A few years ago, Noam Chomsky warned about the return of fascism in contemporary capitalist societies. He pointed out that 40 years of neoliberal policies—a one-sided class war launched by the business class and its allies against the working people, the poor, the minorities, the young, and the old—had produced massive levels of inequality and increased social tension, “yielding a breeding ground for extremism, violence, hatred, search for scapegoats—and fertile terrain for authoritarian figures who can posture as the savior.” Thus, as he put it, “We’re on the road to a form of neofascism.”

However, it is specifically the economic and political repercussions of the financial crisis of 2007-08 that originated in the United States as a result of the collapse of the U.S. housing market and then spread to the rest of the Western world through linkages in the global financial system that became a catalyst for the revival of ultranationalism and the surge of authoritarianism and far-right parties and movements across advanced capitalist democracies. Parties that were either non-existent or struggling to gain political legitimacy and mass popularity were propelled into the political mainstream in record time. As has been pointed out, many of the most prominent far-right parties in Europe today, such as those in Germany and Italy, are “children of financial crises.” The financial crisis of 2008 is also the primary factor behind the transformation of Hungary under Victor Orban into the most far-right nation in Europe.

In the United States, it was the Obama administration with its big bailouts for financial institutions and broken promises that set the stage for the rise of Trumpism by breeding citizen disillusionment with the government. The pandemic and the subsequent economic disruption, combined with the widespread protests over the death of George Floyd and President Donald Trump’s own response to the crisis with threats to use the military against protesters, led to a Biden victory over Trump in 2020. Young voters and progressives helped former President Joe Biden win even though he campaigned with a centrist strategy and refused to back policies such as universal healthcare and a wealth tax, which were being advocated by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), respectively.

For the past 40 years, neoliberal capitalism has been hard at work in making people think not like citizens but rather like consumers.

Yet, Biden’s electoral victory in 2020 did not mean that Trumpism had been defeated. Trump had been spewing racism and hate from the moment he entered politics, and his promise to “drain the swamp” resonated with many voters who, like their counterparts across Europe, were fed up with politics as usual and were looking toward a public figure, a savior, who would confront the despicable elites. Unfortunately, citizens in contemporary capitalist democracies can be as easily duped, perhaps even more so, as those living under a dictatorship. But the Democrats lost the 2024 election not so much because of inflation but rather because of the disastrous Kamala Harris campaign in which she totally threw the working people under the bus. As a result, she helped Trump make gains among almost all demographic groups, including African American and Latino voters who have been traditional supporters of the Democratic party, and triumph in all the seven swing states. Her campaign confirmed the suspicions of many that the Democrats have become the party of the elites. Indeed, even voters who previously backed the Democrats see the party as unwilling to fight for people and “overly focused on diversity and the elites,” according to new research by the progressive group Navigator Research.

Fed up with politics as usual and deteriorating socioeconomic conditions, voters who have thrown their support behind far-right politicians appear not to be overly concerned with the drift of liberal democracies toward authoritarianism. For instance, polling shows that the majority of U.S. citizens support mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. European countries have also been adopting deadly border policies as many of the continent’s citizens demand stronger border controls. In Germany, for instance, the conservatives even worked together with the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) in passing a non-binding motion calling for drastic restrictions on migration. Thankfully enough, the German parliament rejected the immigration bill by 350 votes to 338, with five abstentions.

What the drift toward authoritarianism says about the state of liberal democracy in the Western world is hardly encouraging news. Neoliberal capitalism has weakened in enormous and profound ways both the institutions and the culture of a democratic polity. Under neoliberal capitalism, liberal democracy has lost its capacity to respond to the needs of the working people. Economic liberalization, deregulation, privatization, and the dictatorship of finance capital (reinforced in the Anglo-Saxon context through the ideological prism of social Darwinism) have forced social democracy on the retreat across the Western world. In its turn, popular mainstream media reinforces the neoliberal ideology in multiple ways, such as by what Noam Chomsky calls “the strategy of distraction” and by “treating the public like children.”

For the past 40 years, neoliberal capitalism has been hard at work in making people think not like citizens but rather like consumers. A citizen is one who participates in the affairs of the polity and is concerned for the well-being of his or her community and the weak and most vulnerable among us. A consumer is one whose identity and values are with reference to the self and has surrendered power to the market and to those who make the ultimate decisions for his or her wants and needs. The first is active while the latter is passive. The nearly 90 million eligible U.S. voters who did not vote in the 2024 presidential election are consumers or what people in the classical city-state of Athens called idiotes—that is, the private individuals who did not hold office and did not participate in public affairs. Incidentally, it is from the Greek word ἰδιώτης that we get the contemporary English word “idiot.”

Indeed, one could credibly argue that the U.S. is now on track to having a full-fledged neofascist regime because nearly 90 million eligible voters opted to skip the 2024 presidential election, while millions who did vote for Trump did so out of pure ignorance as to what Trump represents. Acting like an emperor and engaging in colossal acts of cruelty toward the weak and the vulnerable surely gives enormous pleasure and satisfaction to those racists and bigots that make up such a huge part of the MAGA movement, but this fact alone also reveals the rather exceptional fragility of U.S. democracy, since it rests on a political culture that is obviously incapable of escaping its racists roots. Trump’s efforts to end diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs are deeply rooted in racism and will only make U.S. society less tolerant toward the “Other” and thus even more racist.

Ultimately, the most critical question is how we fight back against neofascism in the U.S. right now. Fascism is not inevitable. It reared its ugly head in the past and was ultimately defeated everywhere by people who refused to subordinate themselves to a brutal and hateful form of politics. But the fact that it is still rearing its ugly head all over the Western world today is clear proof that neoliberal capitalism has failed to keep fascism at bay. Increased protectionism, chauvinism, jingoism, and repression are objectively necessary for a system that thrives on exploitation and by widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots, all the while engaging in a vicious assault on the public sector.

Trump 2.0 is an unmistakably neofascist administration that will be run by highly dangerous and unqualified cabinet appointees. A left resistance to Trump’s neofascist regime is vital but must be based on a political struggle that merges with every other struggle. The anti-fascist movement that must emerge against the tactics of the Trump 2.0 presidency should build strong alliances between workers, women, minorities, and environmentalists. The struggle for workers’ rights, women’s rights, minority rights, and LGBTQ rights are all part of the same struggle against 21st-century neofascism, a movement that wishes to turn back the clock.

Thus, creating an anti-fascist mass movement that merges different struggles is of the utmost importance. We should not forget that fascism in the past came to power after assuming the character of a mass movement. It is the same now. Trumpism is a reactionary social movement, and we may not be that far away from becoming a witness to the emergence of an army of modern blackshirts, especially since the pardoning of Capitol attackers has sent a clear message to white supremacists across this country that the current government is on their side.

As the renowned communist and feminist leader Clara Zetkin argued more than 100 years ago, fascism was “an expression of the decay and disintegration of the capitalist economy…”

The same can be said today in reference to the rise of neofascism. It is an expression of the inherent political, economic, and social contradictions of capital accumulation under a neoliberal regime.

Zetkin saw “fascism as the strongest, most concentrated, and classic expression… of the world bourgeoisie’s general offensive.” Accordingly, she concluded that “the struggle against fascism must be taken up by the entire proletariat.”

The same goes today. The struggle against neofascism in the U.S. must be taken by all those whose rights are being targeted under the second Trump administration. And the strategy to do so is the united front, as Clara Zetkin would surely have advocated if she were alive today.

In late January, the Trump administration forcibly repatriated Colombian nationals via military aircraft, allegedly shackling them and depriving them of basic necessities, all without trial. In a racist nod to his nativist base, U.S. President Donald Trump boasted on Truth Social that the migrants were "CRIMINALS."

While Trump's behavior is outrageous, and should be condemned widely, it also presents an opportunity for the left in Colombia, and Latin America, to push for further autonomy.

In a nation of militarized borders, hypersurveillance, and a cruel immigration system, millions of Latin Americans enter the U.S. illegally seeking refuge or economic opportunity. Latin American borders, by contrast, tend to be more porous, with irregular crossings common during geopolitical crises. When the Simón Bolívar International Bridge between Colombia and Venezuela closed amid diplomatic tensions, "Colombovenezolanos" regularly crossed through jungles and mountains to trade, study, work, and visit loved ones. I witnessed this firsthand at the bridge's reopening in the early days of Gustavo Petro's presidency.

To ensure this transition benefits the region, the left must actively counter right-wing efforts to realign Latin America with fascist, oligarchical U.S. interests.

Most Colombian immigrants (including irregular migrants) to the U.S. are not criminals; the majority crossing are economic migrants and asylum seekers. Yet Trump's imagery equates them with convicted terrorists bound for Guantánamo Bay—ironic given that he just issued an order to sending 30,000 migrants to the island for extrajudiciary detention.

There is a clear double standard here. Trump, himself civilly liable for rape and closely tied to serial rapist Jeffrey Epstein, has supported far-right terrorist groups and pardoned 1,500 insurrectionists who attempted to overthrow a democratic election on January 6, 2021. He prioritizes prosecuting brown immigrants over actual criminals.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro condemned the flights as violations of Colombian sovereignty and human rights, initially refusing to accept them. In retaliation, Trump imposed severe economic measures: a 25% tariff on all goods, a travel ban, sanctions on government officials and their allies, and extra screening at all U.S. ports of entry. Facing economic devastation and fearing further mistreatment of 1.5 million Colombians in the U.S., Petro relented.

