.

The anti-repeal effort, led by No On 2, raised nearly $14 million between June and late October, including $5.5 million from Unite America PAC, $4.4 million from Article IV, and $2 million from Action Now Initiative, the action arm of the philanthropic organization Arnold Ventures.

Despite recent setbacks, the coalition advocating in favor of ranked-choice voting appears to be changing. Even where efforts to implement RCV failed, the donors backing various ballot measures illustrate just how varied the groups interested in pushing for this election reform are.

Randall Irvin has been waiting for public housing in Chicago for six years, and his situation is not that unusual. For example, there are over 100,000 families on San Antonio’s waitlist for public housing. In Chicago, there were more than 200,000 families on the waitlist in 2023. Public housing waiting lists are extremely long because there is an inadequate supply—and a 1998 amendment to federal housing law is a significant barrier to building new housing.

Table 1 lists the average number of months households waited before they were able to receive public housing in selected metropolitan areas according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. It ranges from a low of 11 months in San Antonio to a high of 84 months (seven years) in Miami. These numbers hide the wide range of variation around the average. In the city of Chicago, families can wait for as few as six months or as long as 25 years depending on the specifics of their situation and their family size. Households that are still waiting for housing or that never receive housing are not included in the calculation of the averages, so these average wait times do not fully capture the difficulty of obtaining public housing.

The families remaining on public housing waitlists for housing for years are in desperate situations. They are people who are homeless, who are living in unsafe and unsanitary conditions, and who are struggling to afford their housing. In Washington, D.C., Rosalynn Talley, who waited 14 years for public housing, described her overcrowded housing situation as being “smashed up like sardines.” Her neighborhood was also unsafe, and there was mold in the house.

Congress is to blame for the low supply of public housing. In 1998, Congress passed the Faircloth Amendment which put a cap on the number of public housing units. The cap and the consistent underfunding of public housing has caused the number of public housing units to decline 40% from 1.4 million in 1994 to 835,000 in 2022 while the need for affordable housing has steadily increased.

Public housing is one of the most affordable forms of housing, but affordable housing policy has shifted to relying on the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). LIHTC goes to private developers and investors and creates “affordable” housing that is often more expensive to renters than public housing. The Joint Center for Housing Studies reports that “LIHTC [housing] does not necessarily protect a renter from [housing] cost burdens.” While the Faircloth Amendment has been a benefit to the for-profit real estate industry, it has hurt low-income renters.

Thankfully, there are some in Congress working to undo this bad law. The Homes Act, introduced by Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), if passed, would repeal the Faircloth Amendment and provide the funding needed to address the maintenance and repair backlog in public housing. Currently, the bill has 40 supporters in the House of Representatives and two supporters in the Senate. Repealing the Faircloth Amendment would open another channel to address the affordable housing crisis.

The recent COP29 climate finance deal is a stark example of how wealthy historical emitters continue to evade their responsibilities to pay for climate action and remedy climate harm. But they cannot escape rising demands for accountability. In the historic hearings on states' climate obligations at the International Court of Justice, which are drawing to a close, developing nations are forcing them to face the law.

The timing of these ICJ hearings, on the heels of yet another failure of the United Nations climate talks, underscores what's at stake.

The headlines have called COP29's climate finance deal a triumph of diplomacy, but this could not be farther from the truth. Wealthy nations responsible for the majority of cumulative greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have carefully engineered an escape from their climate obligations through a deal the terms of which are too loose, and that offers too little, too late.

We know rich countries can deliver the grants they owe to the Global South. They can raise well over $5 trillion a year by ending fossil fuel handouts, taxing the rich, and changing unfair global financial rules.

It's too loose: Despite the deal's reference to two finance figures, $1.3 trillion and $300 billion, both constitute a hollow promise. The text fails to hold developed countries to their legal duty to provide climate finance to the Global South. Actors are merely "called upon" to work toward scaling funding to $1.3 trillion per year by 2035, without any binding commitments. Even the $300 billion annual goal has been carefully worded to avoid any concrete obligations. Developed countries are only required to "take the lead" in "mobilizing" these funds, which can come from private finance, multilateral development banks, and other "alternative" sources.