In a passionate rebuke, the former M-19 guerrilla leader implored Trump to recognize Colombians' humanity, noting that despite U.S. efforts to repress its neighbors, Colombia has long resisted foreign domination, and thrived while doing so.

This is nothing new. The Monroe Doctrine, framed as protection against European colonization, was weaponized to oppose Simón Bolívar's dreams of regional unity and independence. The U.S. backed the United Fruit Company during the 1928 Banana Massacre, pressured the Colombian government into violent crackdowns on labor strikes, and played a major role in counterinsurgency efforts during La Violencia. The War on Drugs further entrenched U.S. intervention, with operations like the killing of Pablo Escobar more about American dominance than narcotics control—with U.S. drug consumption continuing to increase and the government arming and financing drug traffickers in Latin America and elsewhere. The U.S. also supported far-right paramilitaries and corrupt leaders in Colombia, including former President Álvaro Uribe, whose administration faced numerous allegations of ties to death squads.

Such blatant nativism has a long-term cost: U.S. regional influence. Despite the U.S.-Colombia trade war cooling off, the wheels of shifting regional power have already been put into motion. Though Colombia remains a key U.S. ally, Trump's aggression accelerates a preexisting shift, namely, Latin America's decoupling from the U.S., and the rise of polycentrism, or multiple powers competing over influence within Latin America. Colombia is increasingly diversifying its foreign relations, seeking partnerships that align with its national interests, values, and autonomy.

Across Latin America, left-wing and center-left democratic governments—from Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil to Bolivia, Uruguay, Honduras, Guatemala, Chile, and Peru—are reducing their reliance on Washington. Many regional leaders are reconsidering U.S. arms purchases, shifting defense contracts elsewhere. MERCOSUR and U.S. free trade negotiations have stalled, replaced by deepening ties with the E.U., China, and internal regional alliances. U.S. infrastructure and economic initiatives pale in comparison with China's growing investment, while the E.U. expands its footprint in public projects. Several Latin American countries, including Mexico, have already issued threats of retaliation against Trump's tariffs and repatriation flights.

Some right-wing governments, though a minority, still kowtow to Trump. Argentina's Javier Milei and El Salvador's Nayib Bukele have become MAGA darlings. Meanwhile, far-right movements are gaining traction in Colombia, Chile, Peru, and possibly Brazil, threatening polycentrism's progress. Their electoral victories would erode regional leverage against Trump and other authoritarian figures pursuing nativist agendas. Still, the broader trajectory favors a regional shift, with right-wing governments struggling to reverse course against broader trends. That shift will be best ushered in by the pro-democratic left.

Latin America's history is one of continuous resistance against imperial powers—Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and now the U.S. For over two centuries, Washington has acted as a bully in its own backyard, orchestrating coups, backing dictators, and fueling instability to protect military and corporate interests. Trump's aggression is simply the Monroe Doctrine on steroids. Yet this overreach may finally push Colombia and other Latin American nations toward genuine self-determination.

This moment presents a strategic opening for the Latin American left. Historically, even progressive leaders like Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Michelle Bachelet treated the U.S. as a well-intentioned partner. That illusion has now fully shattered. With Trump exposing the naked self-interest of American Empire, its moral credibility in Latin America has collapsed. Washington's warnings about Chinese, Russian, or Iranian influence in the region now ring hollow—despite those states' extensive human rights abuses and extreme authoritarianism. Leftists in the region have long opposed U.S. imperialism, but today, that skepticism is near-universal, save for local fascists, oligarchs, and their enablers. If harnessed effectively, this disillusionment can propel Latin America toward true autonomy and bottom-up development.

Bilateral cooperation between the U.S. and Colombia is important, but there is simply no middle ground with fascism, and democracy must be defended, regardless of political expediency in the short-term. Under Trump, the U.S. is not just seen as lacking any moral character but as politically unstable, led by an idiocratic elite class. Despite their own obvious flaws, China, the E.U., and other regional partners offer a lower-risk, higher-reward alternative. By doubling down on racism, imperialism, and aggression, Trump accelerates America's decline in Latin America.

Whether the U.S. makes this a seamless transition to polycentrism or, like many other dead Empires, decides to go down swinging by further opening up the veins of Latin America, remains to be seen. If history is any guide, the latter is more likely—to the detriment of peace, human rights, and self-determination everywhere.

To ensure this transition benefits the region, the left must actively counter right-wing efforts to realign Latin America with fascist, oligarchical U.S. interests. This means solidifying regional economic and political alternatives, bolstering diplomatic unity against American coercion, and deploying the grassroots base against U.S.-backed reactionary forces. Only through concerted action can Latin America fully unshackle itself from imperial influence and forge a future of genuine sovereignty, justice, and development for all.

The dominant self-conception of the Jewish story is innocence, repeated persecutions, and then redemption by creation of the Jewish nationalist State of Israel.

This narrative is critically examined in Peter Beinart's new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning.

Beinart's book says the maudlin story we Jews tell ourselves of our virtue and heroic endurance inoculates Jews from seeing Israel's agency in creating the resistance it faces: "We must now tell a new story to answer the horror that a Jewish country has perpetrated… We are not history's permanent virtuous victims."

The predicted consequence of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine to Jews in "diaspora" is happening. Jews feel they are being scrutinized and called to account for Israel's actions, on campuses and in the streets worldwide.

Beinart, former editor of The New Republic, is now an editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, and a New York Times contributor.

He has been in a 20-year progression of seeing, more and more sharply, the "Jewish and democratic" state of Israel as anti-democratic and incompatible with Jewish tradition.

He writes that support for a Jewish state has become "idolatry," permitting endless killing, torture, and oppression of Palestinians "There is no limit. No matter how many Palestinians die, they do not tip the scales, because the value of a Palestinian is finite and the value of a Jewish state is infinite."

Contemporary Jewish life is filled with that idolatry, he observes: "In most of the Jewish world today, rejecting Jewish statehood is a greater heresy than rejecting Judaism itself."

The book attributes the horrors imposed on 2 million human beings in Gaza not only to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) but to Jews: "Worshipping a country that elevates Jews over Palestinians replaces Judaism's universal God—who makes special demands on Jews but cherishes all people–with a tribal deity that considers Jewish life precious and Palestinian life cheap."

Beinart is not playing the peekaboo game of saying Jews are not responsible for Israel, and the other half of the time saying Israel is the Jewish State.

He's not saying "all Jews," but fairly saying "representative," "mainstream" Jewish organizations worldwide are now Zionist. Anti-Zionist organizations are dissident.

He observes that many synagogues have an Israeli flag on the bima (platform where the Torah is read) "and a prayer for Israel in the liturgy."

It was predicted and warned about, as the Zionist movement grew, that the effect of creating a Jewish nation-state would be Jews being seen in the light of that state's actions.

The predicted consequence of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine to Jews in "diaspora" is happening. Jews feel they are being scrutinized and called to account for Israel's actions, on campuses and in the streets worldwide.

Beinart places the Hamas violence of October 7, 2023 in context, as consistent with the history of suppressed peoples without peaceful means to contest their status, as is seen in slave revolts and anticolonial guerilla wars.

I note that Beinart's thoughts are resonant with what, almost 100 years ago, historian and then-Zionist Hans Kohn wrote of 1929 anti-Jewish riots after 12 years of Zionist colonization in Palestine under British authority:

We pretend to be innocent victims. Of course the Arabs attacked us in August… They perpetrated all the barbaric acts that are characteristic of a colonial revolt… We have been in Palestine for 12 years [since the Balfour Declaration] without having even once made a serious attempt at seeking through negotiations the consent of the Indigenous people.

Israeli retribution since October 7, 2023 on the 2 million-plus population of Gaza and their means of life—homes, utilities, schools, universities, hospitals—has officially resulted in over 46,000 deaths and innumerable injuries directly from IDF attacks.

The medical journal Lancet estimates deaths as likely much higher, counting "deaths from starvation, disease, or cold."

Most of the population of Gaza was made homeless, huddled in improvised shelters, pushed by IDF warnings from one "safe zone" to another, often then bombed.

Beinart's book is an analysis of Zionist apologetics that are necessary to both regard oneself as moral and defend what Israel has done, from the 1947-49 Nakba—terroristic expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from their communities within present-day Israel—to Gaza in 2025.

He denounces dehumanizing, demonizing, Zionist lies about Palestinian resistance: "These claims don't withstand even modest scrutiny. They're less arguments than talismans. They ward off dangerous emotions like grief and shame."

Using the model of the dismantling of apartheid South Africa, he tries to envision what principles could heal Palestine :

The details matter, but they matter less than the underlying principles. Wherever they live together, Jews and Palestinians should live under the same law. And they should work to repair the injustices of the past. The Israelis who were made refugees on October 7 should be allowed to go home. And the Palestinians who were made refugees in 1948 should be allowed to go home. Historical wrongs can never be fully undone. But the more sincere the effort, the greater the reconciliation that ensues.

This would be a radical reconception of Jewish life in Palestine, that in abandoning the role of conquerors, Jews may live as Jewish Palestinians. He makes the point that whites relinquishing apartheid was a more peaceful process for South Africa than having it overthrown.

In the summary chapter of the book, Beinart says Israel's conduct is from a heretical Jewish tendency to believe Jewish people are sacred, rather than people with extra obligations: "So what if a few dreamers in Moorish Spain or the Silesian shtetl [Eastern European Jewish village] consoled themselves with the idea that deep within us lies a special spark of the divine? They didn't have the power to do anything about it."

This self-deification, first proposed by an Israelite named Korach, who challenged Moses' leadership, hadn't mattered as much until the creation of "Jewish" national power: "All that changed with the creation of Israel. Only once Jews control a state with life-and-death power over millions of non-Jews does Korach's claim of intrinsic Jewish sanctity become truly dangerous."

Beinart calls for liberation for Jews from the Zionist doctrine that Jews are only victims, never victimizers: "We can lift the weight that oppressing Palestinians imposes on Jewish Israelis, and indirectly, on Jews around the world… We can lay down the burden of seeing ourselves as the perennial victims of a Jew-hating world."

More than level of observance or denomination, the question of Zionism is going to be a fault line in Jewish fellowship, Beinart believes:

Remove Jewish statehood from Jewish identity and, for many Jews around the world, it's not clear what is left. But the benefit of recognizing that Jews are not fundamentally different from other people is that it allows us to learn from their experience. Jewish exceptionalism is less exceptional than we think. We are not the only people to use a story of victimhood to justify supremacy.

Israel's perpetual peril is the Arab population it has displaced but not exterminated. They are determined to redeem their birthright to live as freely in Palestine as Jews do.

Instead of conquest, Beinart proposes a model of restraint, cooperation, and respect—along a line of Jewish thinkers from Ahad Ha'am to Judah Magnes to Albert Einstein.

Many of the visions for Jewish settlement in Palestine were universalist and pacific.

In 1927, Zionist writer (and Chaim Weizmann protege) Maurice Samuel mused, in his book I, The Jew, that Jewish civilization "for 60 generations" demonstrated "that neither conquest or oppression was necessary to its survival… a group can survive without mass murder."

Whether trauma or hubris allows Zionists in Israel and elsewhere to trust that model—finding the image of God even in their "enemies"—is the question.

Since the election, two themes have recurred in analyses of the current political moment: Pundits are calling on progressive political leaders to abandon so-called identity politics and center working-class concerns, and others are defining this election as a potential realignment of political parties.

We and our colleagues at Dēmos are laser-focused on this drumbeat because it strikes at the core of our mission to build a just, inclusive, multi-racial democracy and economy where ordinary people hold power.

Working class is as much an identity as gender, religious affiliation, immigrant status, place, race, and ethnicity. All of us hold multiple identities. But in the political context, “identity politics” is often a dog whistle for Black and brown communities or members of the LGBTQIA+ community. Political leaders and pundits’ calls to deprioritize communities of color and marginalized groups distort the nation’s power dynamic and risk sidelining voices working to build a more equitable society. Such takes also pretend the far-right offers credible solutions to pressing economic issues while minimizing the critical role progressives play in challenging the systems that drive economic inequality. Any critique of movement or “identity politics” without a power analysis misses the forest for the trees.

Average incomes will not increase as more corporations shut down their DEI offices.

Last month, Demos released its Power Scorecard, a data-driven tool that tests our core theory: Political and economic power are inextricably linked, and one is predictive of the other. The tool ranks and measures people power in all 50 states (called a power score) by examining 30 indicators of economic well-being and 30 indicators of civic and democratic vitality. Some economic measures include the percentage of households that can cover everyday costs, avoid debt, maintain stable housing, and access affordable childcare. Measures of civic vitality include voter turnout, percentage of unopposed elections, ease of voting, and descriptive representation in government.

Our findings shed light on how conditions in each state influence the agency and control ordinary people exert in our democracy and economy. Common threads among the highest-ranked states include lower rates of child poverty and incarceration, less concentrated poverty, a greater percentage of workers represented by unions, higher voter turnout rates, and more state checks on corporate contributions to political candidates.

We could not disaggregate data by race for all indicators, but a limited analysis reveals “identity groups” are most disempowered in all states. This is not surprising, and it’s precisely why progressive activists advocate for bold, structural changes such as living wages, access to healthcare as a human right, expanded labor rights and protections, and policies to curb corporate power. And yes, they also call for political leaders to address racial and gender inequalities. Movement activism is rooted in the understanding that economic disparity, systemic racism, and gender inequality are interconnected problems requiring interconnected solutions.

We are aware that opinion polling over the last couple of years continuously revealed voters’ worries about their ability to make ends meet and financially get ahead. Policymakers on all sides of the political spectrum should heed these concerns. But as political leaders assess their messaging failures and policy disconnects, they must avoid the convenience of tunnel vision or public discourse that falsely suggest “identity groups” wield undue or disproportionate influence. Working-class people of all races are constrained by a system in which economic and political power are concentrated in the hands of an elite few.

As much as progressives are agitating to dismantle economic and racial disparities, a well-funded opposition is invested in maintaining a power structure that bends to the will of the wealthy and powerful. The far-right may have successfully tapped into some voters’ frustrations, but their policy proposals will exacerbate economic polarization and diminish ordinary people’s political power. Their standard bearers continue to favor tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, weakening unions, and restricting access to the ballot. If progressive political leaders acquiesce to calls to sideline “identity groups,” they will alienate the very movement voices working to address root causes of economic insecurity. Culture wars are a divisive political tactic, not an economic policy solution.

To put a finer point on it, average incomes will not increase as more corporations shut down their DEI offices. Housing will not be more affordable due to mass deportation. Grocery prices will not decline due to state legislation banning transgender people from public bathrooms. And tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations will not and have never trickled down to ordinary people.

Black and brown communities bear a disproportionate share of economic hardship, from unaffordable housing and inflationary pressure on consumer goods to exploitative labor practices. There are historical and ongoing systemic reasons for this disparity—a historical record that the far-right is actively trying to erase with book bans and factually diluted K-12 curriculums. Ignoring these complicated truths in the name of appealing to an idealized working-class voter devoid of any identity is a failing strategy—and the people who will suffer most are working-class voters of all races and identities.

Progressive leaders must reject false choices rooted in the idea that social and economic advancement is a zero-sum game or that working-class people must spar over scraps while all the spoils go to the elite few. Instead, they should amplify the voices of those actively challenging systems that sustain social injustice and vast economic inequality.

For decades now, the growth rate of America’s largest fortunes has dwarfed the growth rate of our total national wealth. The political power those massive fortunes can now buy has pushed us perilously close to oligarchy. Billionaires, as we now see, are dominating the new Trump administration.

America’s total household wealth, since 2014, has roughly doubled, increasing from about $80 trillion in 2014 to about $160 trillion today. Over that same period, the wealth of America’s eight richest individuals—average net worth, over $200 billion—has more than quadrupled, jumping from $390 billion in 2014 to $1.7 trillion today.

In other words, over just the last decade, the ultra-billionaire share of our nation’s wealth has more than doubled. If you’re an American citizen, your chance of becoming a billionaire? Less than 1 in 42 million.

The gains flowing to the holders of these assets—billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk—currently enjoy some of our tax system’s lowest tax rates.

Back in 1982, the year the annual Forbes list of America’s 400 richest made its debut, the entire 400 did not hold, collectively, even a full 1% of the nation’s wealth. Today just our top eight richest alone now hold that 1%.

At the root of this march to oligarchy sit two factors. The first, the simple formula the French economist Thomas Piketty made famous a decade ago in his masterworkCapital in the 21st Century: r > g. The basic truth here: The rate of return on the investments of our richest, Piketty’s r, regularly runs greater than the rate of overall economic growth, his g.

The second factor: A gaping U.S. tax loophole I like to refer to as “buy-hold for decades-sell” allows the investment gains of the ultra-rich to compound for decades without facing taxation.

Let’s put these two factors together. The reality of r > g means that if our taxes don’t adequately trim the rate of growth in the wealth of the richest Americans, their share of the nation’s wealth will inevitably increase, with no upper limit to that increase. Left unchecked by taxation and other policy choices we might choose to make as a nation, the share of our wealth that America’s top 1% hold—currently about 34%—could easily reach 50%.

That 50% happens to be the share of our nation’s wealth that our top 1% held on the eve of the Great Depression way back in 1929.

To prevent undue wealth concentration, stats like these make clear, our tax system must operate to reduce the pre-tax rate of return on capital to an after-tax rate of return that doesn’t cause wealth to concentrate. But unless we close the buy-hold for decades-sell loophole, that will be next to impossible.

Why? America’s largest fortunes rest on assets that have appreciated over time at a rapid clip. The gains flowing to the holders of these assets—billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk—currently enjoy some of our tax system’s lowest tax rates.

How could that be? Consider an investor who purchased $100,000 of Microsoft shares in 1986, after the company went public. That investment would be worth about $430 million today. The ample return on that investment would be nowhere near the return flowing to Bill Gates and his pals who received Microsoft stock before the company went public. But that $100,000 investment would still show an awesome rate of return, some 23.9% per year, compounded annually.