As multiple states including Colombia, Sierra Leone, and Seychelles emphasized during the ICJ hearings, this vagueness disproportionately impacts debt-stressed nations already struggling to fund climate action. If rich countries can pass the buck to the private sector and Global South, the most climate-vulnerable nations may be forced to take on more loans and private investment schemes rather than grants, deepening the historic debt crisis already affecting 93% of them.

Private finance cannot cover the costs of climate action in the Global South. That approach has been tested and failed. Nor can carbon markets fill the gap. Yet, the deal leaves the door open to carbon finance being wrongly counted as climate finance, allowing polluters to claim other countries' climate action as their own through carbon offsets rather than requiring them to pay up and phase out fossil fuels at home. With under 16% of carbon credits currently achieving actual emission reductions, this doesn't underwrite climate ambition, it undermines it.

It's too little: Contrary to what UNFCCC lead Simon Stiell has suggested, what was agreed at COP29 is not a tripling of climate finance. When adjusted for inflation, the $300 billion target is no meaningful increase compared to the $100 billion annually promised by 2020—which rich countries failed to meet. As the decision's own preamble acknowledges, the scale of need in developing countries is on the order of trillions, not billions, annually for climate action between now and 2030. And that figure is neither unreasonable nor out of reach. For context, rich nations currently spend $378 billion yearly on fossil fuel subsidies alone, and fossil fuel companies raked in an average of over $1 trillion in annual profits over the last 10 years. The money exists—it's just being invested in climate destruction rather than climate action.

It's too late: Waiting until 2035 for full implementation of climate finance goals essentially writes off this critical decade for climate action.

The inadequacy of this climate finance deal means planning for failure when it comes to fossil fuel phaseout, and therefore locking in climate catastrophe. The necessary global transition away from fossil fuels can't happen at the speed and scale required unless the biggest polluters pay. The ink has barely dried on the agreement, and wealthy nations are already on the offense. E.U. Climate Commissioner Woebke Hoekstra suggested in De Telegraaf that the E.U. could reduce its share of climate finance contributions since "other country contributions count too." Meanwhile, U.K. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband reframed the entire deal as an "investment opportunity," suggesting that private sector funding could cover the bill—precisely the kind of responsibility-shifting the agreement's language enables. Hoekstra celebrates the deal as 'the start of a new era for climate finance'. Sadly, this is true. A new era where the E.U., U.K., and other rich nations dodge their responsibility to pay—one where everyone is responsible and thus no one is.

But we know rich countries can deliver the grants they owe to the Global South. They can raise well over $5 trillion a year by ending fossil fuel handouts, taxing the rich, and changing unfair global financial rules.

We also know failing to provide needed climate finance doesn't just condemn Global South countries suffering most acutely from a crisis they didn't create. It undermines our collective future.

As the International Court of Justice deliberates on states' climate obligations, this inadequate finance deal illustrates exactly why judicial scrutiny and legal clarity is needed. The world cannot afford another decade of wealthy nations dodging their responsibilities while climate disasters mount.

We reject this deal for what it is—a carefully constructed escape hatch for wealthy nations. It's high time for the biggest polluters to stop hiding behind voluntary pledges and using the climate regime to protect themselves from climate accountability, rather than to protect people and the planet from climate destruction. Rich countries must pay up for the climate action needed to halt the climate crisis they have created and remedy the climate harms that they have inflicted. Doing so is not just a moral imperative, it's a legal obligation.

Syria, known throughout history as the “crossroads of civilization,” now finds itself at a crossroads of its own. After 54 years, the Assad family’s brutal dictatorship in Syria has finally ended.

“I never thought I’d live to see this day,” said my dad, who left Aleppo as a teenager. My parents grew up there.

After Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia, elated Syrians rejoiced in the streets. Moving videos emerged of political prisoners being freed after enduring decades of torture in the regime’s notorious prisons. The whereabouts of many still remain unknown.