So, for that lucky investor holding those Microsoft shares from 39 years ago, Piketty’s “r”—before tax—would be over 23%.

Over that same period from 1986 to today, our nation’s total household wealth, adjusted for population growth, has increased at a rate of between 5 and 6% per year. This growth rate—calculated after taxes—doesn’t quite give us an exact apples-to-apples comparison with that Microsoft investor’s 23.9% wealth growth rate. To make the comparison apples-to-apples, we would need to account for our investor’s tax liability.

How impactful would that tax liability turn out to be? A lot less than you might think.

Take the absolute worst-case scenario, tax-wise, for the investor: a sale today of the entire holding of Microsoft shares purchased way back in 1986. That would trigger a federal income tax liability of 23.8% on the investor’s $429,900,000 gain, about $102 million in total tax. That tax would reduce our investor’s annual rate of return to about 23.1%.

Wait, what? The income tax on a long-held, highly profitable investment only reduces the pre-tax rate of return by a single percentage point?

Yup. Think about our investor’s situation this way. If the growth in the value of the investor’s shares faced an annual tax of just 3.3%, and the investor sold 0.65% of the shares each year to pay the tax, the investor would be in the same exact position at the end of the 39 years. Put another way, that 23.8% tax at the end of a 39-year holding period translates to an effective annual tax rate of 3.3%.

Over 39 years, to put things in still another way, our investor’s share of the nation’s wealth would have increased over 300-fold.

Now consider what would happen if we increased the tax rate applicable to long-term capital gains to the maximum rate applicable to ordinary income, currently 40.8%. That one-time tax at the end of 39 years would leave our investor with an after-tax return on investment of 22 %.

What does this still quite robust 22% return tell us? Simply this: We need to look elsewhere for the biggest weakness in our tax system. So let’s try considering the tax end-game if our hypothetical Microsoft investor faced an annual tax rate of 23.8% on the increased value of his investment. That would leave him with an after-tax wealth pile at the end of the 39 years totaling about $68 million . To achieve the same result with a one-time tax on the gain from the sale of the shares at the end of 39 years would require a tax rate of 84.2%.

Few investors ever achieve an annual 23.9% growth rate over the long-term. But the wealth of some American billionaires has actually grown at twice that rate. These billionaires are achieving enormous rates of growth in their wealth, a growth that goes untaxed for decades. The tax they eventually do pay—when they sell their assets—translates into a minuscule effective annual rate of tax on their investment gains.

We can and we should do away with the current preferential rate of tax applicable to investment gains. But unless we close the buy-hold for decades-sell loophole, the wealth of our nation’s billionaires and their political power will both continue to metastasize—and obliterate our pretensions to democracy.

Convicted felon Donald Trump has declared war on Americans. In less than two weeks, he has become the dictator, a role he celebrated in his campaign. He is using illegal executive orders as poisoned spears against just about every program the federal government administers to advance the health, safety, and economic well-being of all Americans.

Until temporarily enjoined by a federal court, Trump pushed to cut all monies that fund schools, housing, nutrition programs, and healthcare—especially Medicaid for over 80 million children, women, and men and the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). Essentially, he and his minions are going berserk, smashing the law, tearing up our Constitution, and inviting lawsuits which they can delay, with your tax dollars, until they reach Trump’s handpicked corrupt U.S. Supreme Court cronies.

The media can scarcely keep up with just listing the vicious cruelty of Der Fuhrer driven by vengeance and greed arising out of his deeply unstable egomania. Trump’s abuses of power can be divided into three categories:

1. Driving to destroy the historic safety net leads to a collective homicide. Yes, without food, healthcare, and safety initiatives, Americans will die or get sick, whether they voted for Trump or not;
2. Omnicide coming from directly shutting down federal agencies and their cooperation with other nations (quitting the Paris climate accords) from continuing the fight against climate violence and the accelerating intensity of wildfires, floods, droughts, hurricanes, extreme heat waves, and rising sea levels, and subordinating renewable energy to greenhouse gas-producing fossil fuels. Trump also quit the World Health Organization and froze federal programs working to foresee and forestall deadly pandemics;
3. Genocide by continuing former President Joe Biden’s co-belligerency with mass killer and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and adding support for the expulsion of the remaining survivors in Gaza to their death in the desert. Add these criminal mayhems to the censorship or persecution of anyone who opposes Trump.

With his fascistic henchmen (assured of Trump’s pardons for any criminal actions) to head the FBI and other crackdown agencies, he is unleashing a police state the likes of which American history has not seen since the days of slavery. The Trumpsters are also enabling expansion of private corporate prisons to incarcerate his enemies.

Together with Elon Musk, the Trump administration is moving to turn the civil service back into the spoils system. Musk is also going berserk, offering out-of-nowhere 2 million federal employees buyouts with pay until September. This is totally crazy, illegal, and dictated by a private mega-billionaire. You may remember the former Musk who warned about global warming and lethally out of control robots (AI).

These moves are part of a purge of experienced public servants, who serve people every day, to be replaced by the tribunes and agents of the corporate state or the final takeover of our government, by big business, with Trump at its head.

Right now, Trump, the failed gambling czar in the White House, and his minions think they are invincible. The GOP in Congress is cowed. The courts are Trump’s at the top level, and if they balk, he issues pardons. Who’s going to stop him and the rampaging Trumpsters?

In a word, The People. Already his polls are dropping. Under direct threat by Trump, the mass media is not all going to turn into Fox News. The stories of the pain, deprivation, and chaotic sadism imposed on totally innocent American families and workers will generate spontaneous resistance that translates into lower consumer buying amid higher inflation and the instability that small businesses dread. Even Chambers of Commerce will recoil at yet more tax dollars being unavailable for public infrastructure and instead going for more weapons of mass destruction to enlarge the military state.

All of this is to say that the demented Trump is deeply un-American as he touts America seizing the Panama Canal and Greenland, together with his designs on Canada.

Unless he changes course, he will be brought down by corruption throughout his ranks, plunging polls, resistance by many states and their attorneys general, and finally by a Congressional GOP realizing that it is their political skin or Trump’s. They will choose their own political survival.

Remember, during the Watergate scandal in 1974, a delegation of Republican Senators went to the White House and told then-President Richard Nixon that his time was up and that he had to resign for far, far fewer transgressions.

Trump knows no boundaries, no self-restraint, and has often declared that he will do whatever he wants, meaning operating in massive violation of the laws of our land. He is now ruling by dictates that are getting more sweeping and penetrating by the day. He should read a history book.

LIVE at 12 noon Eastern today, Streaming 24-7 thereafter:

It’s Trump’s second week as president and he’s a busy boy. He’s expanding Guantánamo Concentration Camp to accommodate as many as 36,000 migrants in perpetuity, working on ways to get a third term, firing the inspectors general and running roughshod over the hapless Democrats who still seem to think they shouldn’t change a thing.

Editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) could talk about all that and more. And maybe they will. But this is a Political Potpourri episode in which they’re going to roll open mic style: whatever comes to mind is what will come up.

 

The post DMZ America Podcast Ep 191: Political Potpourri first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post DMZ America Podcast Ep 191: Political Potpourri appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Healthcare is big business in the United States. So big it can be hard to wrap your head around.

America’s largest healthcare company, the UnitedHealth Group, pulled in over $100 billion in revenue in just the fourth quarter of 2024 alone. For the full year, the giant’s insurance division, UnitedHealthcare, just reported record revenue of $298.2 billion.

These staggering revenue totals actually fell below investor expectations. Right after the announcement, UnitedHealth Group shares slipped 6% on the New York Stock Exchange.

The outpouring of anger after the December killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson—anger not at the shooting but at the company Thompson represented—shows just how many Americans are currently suffering under our privatized healthcare system.

That tells you a lot about what’s important in the healthcare industry: profit, not care. Health insurance companies in particular can only profit by paying out less in claims than they collect in premiums. And that means denying patients coverage for the care they need.

Just outside the New York Stock Exchange, victims of our for-profit healthcare system—doctors and patients alike—recently braved freezing temperatures to call out the suffering that engineered UnitedHealth’s exorbitant earnings.

One of those demonstrators, Jenn Coffey, has been battling complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS), a condition so incredibly painful that it’s often called the “suicide disease.”

UnitedHealth denied her the prior authorization needed to have her critically important treatment adequately covered. “UnitedHealthcare would rather leave me in torture than grant me the peace my infusions bring,” says Coffey. “I’m asking for a life worth dignity. I’m left begging for a life worth living.”

Several other speakers shared their deeply personal experiences with a healthcare system that far too often treats patients as disposable.

Dr. Toutou Moussa Diallo, a New York-based researcher and healthcare activist, detailed how insurance denials led to subpar treatment for his broken ankle that only made the initial injury more debilitating. Nephrologist Cheryl Kunis shared the story of a patient who died after UnitedHealthcare refused to cover a PET scan of a malignant neck tumor.

These experiences amount to much more than isolated one-off incidents. The outpouring of anger after the December killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson—anger not at the shooting but at the company Thompson represented—shows just how many Americans are currently suffering under our privatized healthcare system.

The ongoing campaign protesting how UnitedHealth does business began well before Thompson’s headline-grabbing killing. The Care Over Cost mobilization, led by People’s Action, has been organizing rallies protesting America’s biggest private insurers for years.