In addition to respecting Syria’s territorial integrity and the aspirations of its people in a future government, the U.S. should immediately lift all sanctions on Syria to help with reconstruction and economic recovery.

Assad’s fall is undeniably worth celebrating—it’s a rare unifying force for a deeply fractured country. But after decades of oppression and 14 years of war, it will take much more to heal these wounds and guarantee a new era of freedom, justice, prosperity, and reconciliation.

The popular uprising for Syrian dignity that ignited in March 2011 was violently crushed by Assad and morphed into several proxy wars involving Russia, Iran, Israel, the U.S., Turkey, and numerous armed groups, including al Qaeda-linked terrorists.

Heinous war crimes and other human rights violations were committed by all parties throughout the war, which has killed over 350,000 people. In the world’s largest forced displacement crisis, over 13 million Syrians have either fled their country or have been displaced within its borders.

The war has damaged Syria’s infrastructure while Western sanctions have further shattered Syria’s economy. Poverty is widespread, and more than half of the population currently grapples with food insecurity.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), once allied with al Qaeda in Syria, was largely responsible for Assad’s overthrow on December 8. Designated by the U.S as a terrorist organization, HTS has its own track record of brutality in Syria. The rebel group’s leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, founded the Al Nusra Front, once had ties to ISIS, and still has a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head.

Jolani has since renounced his ties with al Qaeda and recently said he supports religious pluralism in Syria. But it’s reasonable to be skeptical that HTS and its allies are now truly committed to freedom, justice, and human rights for all long-suffering Syrians.

Still, foreign occupation and intervention are antithetical to a sovereign and “free” Syria.

Following Assad’s fall, Israel has launched hundreds of airstrikes and unlawfully seized more territory beyond its illegal, 57-year occupation of Syria’s Golan Heights. Whether Turkey gives up occupied land in northern Syria also remains to be seen, especially if Syrian Kurds end up forming an autonomous region within the country.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military still occupies part of Syria, including the oil fields in the northeast, and it’s unclear when the U.S. will withdraw its remaining 900 soldiers. In addition to respecting Syria’s territorial integrity and the aspirations of its people in a future government, the U.S. should immediately lift all sanctions on Syria to help with reconstruction and economic recovery.

As a Syrian American, I try to remain hopeful as I think about my relatives in Aleppo, friends in Damascus, and the generous strangers who’ve taken care of me as their own when I’ve visited. I look forward to returning to a Syria where people can finally breathe, rebuild, and live in dignity. But I also fear for the future.

Syrians have always taken pride in their rich ethnic and religious diversity. An inclusive and democratic government that guarantees the equal rights of all Syrians is essential to ensuring that the country stays unified and doesn’t plunge into sectarian chaos. It would be tragic if one authoritarian ruler is replaced by another or the country becomes balkanized into armed factions.

While much remains uncertain and immense challenges are ahead, prioritizing the immediate needs of Syrians is a logical first step. And, more than anything else, we must ensure that the Syrian people are the ones who steer the destiny of a peaceful, post-war Syria that reflects their remarkable resilience, courage, hopes, and dreams.

Corporate executives worried about becoming the targets of the next Brian Thompson-style killing of those who run an evil company have to choose between a chance of losing their lives versus the certainty of making more profits.

The post Greed Has Good Odds first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post Greed Has Good Odds appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The shooting death of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson has sparked a national conversation about the state of healthcare in the United States. The accused shooter, Luigi Mangione, allegedly wrote a manifesto in which he pointed out that the U.S. has low life expectancy despite paying the highest costs for healthcare in the world. And he appears to have lit a fuse as “Wanted” posters have gone up on the city streets depicting other health insurance company executives accused of putting profits before their clients’ health at the same time Thompson’s bereaved family laid one of the most despised dead people in America to rest.

“The TMI Show”’s resident leftist Ted Rall, guest co-host Robby West and guest Steve Gill, a conservative talk host, discuss Health Insurance Horror Stories, the future of for-profit healthcare under Trump and what, if anything, could be done to reduce Americans’ anger at a system that ought to be helping them.

The post TMI Show Ep 36: “Health Insurance Horror Stories” first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 36: “Health Insurance Horror Stories” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Before hanging on December, 2, 1859, John Brown slipped a note to a jailer:

“I, John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty, land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without verry much bloodshed; it might be done."

Many abolitionists had painfully reached the same conclusion – the institution of slavery had become too entrenched, powerful and emboldened to be disassembled by means of rational discourse, or moral appeal.

Slavery is not, in the literal sense, the issue today, but the decidedly inevitable manner in which present day events drag the suffering masses hopelessly along, evokes a parallel set of themes to those that confronted John Brown 165 years ago. At what point do crimes of wealth, power and profit, committed by the rulers of society at the expense of those who have no means of defense, reach a moral tipping point? When does the polite habit of acquiescence reach a place and time where a significant portion of the public accepts that the usual means of redress via debate and politics no longer offers relief from intolerable suffering? This question had a simple, unquestionable answer for John Brown.

Violence may be everywhere in the US - school shootings, random gun violence, chemical toxins, proxy wars, domestic abuse, suicides, drug overdoses and, pointedly, an epic and endless body count from systemic medical neglect - but we have not seen a single recent act of violence purposefully launched against the corporate powers that assault vulnerable people, until last week. Slavery and the genocidal obliteration of the indigenous population may be America's "original sins," but now we have an environmental catastrophe synchronized with growing levels of poverty and a US military budget that sucks up every spare dime of tax payer cash. Are we really on the cusp of Armageddon, and, if so, when does violent resistance become morally justifiable?

Mangione escaped on an electric bicycle, but the act appears to have peeled back the repressed veneer of passivity and resignation that characterize the mindset of America, and revealed a shocking substrate of U.S. collective distress.

Violent acts carried out on behalf of systematically brutalized victims have been so vanishingly rare in U.S. history, that John Brown's unsuccessful raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859 may well be the only such peacetime event that has ever had lasting impact on our national fate.

We know, of course, that Brown's attempt to arm slaves, and use captured weapons from the attacked federal armory at Harper's Ferry (as a means to spark a widespread insurrection against the economic institute of slavery) had been destined to fail. In the end, Brown and his men were quickly defeated and captured. Brown sustained serious wounds from a sabre and two of his three sons were killed in the fighting against soldiers led by Robert E. Lee. Frederick Douglas refused Brown's invitation to join the insurrection - Douglas deemed the plan to be suicidal. The Harper's Ferry raid was put down in days with 16 deaths—10 were members of Brown's group. The "raid" took place in October of 1859, Brown's trial unfolded in November, and he was hanged before a large assortment of soldiers and onlookers on December, 2, 1859. Nonetheless, Browns unsuccessful raid had attached itself to the gears and pulleys of history—slavery was done for.

I am, like most observers, struggling to find historical context for the absolutely remarkable events in the past few days in which a heretofore anonymous young man, Luigi Mangione, assassinated UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson on a New York City street. Mangione escaped on an electric bicycle, but the act appears to have peeled back the repressed veneer of passivity and resignation that characterize the mindset of America, and revealed a shocking substrate of U.S. collective distress.

Jokes, snark, celebration and the almost instant lauding of the assassin have reverberated across social media. For a nation so morally confused, lost and numbed that the public willfully handed a mandate to the mediocre, bumbling fascist, Donald Trump, a mere month ago, it appears almost surrealistic to contemplate both the quantity and the quality of resentment that smolders beneath our seeming national mood of defeat. The referendum on violence as a viable form of redress has been - as it was immediately following the events of Harper's Ferry 165 years ago - proven to be unresolved and ongoing.

Unlike John Brown, who had been a major public figure - a celebrity and vibrant voice on the issue of slavery long before his capture at Harper's Ferry - Mangione emerged out of nowhere to (perhaps inadvertently) represent millions of dispossessed, voiceless individuals. While the act of assassinating a major perpetrator in the bloodbath of the US predatory health insurance industry seemed, in retrospect, likely to open up societal rifts, few could have predicted how pitched and strident the public outcry would be.