UnitedHealth has—for good reason—become the most powerful lightning rod for patient and medical staff critiques of how private insurers operate. The company’s gargantuan profits rest on decisions that regularly exploit patients at every opportunity.

Just a few snippets from recent news accounts offer a vivid picture about how UnitedHealth goes about making its billions.

UnitedHealth Group’s pharmacy benefit manager, Optum RX, marked up some cancer treatments by over 1,000%. UnitedHealthcare systematically limited access to critical treatments for children with autism to cut costs. And along with two other insurers, the company intentionally denied nursing care to patients covered by Medicare Advantage—all to maximize profit.

And how has the UnitedHealth Group been spending all its ill-gotten gains? One telling stat: UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty pocketed an astonishing $23.5 million in 2023 compensation.

As the rally in front of the New York Stock Exchange ended, protesters called on UnitedHealthcare to publicly release its claim denial rates, oppose federal tax cuts that would result in Medicaid service reductions, and end the company’s care-denying prior authorization requirements.

Those eminently reasonable demands for the company. Meanwhile, the rest of us should consider whether we want healthcare to be a tool for the public good—or just private profit.

As the Trump presidency digs its claws into the country—winner take all!—I look on in terrified amazement as he begins arrogantly instituting what can only be called his plan to devolve America back to the good old days: back to the era of Jim Crow certainty and whatever that might mean.

We’re white, we’re Christian, and we’re the best! Just ask Pete Hegseth.

This is the “Gulf of America”! It’s not President Donald Trump’s smugly renamed Gulf of Mexico; it’s the hole in the country’s collective consciousness, which Mr. President is hellbent on expanding. His plan is to make America safe for what it used to be and allow our old, beloved prejudices to return. Deport the illegals! Kill wokeness! Kill understanding and awareness!

All of which leaves a few glaring questions hovering over the daily news: How the hell did this guy win a majority of votes? Is he really aligned with the nation’s primary beliefs? And if he isn’t... uh, what happened last November? Was the election rigged? Was it stolen? And if so, how? Do we live in a publicly proclaimed—yet fake—democracy?

This is a fascinatingly awkward question to ask, considering what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. A portion of the MAGA base—spurred on by their leader, who instantly proclaimed “fraud!”—stormed the capital, busted its windows, tasered the police, clomped through the halls, left a gift of excrement on then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk, and politely asked that then-Vice President Mike Pence be hanged.

This time around, the Democrats had tea with the guy who beat them. They respected the transfer of power. They upheld our alleged democracy. But let’s be clear: There are questions that must be asked. Our system of government has serious flaws—it always has! And let’s be clear: When you’re in power–and want to stay in power—democracy, “the will of he people,” can be an enormous inconvenience.

All of which leads me to the amazing work of Greg Palast, who has been investigating the electoral process—tracking its flaws and lies–ever since the George W. Bush era. This time around, the essence of his analysis is this:

Trump lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the presidency with 286 electoral votes.

And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass “vigilante” challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.

This wasn’t done with the simple snap of a powerful finger. Palast outlines numerous efforts over the years, at numerous governmental levels (in particular, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia), to play games with the electoral process and interfere with—and outright eliminate—certain voters’ right to vote. These efforts include such tactics as rejecting mail-in ballots without valid reason, failing to enter newly registered voters in the voting rolls in time for them to vote in the presidential election, failing to count “provisional” ballots, and allowing registered voters to be challenged by ordinary citizens for extremely spurious reasons (e.g., their names match other names, such as a name in an obituary).

And who are these “certain voters” who are targeted? In essence, they’re voters of color: Black, Hispanic, Muslim or whatever, often identifiable as such by their names. And powerful Republicans target them because they’re statistically likely to vote Democratic.

And this brings up Palast’s recently released documentary: Vigilantes Inc.: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen, which is available for view online. The term “vigilante,” with all its violent, KKK-esque implications, refers to those ordinary (white) citizens who have volunteered to be Republican name-checkers, looking for any and all possible reasons to challenge... oh, let us say, people with names such as Jose Garcia or James Brown. Challenge them bureaucratically, so their legitimacy as voters may be rescinded.

What I found utterly compelling about Vigilantes Inc. is the race-based—and historical—context in which the vigilantism is carried out. This documentary is about far more than the 2024 election. America’s present-moment racism is put under the harsh, glaring light of its own past—its post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow-era past, when efforts to “get around the 15th Amendment” included not only poll taxes (for Blacks only) and spurious questions (“how many jellybeans in the jar?”), but also outright intimidation and vicious violence.

In the documentary, Palast interviews Black voters who were “disappeared” from the voting rolls, intimidated, threatened, arrested—and enwraps such actions in the country’s past. For instance, the story is told of 10 Black women who were elected to the school board in Quitman, Georgia, in the early 2000s, shortly after Brian Kemp became Georgia’s secretary of state. He accused them of stuffing tampered ballots into mailboxes. The women faced multi-year prison sentences. They were ultimately acquitted, but one of the women had considered suicide and another, who suffered from lupus, died in the midst of the ordeal.

The hell the women endured brought up memories for people in the area of the horrific lynching of 13 Blacks in southern Georgia nearly a century earlier. One of them was a woman, Mary Turner, who happened to be in her eighth month of pregnancy. A mob surrounded her, hung her from a tree—upside down–by her ankles, then cut open her abdomen, while she was still alive. The unborn child fell to the ground, where the mobbed killed it.

This documentary opens our souls. Oh my God, the past is still alive, but the film’s primary vision is transcendent. This is not a film of us vs. them, but of love and extraordinary courage: the courage—of so many people—to create the democracy the country has not yet become,

As the film ends, the narrator says: “But spirits drowned will rise. America is a haunted house and our ruling dynasties have gone to war with our ghosts—the ghosts of our history. Until America hears those spirits, neither they, nor we, will be set free.”

The billions of dollars poured into artificial intelligence, or AI, haven’t delivered on the technology’s promised revolutions, such as better medical treatment, advances in scientific research, or increased worker productivity.

So, the AI hype train purveys the underwhelming: slightly smarter phones, text-prompted graphics, and quicker report-writing (if the AI hasn’t made things up). Meanwhile, there’s a dark underside to the technology that goes unmentioned by AI’s carnival barkers—the widespread harm that AI presently causes low-income people.

AI and related technologies are used by governments, employers, landlords, banks, educators, and law enforcement to wrongly cut in-home caregiving services for disabled people; accuse unemployed workers of fraud; deny people housing, employment, or credit; take kids from loving parents and put them in foster care; intensify domestic violence and sexual abuse or harassment; label and mistreat middle- and high-school kids as likely dropouts or criminals; and falsely accuse Black and brown people of crimes.

With additional support from philanthropy and civil society, low-income communities and their advocates can better resist the immediate harms and build political power needed to achieve long-term protection against the ravages of AI.

All told, 92 million low-income people in the United States—those with incomes less than 200% of the federal poverty line—have some key aspect of life decided by AI, according to a new report by TechTonic Justice. This shift towards AI decision-making carries risks not present in the human-centered methods that precede them and defies all existing accountability mechanisms.

First, AI expands the scale of risk far beyond individual decision-makers. Sure, humans can make mistakes or be biased. But their reach is limited to the people they directly make decisions about. In cases of landlords, direct supervisors, or government caseworkers, that might top out at a few hundred people. But with AI, the risks of misapplied policies, coding errors, bias, or cruelty are centralized through the system and applied to masses of people ranging from several thousand to millions at a time.

Second, the use of AI and the reasons for its decisions are not easily known by the people subject to them. Government agencies and businesses often have no obligation to affirmatively disclose that they are using AI. And even if they do, they might not divulge the key information needed to understand how the systems work.

Third, the supposed sophistication of AI lends a cloak of rationality to policy decisions that are hostile to low-income people. This paves the way for further implementation of bad policy for these communities. Benefit cuts, such as those to in-home care services that I fought against for disabled people, are masked as objective determinations of need. Or workplace management and surveillance systems that undermine employee stability and safety pass as tools to maximize productivity. To invoke the proverb, AI wolves use sheep avatars.

The scale, opacity, and costuming of AI make harmful decisions difficult to fight on an individual level. How can you prove that AI was wrong if you don’t even know that it is being used or how it works? And, even if you do, will it matter when the AI’s decision is backed up by claims of statistical sophistication and validity, no matter how dubious?

On a broader level, existing accountability mechanisms don’t rein in harmful AI. AI-related scandals in public benefit systems haven’t turned into political liabilities for the governors in charge of failing Medicaid or Unemployment Insurance systems in Texas and Florida, for example. And the agency officials directly implementing such systems are often protected by the elected officials whose agendas they are executing.

Nor does the market discipline wayward AI uses against low-income people. One major developer of eligibility systems for state Medicaid programs has secured $6 billion in contracts even though its systems have failed in similar ways in multiple states. Likewise, a large data broker had no problem winning contracts with the federal government even after a security breach divulged the personal information of nearly 150 million Americans.

Existing laws similarly fall short. Without any meaningful AI-specific legislation, people must apply existing legal claims to the technology. Usually based on anti-discrimination laws or procedural requirements like getting adequate explanations for decisions, these claims are often available only after the harm has happened and offer limited relief. While such lawsuits have had some success, they alone are not the answer. After all, lawsuits are expensive; low-income people can’t afford attorneys; and quality, no-cost representation available through legal aid programs may not be able to meet the demand.

Right now, unaccountable AI systems make unchallengeable decisions about low-income people at unfathomable scales. Federal policymakers won’t make things better. The Trump administration quickly rescinded protective AI guidance that former U.S. President Joe Biden issued. And, with President Donald Trump and Congress favoring industry interests, short-term legislative fixes are unlikely.

Still, that doesn’t mean all hope is lost. Community-based resistance has long fueled social change. With additional support from philanthropy and civil society, low-income communities and their advocates can better resist the immediate harms and build political power needed to achieve long-term protection against the ravages of AI.

Organizations like mine, TechTonic Justice, will empower these frontline communities and advocates with battle-tested strategies that incorporate litigation, organizing, public education, narrative advocacy, and other dimensions of change-making. In the end, fighting from the ground up is our best hope to take AI-related injustice down.

We are told to carry on as if any of what we are living through these days is normal. We are repressed in the streets and in our homes. The objective is to repress our emotions, our histories, our backgrounds and our very minds. There is a war being waged on humanity by the elites that today hold a power comparable to the absolutist monarchies, including in what today are formal democracies. On the 18th and 19th of January we first joined to begin a push back, taking to the streets in The Surge in thirty three different cities across Europe and also in Bolivia and Uganda.

The fronts of the war led by elites on humanity are manifold: the ongoing climate onslaught, now a deliberate decision by governments and companies to drive humanity and the species that live in this planet towards collapse, the fascist bonanza paid for by economic power to maintain business as usual through the solidification of social classes, the hatred of ethnic, sexual and religious difference, and the direct war and genocide that we see happening in Palestine, with direct threats of a new all-out war between the so called world powers.

We see, on the eve of the inauguration of the embodiment of these existential threats, the direct connection between the deepening climate crisis, the rise of authoritarianism and fascism and the outbreak of extreme violence, war and genocide. Societies are burning through their deepest frailties. The cultural war by the far-right and its Tech Lords on any notion of equality, dignity and basic conviviality is an absolute war, waged inside societies in all countries, in all institutions, every smartphone, every family. The far-right is pushing societies as a whole towards the acceptance of barbarism and survival of the fittest. They are winning. The Trump-Musk presidency, which started on the 20th of January, is the latest battle that they won in this absolute war. They have recruited many more generals on their side: beyond the Tech Lords like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, they count on the far-right, conservatives, liberals and centrists to normalize barbarism and collapse. Yet, none of them are causes, all of them are consequences. The economic system in which we live was designed to exploit not only the working classes and the poor, but everything that can be turned into a commodity. The crumbling of the environment is a necessary consequence of capitalism and we see it in the atmosphere but also in the mines of Congo, the salt flats of Bolivia and many other places. When scarcity begins to loom, there are immediate direct consequences: the rise of authoritarianism, fascism and violence as the ultimate political tools, to repress any responses from the people and the working classes.

The genocide in Palestine by the Israeli state is a new model of conflict, adapted to these increasingly violent times. It is the proposal by a fascist government to other fascist governments on how to act in future conflicts. The Palestinian people, in all its dignity and resistance in the last decades, now suffers more than ever, under an internationally articulated offensive that counts on the support of all ancient slave masters and colonialists, that overtly revise their past with longing for a similar future. The freedom of the Palestinian people is not merely symbolic, it is decisive for the future of all.

What are we to do? In a moment of simplification and intellectual degradation of politics and society, we must embrace the diversity of our movements and the complexity of our world and our struggles. Most importantly, we must embrace their interconnectedness and articulate the need for an international struggle that unites peoples and movements across the world. We are activists and organizers from the antifascist, Palestine liberation, climate justice and peace movements and we acknowledge that none of our struggles can be won if the other is defeated. Moreover, we acknowledge that none of our struggles can be won in any one of our countries by themselves. We are internationalists and today say that without an internationalist movement we can have no expectation of winning. We acknowledge that we are all affected by these manifold crises in different ways and articulate the need to help each other. The rise of fascism, the climate crisis and the war path of the great powers can not be explained by any isolated national context, as isolated contexts simply do not exist. Global capitalism is in a structural crisis that is leading Humanity as a whole to its demise. We will not stand idle and watch it happen as if we were mere spectators of a show. We will act decisively, and urgently. We are living in a manifest historical emergency, with multiple crisis befalling our planet and its peoples. We can’t get stuck on procedural, sectarian, or movement-as-usual obstacles. There is nothing ordinary about the times we are living. We need to do extraordinary things to stop this war.

On the 18th and 19th of January we marched in Amsterdam, Angra do Heroísmo, Barcelona, Bergen, Bilbao, Brussels, Bucharest, Cochabamba, Faro, Granada, Hamburg, Ibiza, Innsbruck, Kampala, La Paz, Lisboa, London, Lugo, Luxembourg, Madrid, Málaga, Malmö, Murcia, Oslo, Palma de Mallorca, Saint-Étienne, Sevilla, Sofia, Soria, Stockholm, Villach, Valencia, Zaragozawill march, in at least nineteen cities across Europe - Amsterdam, Barcelona, Bilbao, Brussels, Bucharest, Faro, Granada, Hamburg, Ibiza, Innsbruck, Lisbon, London, Oslo, Sofia, Stockholm, València, Villach and Zaragoza, signalling the first moment in which these three movements came together.

We acknowledge other movements are missing here, and welcome a deepening of our analysis and its transformation into action. The march was the first moment. This April, in Brussels, we will hold a Congress to create a common political program. We urge others, from around the world, to join us. The Surge, a popular surge, an uprising from below, now begins.

Albert Henzler
Alex Considine
Amina Daschil
Britney Goméz
Cuca Esteves
Daniela Subtil
Diana Castro
João Camargo
Judith Pape
Karen Killeen
Kim Lê Quang
Leonor Canadas
Maria Bendler
Nell Crow
Sophia Pankenier
Willy Dreesen

It’s time to assess former U.S. President Joe Biden’s legacy. It has been a catastrophe. Or, worse.

Domestically, his most influential legacy is that he turned the country over to Donald Trump, the most repellant, dis-qualified, should’ve-been-easy-to-defeat candidate for president ever. It is the end of the epoch of liberal democracy and the beginning of an era of oligarchic fascism. Nothing less.

Internationally, he lost the U.S.’ proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, and scarred the U.S. forever as an unrepentant perpetrator of genocide. It is the end of post-Cold War primacy for the United States and the beginning of its persona as a rapacious, predatory rogue state that objectively disdains human rights, democracy, and the international rule of law. Nothing less.

The combination of the two effects amounts to a massive, unprecedented comedown, an unparalleled destruction for the U.S. in its own house, and in the world. It’s hard to see how either will ever be recovered. That is Biden’s essential legacy.

Domestically, Biden refused to prosecute Trump for his public attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The Brad Raffensperger tape was known about on January 3, 2021, more than two weeks before Biden ever even took office. You know the tape, “All I want is for you to find me 11,780 votes.” That is prima facia proof of federal election interference, a felony.

It is the end of post-Cold War primacy for the United States and the beginning of its persona as a rapacious, predatory rogue state that objectively disdains human rights, democracy, and the international rule of law. Nothing less.

Prosecution should have begun on January 20, 2021, the day Biden took office. Instead, Biden waited two-and-a-half years before even opening a formal investigation. It gave Trump more than enough time to run out the clock with his trademark Deny, Deflect, and Delay tactics.

Similarly, the matter of fake electors. They, too were uncovered even before Biden took office, when former Vice President Mike Pence refused to accept them on January 6, 2021. They, too were prima facia evidence of federal election interference, a felony. They, too, were left uninvestigated and unlitigated for two-and-a-half years, an unfathomable dereliction by the only person in world in a place to see that the law was simply enforced.

The damage to the country is incalculable. Trump will never face accountability. If Biden had simply done his job, Trump would now be sitting in an orange jumpsuit in some minimum security federal prison, instead of reveling in his second coronation. Biden ensured that the Rule of Law does not apply to the wily, wealthy, and powerful. In doing so, he undermined the public’s respect for and confidence in that Rule of Law.

Then, Biden’s refusal to step aside for a more able candidate in the 2024 election ensured that no one could mount a winning campaign. The psychotically delusional ego behind it—that he was busy running the world—is insufferable. And it was a conspiracy among all of the top ranks of the Democratic party to hide his infirmity, until it was no longer possible.

Let’s stipulate—with an overabundance of generosity—that former Vice President Kamala Harris did as good a job as she could. The most telling fact of the Democrats’ loss was that Trump won by just over 2 millions votes, while 19 million people who had voted for Biden in 2020 did not vote for Harris in 2024. By a roughly 3-to-1 margin—nearly 6 million people—those who stayed home reported that they would likely have come out and voted for Harris but for Biden’s support for the Israeli genocide.

There you have it. The Democrats’ own supporters would not support the Democratic nominee because of Biden’s unconscionable, barbaric, intractable policy in Gaza. Biden owns all of the dimensions of his party’s defeat and the loss of all of the branches of government to Trump. THAT is his domestic legacy. Nothing else matters.