Songs lauding Mangione's assassination of Thompson have gone viral on the internet. "Free Luigi," has become a meme. T-shirts with the slogan "Deny, Defend, Depose"—written on the bullet casings from Mangione's fatal shots—have been printed on t-shirts that sell for $25 on many sites. Other shirts have Luigi Mangione written in script across a picture of the video game character, Luigi, holding a gun. Another shirt portrays a child holding a machine gun with the slogan, "Universal Healthcare, Let's Give It A Shot". It is indeed ironic that Mangione’s anti-corporate deed should inspire so much entrepreneurial zeal.

One of the verses of a Jonathan Mann song posted on YouTube begins with the following verse:

You can draw a straight line
As straight as they come
From the misery of millions
To Brian Thompson
Under his leadership Profits rose
And all that it cost was a million gravestones

Some have labeled Mangione a folk hero, but if John Brown's legacy proves at all prophetic, pundits, politicians and anonymous keyboard warriors will battle to shape Luigi Mangione into a collection of caricatured interpretations.

Charles J.G. Griffin, offers this from a 2009 paper entitled, 'John Brown's "Madness"':

"But on one point, at least, a great many of Brown’s contemporaries were agreed: Brown himself was almost certainly “mad.” In pulpits, public meetings, and a significant number of the nation’s 4,000 newspapers, North and South, Brown was routinely judged to be “deluded,” “fanatical,” “maniacal,” or “crazed.”........Some pointed to heredity or personal tragedy as the source of Brown’s derangement, dismissing Harper’s Ferry as a frightening but isolated incident. Others saw Brown as a man driven to insanity by the words or deeds of others, arguing that the raid was representative of the increasingly chaotic and irrational state of the Union itself. And still others believed that Brown’s mania was divinely inspired, his raid a providential intervention into the nation’s affairs."

It would seem, from two of the most famous depictions of John Brown - by Frederick Douglas and by Henry David Thoreau - that those who lauded Brown regarded him as quite sane. Thoreau, in his "A Plea for John Brown," written shortly before Brown's trial said this:

"Many, no doubt, are well disposed, but sluggish by constitution and by habit, and they cannot conceive of a man who is actuated by higher motives than they are. Accordingly they pronounce this man insane, for they know that they could never act as he does, as long as they are themselves."

It should be noted that Thoreau's admiration for Brown was unequivocal. Unlike the pundits of today, who feel absolutely mandated to offer a condemnation of violence as a sort of rhetorical tic, Thoreau, well known as a seminal figure in the evolution of non-violent resistance, never tempers his admiration for Brown with doubts about the captured hero's chosen methods.

Frederick Douglass, speaking at the graduation ceremony at Storer College 21 years after John Brown's execution had this to say:

"The crown of martyrdom is high, far beyond the reach of ordinary mortals, . . . Cold, calculating and unspiritual as most of us are, we are not wholly insensible to real greatness; and when we are brought in contact with a man of commanding mold, towering high and alone above the millions, free from all conventional fetters, true to his own moral convictions, a “law unto himself,” ready to suffer misconstruction, ignoring torture and death for what he believes to be right, we are compelled to do him homage."

Douglass, like Thoreau, observed that ordinary human beings must contemplate heroes from behind a veil of their own limitations.

But what about Luigi Mangione? Should we be universally obligated to first offer a reflexive disavowal of violence before we even begin to unpack his significance? We are just beginning to learn a little bit about Mangione - that he comes from a privileged background, that he has a masters in engineering from an Ivy League school. We also have reason to believe that he is unusually thoughtful and cautious for a man who took the mortal risk that not one in 330 million US residents had taken. In his review of Theodore (The Unabomber) Kaczynski's manifesto he wrote:

"Fossil fuel companies actively suppress anything that stands in their way and within a generation or two, it will begin costing human lives by greater and greater magnitudes until the earth is just a flaming ball orbiting third from the sun. Peaceful protest is outright ignored, economic protest isn't possible in the current system, so how long until we recognize that violence against those who lead us to such destruction is justified as self defense."