Internationally, it is just as much of a debacle.

The Democrats began menacing Russia in 1994, when former President Bill Clinton announced the eastward expansion of NATO to include formerly Soviet-bloc countries. They continued it with the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine, in 2014, overthrowing a Russia-leaning government and installing a Western-leaning neo-fascist state. Biden was the Obama administration’s quarterback on that coup.

Biden, on the brink of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, refused to even discuss Russian President Vladimir Putin’s offer of a European-wide security framework. It was Biden’s Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin, who said that the U.S. wanted “to weaken Russia,” and make this invasion “a strategic failure for Russia.”

And it was the Biden administration that made colossal miscalculations about Russia’s military weakness, the U.S.’ military prowess, and the likely efficacy of economic sanctions. More than 500,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed, and almost $200 billion squandered, for that mistake. To put that into perspective, the U.S., with five times Ukraine’s population, quit Vietnam when, after eight years of fighting (not three years), it could no longer stomach the loss of 58,000 men.

The humiliation of the U.S. loss in Ukraine is not yet fully revealed because a formal settlement encoding the loss has not yet been reached. But most of the world’s nations are happy to have seen Russia bloody the U.S.’s nose.

Of all of the damages Biden inflicted on the U.S., none are as egregious, as unforgivable, or irreparable, as the damage to the U.S.’ reputation for his lusty, unremitting, sadistic support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

For a few weeks after Hamas’ October 7 attack, the Israeli response was framed as “self-defense.” But as Israeli officials publicly declared that they were going for expansion of the Israeli state, to Damascus, Syria, and beyond, it quickly became clear that a genocide was taking place.

The International Court of Justice said that a “plausible case” for genocide had been brought. The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the minister of defense. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch declared genocide. The Israeli human rights organization, B’Tselem, stated that ethnic cleansing was underway.

The worst part was Biden’s and Harris’ claim to be “working around the clock” for a cease-fire, when, in fact, he was encouraging the genocide while precisely working to prevent a cease-fire. A more perfidious, demonic pretense could not be contrived.

Thanks to Biden, the U.S. will never live down that it is a savage, predatory, genocidal state, enforcing by mass murder of innocent, defenseless women and children, the imposition of a Western colonial regime into a third world country in order to steal their land and the riches beneath it. All the world sees it. None will forget it.

Finally, lest anybody think I am some kind of crypto-conservative, I have voted for every Democratic presidential nominee since George McGovern, in 1972. It was the rank and file Democrats of Biden’s own party who expressed their revulsion of that party and Biden’s handiwork by staying away from the polls and handing Donald Trump the presidency and both houses of Congress.

If ever there was a searing, sanctimonious self-immolation in presidential politics, this was it and the costs are incalculable. The damage will reverberate for decades and might never be recovered.

It will be all but impossible for the Democratic Party to accept responsibility for the catastrophe it has inflicted on America, through its head, Joe Biden, and the complicity of all of the party’s upper echelon. It will, thus, ensure that nothing will change. We desperately need a new party that reflects the interests and needs of the American people and not those of the party’s corporate owners. Change cannot come too soon.

By Ralph Nader January 31, 2025 Convicted felon Donald Trump has declared war on Americans. In less than two weeks, he has become the dictator, a role he celebrated in his campaign. He is using illegal executive orders as poisoned spears against just about every program the federal government administers to advance the health, safety,…

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Video games have long been considered a waste of time and even a pernicious influence by many educators and political leaders in the establishment. In 2019, Gaming Disorder was even listed in the 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases. Gaming Disorder is “characterized by impaired control over gaming, increasing priority given to gaming over other activities to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other interests and daily activities.”

Not everyone was buying it. During the pandemic, new studies found that owning a game console and increased gameplay reduced psychological distress and improved life satisfaction among participants. The study found that spending just one extra hour each day playing video games was associated with an increase in mental health and life satisfaction.

On today’s “The TMI Show,” Manila Chan and Ted Rall ask gaming developer V.K. Samhith whether gaming ought to become part of psychological self-care.

 

The post TMI Show Ep 69: Video Games Are Good For You first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 69: Video Games Are Good For You appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Even as Donald Trump and his MAGA movement have seized virtually complete control of the Republican Party, there remain at least two factions competing for dominance of foreign policy: an isolationist gang and a warmongering interventionist cabal. The strains between them seemingly remain unresolved, and there are real strategic debates and disagreements about what direction Trump’s foreign policy should take.

But what Trump himself is signaling as most important—more than which side wins any particular debate—is the proud (re)commitment to an expansionist (and expanding) U.S. empire dominating the world. That commitment to imperialism, more explicit than we’ve seen for a while, remains a crucial unifying point among his supporters. Disagreements over whether to prioritize economic power and pressure vs. military threats and direct engagement—along with reliance on presidential fiat in either situation—matter far less than the strategic agreement on the ultimate goal.

Empire, after all, is not a new idea—Trump’s version is simply to be much more publicly embraced, indeed celebrated.

It started a few days before Christmas, less than a month before he would be sworn in as president. In a Phoenix speech and later in social media holiday greetings, Trump named the presents he was hoping for: Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal. (Soon he would add the Gulf of America and Denali, the “Tall One” in the local Indigenous language, now to be called Mt. McKinley once again, as it was before Biden officially recognized the name that the Koyukon people have called it for centuries.)

While old and new forms of colonialism are a longstanding part of U.S. history, the public pronouncement of a plan not only to carry the U.S. flag to new horizons, but actually to “expand our territory” is new for the 21st century.

As is so often the case with Trump, inconvenient facts—that Canada had no interest in becoming the 51st state, Greenland was not for sale, and the Panama Canal belonged to, well, Panama—had no bearing on his holiday wish list. And for a while it seemed that even in the context of his extremist plans (not to mention the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page opus of implementation instructions for those plans), Trump’s global aspirations seemed just a bit too far over the top to have to take them seriously.

The last time the Panama Canal was a U.S. electoral issue was almost 50 years ago, about three-quarters of a century after France began building the Canal in the 1880s. The U.S. had taken over the project in 1904, and the so-called “Canal Zone”—actually a piece of Panama’s own territory—remained a U.S. colony. Negotiations over ending U.S. control sputtered on and off for decades, and in 1976 Reagan tried to bolster his presidential campaign by loudly rejecting anything that smacked of “giving away” the canal. In language taken directly from the playbooks of far-right racist southern senators Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, Reagan thundered “we built it, we bought it, and we’re going to keep it.” It didn’t work. Treaties to end U.S. control of the Canal were signed a year later. And Reagan lost.

Trump had tried to buy Greenland during his first term, but the Greenlanders’ immediate “we’re open for business, not for sale” put an eventual stop to that campaign. And Canadian officials shrugged off the idea of a U.S.-Canadian union as a joke, something Trump had raised numerous times during his first term, only to be consistently rebuffed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

But then came Trump’s inaugural speech. Far from the traditional anodyne calls for post-electoral unity, and even going significantly beyond the “American carnage” themes of his first term, his 2025 speech included not only a full-throated proclamation of U.S. grievances and a glowing image of those problems disappearing under his presidency, but a clear checklist of what he planned to do to get there. It may have seemed laughable to hear Trump lusting after Canada and Greenland, but his vision of U.S. domination—global, not limited to the Arctic and our northern border—as laid out in his inauguration speech, indicates we need to take him and his imperial threats very seriously.

Trump described a set of multi-faceted, interconnected crises. At home, the U.S. government fails to protect its own citizens “but provides sanctuary and protection for dangerous criminals” that have illegally entered the United States. Our health care system doesn’t deliver for people but is the most expensive in the world. Our education system teaches children “to be ashamed of themselves … to hate our country.”

And internationally, the United States has allegedly been so feeble that other nations have taken advantage of our weakness.

But now, Trump went on, “America’s decline is over.” With him in the White House, a “golden age of America begins right now.”

“From this day forward,” he said, “our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world. We will be the envy of every nation, and we will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer.” In that golden age, the quests of empire will concurrently solve the domestic crises and make the U.S. “the envy of every nation.”

U.S. citizens, now emerging from both personal/national and global carnage, will soon see the simultaneous end to those crises as the country rebuilds its strength at home and reclaims its rightful hegemonic place in the world. “So as we liberate our nation, we will lead it to new heights of victory and success. We will not be deterred. Together, we will end the chronic disease epidemic and keep our children safe, healthy and disease free. The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation.”

And this homage to future growth was very direct—the kind of enlargement “that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons.” All the language of 19th century empire was there: “the spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts.” Americans are “explorers” and “pioneers.”

Despite the claimed long decline, Trump continues to weave U.S. exceptionalism through his rhetoric. “Our American ancestors turned a small group of colonies on the edge of a vast continent into a mighty republic of the most extraordinary citizens on Earth. No one comes close.”

Oh yes, Manifest Destiny and racist western expansion make explicit appearances, as “Americans pushed thousands of miles through a rugged land of untamed wilderness. They crossed deserts, scaled mountains, braved untold dangers, won the Wild West…” Indigenous peoples who were slaughtered to “tame” the land were not mentioned. Seizing half of what was then Mexico was ignored. “We are going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf America,” he said. Because it’s ours. Renaming the Alaska peak Mt. McKinley was not only an attack on the Indigenous communities who had long fought for Denali—it was also designed to honor the U.S. president responsible for expanding the U.S. empire across the oceans, claiming Cuba, Guam, Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.