While partial approval of the unabomber's societal formulations may not be a good look from a public relations standpoint, Mangione's assessment of the current human predicament rather follows the standard model proposed by any number of responsible climate scientists—the only difference is the proposal that violence may be the only intervention to stymy the fossil fuel extinction juggernaut.

Where do we set the moral threshold of violence?

I had suggested, as a thought experiment—before Mangione's capture—that we view the assassination of Brian Thompson as having a parallel to the 1942 killing of Nazi monster Reinhard Heydrich. Few of us would feel comfortable condemning Czech assassin, Jan Kubis, for hurling a fatal grenade at Heydrich's Mercedes in the May, 27, 1942 assault that took out the architect of Nazi genocide. Political violence summons violent retribution that ordinary people like myself have no willingness to risk. In Kubis' case, he met his last moments face to face with 800 machinegun wielding SS troops. Mangione is certain to spend the rest of his gifted life behind bars if he is not killed in custody.

Is it okay to kill Heydrich, but not Thompson? Where do we set the moral threshold of violence?

The quest has already begun to reduce Mangione to a generic lunatic. Cable news is awash with public psychiatrists eager to pronounce him with a neat mental health diagnosis. As such, the past effort to "insane wash" John Brown is being brought out of historical mothballs. The editors of Counterpunch have just published Mangione's alleged "manifesto," and I am struck by the measured, rational, modest tone of this single paragraph:

“To the Feds, I’ll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”

In preparation for this piece I read the section in Martin Luther King's autobiography discussing the dialogue between MLK and Malcolm X—a rhetorical confrontation ironically cut short by the assassination of both men. I learned that MLK was not entirely comfortable with merely a "moral" argument on behalf of non-violence - he also felt compelled to make a practical point - that the Black community lacked the force of numbers and preparedness to challenge the militarized state.

As a lifelong believer in nonviolent civil disobedience, I am not comfortable at all advocating for political violence, but, like Thoreau, I feel that I have no right to condemn those like John Brown or Luigi Mangione who invest their entire being toward the goal of liberation. Objectively, I wonder if nonviolence and violence are opposites or, rather, shades of one another, complementary tactics working in tandem. When MLK was murdered, people rioted for almost two weeks and 43 people died.

It is likely true that a vibrant population might manifest its determination with both acts of civil disobedience and violence. The more fearful and repressive a society becomes, the smaller the window for civil disobedience. I suggest that political writers, rather than condemning violence as a glabella reflex, ought to be analyzing the viability of peaceful protest. Luigi Mangione tells us that peaceful protest has no effect on corporate malice.

It is too early to know how significant a historical figure Luigi Mangione will ultimately become. The American news cycle can obliterate almost any event in short order. It seems, at this point in time, that Mangione has ripped open the skin enclosing a vast repository of popular rage. One hopes that his violent act summons the force of sustained civil disobedience - general strikes, public protests, non-payment of taxes and a willingness to bring the corporate machinery of death to a grinding halt. The fact that people can suddenly imagine such improbable things is, in and of itself, astonishing. Two weeks ago we were effectively dead.

This morning 10 AM ET on the TMI Show with Ted Rall and Manila Chan, with Guest Steve Gill: Your Health Insurance Horror Stories! Email a short audio clip of your story to: TMIShowQuestion@yahoo.com. We’ll play it on air and react. youtube.com/@TMInfoShow

The post Your Horror Story Wanted first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post Your Horror Story Wanted appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

That depends on whether or not the Democratic Party brand is hopelessly tarnished for the majority of working people.

Since 2012, and maybe before that, the Democrats have been losing their traditional base of lower-income workers. In each presidential election since, the percentage of those earning $50k or below has fallen for the Democrats. As Matthew Karp writes in the New Left Review,

Republican gains were largest at the very bottom, diminishing with every upward rung: twelve points from voters making under $25,000, ten points from those making between $25,000 and $50,000, seven points from those making between $50,000 and $75,000, and five points from those making between $75,000 and $100,000."

It’s not all that hard to understand why the working class is giving up on the Democrats. As Sherrod Brown discovered in Ohio, 30 years after NAFTA, he was still confronting the destruction it wrought:

And I go back to Democrats over the last 30 years — essentially since NAFTA. Democrats have historically been the party of workers, but I’ve seen that support erode from workers because Democrats haven’t focused on workers the way that we should over the last 30 years…. But what really mattered is: I still heard in the Mahoning Valley, in the Miami Valley, I still heard during the campaign about NAFTA.

I’ve seen that erosion of American jobs and I’ve seen the middle class shrink. People have to blame someone. And it’s been Democrats.

Rather than finding ways to prevent corporate greed from destroying millions upon millions of jobs, key Democrats said out loud what many had been privately thinking: Workers are turning on us because they are essentially racists. Thus began a process of blaming the very victims of massive job dislocation that the Democrats failed to mitigate for their base.

Working-class voters are walking away. Maybe we should be listening to them.

Hillary Clinton made that clear in 2016:

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.

(My book, Wall Street’s War on Workers, conclusively shows that the white members of the working class have become decidedly more liberal, not illiberal, on divisive social issues over the last several decades.)

Senator Chuck Schumer then turned the loss of working-class voters into a virtue:

For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.

Not quite enough, it seems. The Democrats lost Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, plus Michigan, to Trump in 2016 and again in 2024.

Working-class voters of all shades and ethnicities are moving closer together in their political perceptions as they defect from the Democratic Party. According to Karp’s reporting:

White voters in the MAGA era have been remarkably consistent: 55 per cent backed Trump in 2016, 55 per cent in 2020, and now 56 per cent in 2024. In racial and ethnic terms, Trump’s decisive gains this year came among African Americans, where his support jumped from eight to 16 per cent, and Latinos, where it grew from 35 to 43 percent. A range of further analysis suggests that Trump also made large if uneven national advances among Asian and Native American voters.

Meanwhile, research by the Center for Working Class Politics has shown that strong populist messaging was the best way to reach working class voters in Pennsylvania. They were ignored by the Democrats, who instead chose the least effective message: Protecting democracy.

Furthermore, in a recent study they show that “among working-class voters, hypothetical candidates with elite or upper-class backgrounds performed significantly worse than candidates from humbler backgrounds.”

The very strong run for the U.S. Senate by former labor leader Dan Osborn in Nebraska is elevating the idea that more working-class people should run. In fact, he is setting up the Working-Class Heroes Fund to support such candidates.

Should these new working-class populists run as Democrats? That’s the question that is tripping up left-liberals, the highly educated progressives who feel strong affinities with those in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, especially the technicians who help determine policy. They share values, concepts, ideological frameworks, and overall perceptions of how power functions in American society. Together they share the belief that the Democratic Party can be reformed so that it once again becomes the party of the working-class.

I think we will find that working people are hungry for an act of defiance against a system that repeatedly rewards political and economic elites at their expense.

Just writing that sentence makes me cringe. I’ve heard it again and again over the last half-century. There’s never a good time to break. There always another reason not to. Third parties fail. They become spoilers like Ralph Nader. The rules are stacked against independents. It costs too much. It’s just an act of virtue signaling since you will lose. A fusion ballot line that fights hard in the primaries and then supports Democrats is a better way to influence the Party. Pressuring, rather than bolting from them, is the only way to gain influence in the real world of politics. And on and on and on. I’m sure you can add many of your own.

Meanwhile, working-class voters are walking away. Maybe we should be listening to them. Maybe we should be engaging in a forthright dialogue about how they perceive the Democrats and how they would like to move forward.

I think we will find that working people are hungry for an act of defiance against a system that repeatedly rewards political and economic elites at their expense. As Bernie Sanders has said so many times,

The American people are sick and tired of corporate greed. They are sick and tired of record levels of income and wealth inequality.

What do working people really want to see from working class candidates? Here is one question I hope to ask in a working-class survey that will be run in the near future:

Imagine that Jane Smith, a respected union electrician in the auto industry, wants to run for Congress in Michigan. Her platform centers on protecting and enhancing wages, benefits and job security for all working people against the ravages of corporate greed.

She is trying to decide whether to run as a Democrat, Republican, or Independent. What would you advise?

I wonder what working people will say. Actually, I wonder what you would say.

On November 21, 2024, the House of Representatives passed bill H.R. 9495, the “Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act” and passed it to the Senate for consideration.

The bill contains two separate elements, one of which is not controversial and another which is highly controversial.

The first part of the legislation proposes to postpone the tax obligations of Americans being held hostage overseas. It seems fair and right and has almost universal bipartisan support.

It’s already illegal for NGOs in this country to support terrorism, so one intent of HR 9495 must be to limit democratic participation that makes legislators uncomfortable.

The second piece of the bill would allow the Secretary of the Treasury to, unilaterally and with no concrete justification, designate nonprofits as “terrorist supporting organizations.” These organizations would then lose their nonprofit status. As the ACLU has pointed out, any community news outfit, university, or civil association targeted by this law would be required to prove Treasury’s error in order to reclaim their tax-exempt status. By then, of course, the damage would have been done. The scarlet letter “T” would likely haunt the organization for as long as it attempted to act in the world. The potential effects of HR 9495, however, extend far beyond the fates of a handful of nonprofits.

This bill echoes one passed near the end of President Richard Nixon’s first year as president. President Nixon and his surrogates pitched their Tax Reform Act of 1969 in populist terms. It would, they said, prevent millionaires from squirreling away money in foundations and nonprofits in order to dodge paying their fair share to the common good. What really drove the passage of the bill, however, was another concern. Major foundations, including the Ford Foundation, had been contributing to President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” and his mission to bring the nation’s poor in from the “outskirts of hope.” President Johnson had called for the “maximum feasible participation” of poor people in the democratic politics of their localities, states, and the nation. With funding from the Office of Economic Opportunity and Ford, the voices of the poor and marginalized were being heard. Cleveland elected its first Black mayor. Parents in Bedford Stuyvesant took control of the public schools. And in Durham and Greensboro, as well as in rural North Carolina counties, foundation-funded organizers were helping poor and working people, Black and white, to make coherent demands that would improve their lives and the lives of their children.

Threatened political and business bosses saw in Nixon an ally who could help them maintain their grip on power, as they reinforced the president’s grievance-driven “silent majority” with race-baiting and red-baiting tactics. Meanwhile, Roy Wilkins, the director of the NAACP, saw the Tax Reform Act of 1969 for what it was. “Negro citizens,” he wrote in a New York Times op-ed, “are not deceived by the ‘tax reform’ label. They view the move (and rightly so) as an attempt to halt the increase of Negro voting strength.”

After the passage of the Tax Reform Act, over 200,000 people lost nonprofit jobs funded by the OEO and private foundations. Beyond the economic impact of the law, powerful government and private institutions cut ties with committed activists, causing many of these activists to lose faith in the country’s commitment to broadening our democracy. This pushed some of them to imagine ever-more radical solutions beyond the voting booth, even stirring in a few dreams of overthrowing the American government.

When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in 1831 and 1832, he saw American associations as “fundamental” to our democracy. They give voice to our citizens’ myriad thoughts, concerns, and creative ideas for improving lives and the laws that govern them; nonprofits inspire and improve democratic debate.

As the Tax Reform Act of 1969 siphoned the political power from associations, HR 9495 seems designed for political purposes, to limit debate about the most pressing issues—war, climate, economic access—our country faces today. It’s already illegal for NGOs in this country to support terrorism, so one intent of HR 9495 must be to limit democratic participation that makes legislators uncomfortable.

Before they vote, we should make sure our Senators realize that by shutting people up, they will damage our democracy. They may even push some to more desperate, provocative, and unruly attempts to be heard. Instead of reducing social conflict, passing HR 9495 could well increase it.