And bringing his 19th century-style imperial dreams into the 21st century, Trump promised to “pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.” The moon isn’t good enough anymore. (Of course, at that mention the cameras all swiveled away from Trump to his tech-bro Elon Musk, ensconced with the rest of the billionaire boys club just behind the president.)

Those astronauts almost certainly won’t be sent by NASA, it will be Musk’s SpaceX or another private company that will plant the U.S. flag in space. Neo-colonial resource extractivism isn’t really as “neo” as it sometimes appears; the privatization of colonial exploration and land-seizures is actually an old story. Europe’s royals, in particular, often outsourced their colonial campaigns to private companies—Britain gave key rights to the British East India Company to claim India and encouraged the Jamestown settlement by the Virginia Company, the Dutch East India Company managed the colonization of Indonesia.

It was all done with the approval and collusion of the Roman Catholic church, whose 15th century Doctrine of Discovery assured Europe’s would-be explorers that any land inhabited by non-Christians—no exception for other planets—was fair game for colonial theft. It would not be until March 2023 that Pope Francis formally repudiated the doctrine—but apparently Trump never got the memo.

With a secretary of defense beholden to a president driven only by personal wealth and power, and unaccountable to any faction of the U.S. ruling class, the danger of a new military escalation looms.

So while old and new forms of colonialism are a longstanding part of U.S. history, the public pronouncement of a plan not only to carry the U.S. flag to new horizons, but actually to “expand our territory” is new for the 21st century. So while Trump’s calls for absorbing Canada, renaming the Gulf of Mexico, buying Greenland and/or reclaiming Panama’s canal may seem performative (and as specific examples do not seem like serious threats), they do reflect an eagerness to assert global as well as domestic power. And these broad commitments to a future of global domination do not even include the immediate international crises and challenges (Palestine, Ukraine, Taiwan) that Trump has pledged to “solve on day one” (or at least quickly), often at the expense of the peoples most impacted.

Certainly Trump’s long-threatened tariffs will be imposed as part of that power policy, supposedly to replace higher taxes on corporations and billionaires. In his inauguration speech, he bragged that “instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens. … It will be massive amounts of money pouring into our treasury coming from foreign sources.” Not quite the way tariffs work, of course.

But that doesn’t mean tariffs will replace the military. Trump’s plan, once he reverses all efforts to desegregate and build equity into the armed forces, is to “build the strongest military the world has ever seen.” Within 24 hours of his speech, he had issued an executive order to halt all foreign aid—leaving refugees who had gone through and passed exhaustive vetting by United Nations and United States agencies, and were in many cases en route to airports to catch flights to the U.S. to start their already-approved new lives, stuck in limbo with nowhere to turn for safety. But an exception was made to continue billions of dollars of military aid to Israel and to Egypt, and Trump made sure to reverse Biden’s May 2024 temporary hold on a shipment of additional 2,000-pound bombs Israel used to destroy homes and neighborhoods in Gaza and Lebanon.

And with the Senate’s confirmation of Pete Hegseth to head the Pentagon, the angry veteran accused of sexual assault and known for financial mismanagement and an utter lack of managerial experience is now empowered to oversee 3.2 million employees and overrule or get rid of any generals he finds annoying. This is the same man who called the rules of war “burdensome” and claimed they “make it impossible for us to win these wars.” Hegseth said he “thought very deeply about the balance between legality and lethality,” and clearly lethality won out. His job, as he understands it, is to ensure that the troops “have the opportunity to destroy…the enemy, and that lawyers aren’t the ones getting in the way.” Between that understanding, the power to dismiss officers who follow the laws of war, and Hegseth’s commitment to follow whatever Trump demands, the world may soon face a potentially out-of-control military, bolstered by 750+ military bases scattered across the globe and a budget approaching a trillion dollars.

With a secretary of defense beholden to a president driven only by personal wealth and power, and unaccountable to any faction of the U.S. ruling class, the danger of a new military escalation looms. At some rather random point in his speech Trump claimed that his “proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker.” But in his drive for empire, he will be describing an imperial scenario much closer to that passed down by the great historian Tacitus: “the Romans brought devastation, and they called it peace.”

On January 10, one day before the 23rd anniversary of its opening, a much-anticipated hearing was set to take place at the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility on the island of Cuba. After nearly 17 years of pretrial litigation, the prosecution of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or (KSM), the “mastermind” of the devastating attacks of September 11, 2001, seemed poised to achieve its ever-elusive goal of bringing his case to a conclusion. After three years of negotiations, the Pentagon had finally arranged a plea deal in the most significant case at Guantánamo. Along with two others accused of conspiring in the attacks of 9/11, KSM had agreed to plead guilty in exchange for the government replacing the death penalty with a life sentence.

After more than 50 pre-trial hearings and other related proceedings, Americans–and the victims’ families—would finally see closure for those three individuals who stood at the center of this country’s attempt to reckon legally with the 9/11 attacks.

More than 23 years after the 9/11 attacks, here we are in the very same place we’ve been for endless years—on pause again, despite the endless charade of forward steps that go nowhere.

Because of the fact that the defendants had been tortured at notorious CIA “black sites” before arriving at Guantánamo, the case had long been endlessly stalled. After all, so much of the evidence against them came from torture confessions. As it happens, such evidence is not admissible in court under U.S. or international law, or even under the rules of Guantánamo’s military commissions. For obvious reasons, it’s considered tainted information, “the fruit of the poisonous tree,” and so inadmissible in court. Although military commission prosecutors tried repeatedly over the years to find ways to introduce that all too tainted evidence at trial, attempts to do so failed time and again, repeatedly pushing potential trial dates years into the future. As a recently compiled Center on National Security chart shows, the forever delays in those hearings led to calendars of such length as to defy comprehension. In Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s case, for example, such delays have so far amounted to 870.7 weeks.

With the plea deal now set to come before Judge Matthew McCall, who had agreed to delay his retirement in an effort to see this case to its conclusion, attorneys, journalists, and victims’ family members boarded planes, preparing to witness the longed-for conclusion to a case that had seemed endless. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn, however, that the hearing never took place. Delay was again the name of the game. As it turned out, from the moment the plea deal was announced, it became the centerpiece of an intense battle launched by then-Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

What Happened

Two days after the August 2024 announcement of the plea deal by the “convening authority,” Brigadier General (Ret.) Susan Escallier, the Pentagon official in charge of the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay, Austin summarily overruled her, revoking the plea deal with little explanation and leaving experts and observers alike confused and disappointed. Had the secretary of defense not been consulted on the plea arrangement? That seemed unlikely. Had political pressure caused him to take such a drastic act? If so, then perhaps after the election he would change his mind and restore it. No such luck.

Whatever Austin’s motivation, Judge McCall refused to take “no” for an answer, declaring his revocation invalid.

McCall made it clear, instead, that he was moving forward. As the judge explained, in the memo that Austin had long ago issued appointing Escallier, he had attested to her independent authority. “Ms. Escallier shall exercise her independent legal discretion with regard to judicial acts and other duties of the Convening Authority.” But even as McCall prepared to go forward, Austin appealed to the Court of Military Commissions Review, asking it to rule that he did indeed have the authority to revoke the plea deal. However, that court then ruled that the secretary had improperly rescinded the deal after it had taken effect.

Still, he refused to give up, seeking help elsewhere. And he found it. On the eve of the scheduled hearing, the Department of Justice filed papers asking the D.C. Circuit Court to prohibit the Gitmo court from moving ahead and to stay proceedings while it contemplated the decision. Those who had flown to Guantánamo then returned home, and a new hearing was set for January 28th at the D.C. Circuit Court. At issue was both Austin’s authority to take over the plea deal and whether he had the right to withdraw from it, as lawyers argue that the dependents had already started performing their part of the deal. Of course, in the second age of Trump, it is no longer Austin but Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth who will decide what happens next.

So, more than 23 years after the 9/11 attacks, here we are in the very same place we’ve been for endless years—on pause again, despite the endless charade of forward steps that go nowhere.

The Mirage of the Military Commissions

At this point, it’s worth asking whether the resolution of those cases by trial was ever a priority—or even a realistic goal. A look back over the course of the military commissions and the 9/11 case suggests some answers.

The Guantánamo detention facility was set up by a presidential military order issued on November 13, 2001. It authorized the detention of war-on-terror captives and mentioned future trials. “It is necessary for individuals subject to this order… to be detained, and, when tried, to be tried for violations of the laws of war and other applicable laws by military tribunals.” Accordingly, the commander of the naval base at Guantánamo spent the early months of the detention operation scouring the base itself for a suitable facility in which to hold such trials. He was surprised when no one at the Pentagon approached him about the need for such a building.

So here we stand, with Donald Trump back in the White House, awaiting what this will mean for the future of the forever prison.

Fast forward six years, a year after those “high-value detainees” already tortured at CIA black sites were brought to Guantánamo. As NBC’s Bob Windrem later reported, an “Expeditionary Legal Complex was built in 2007 in the expectation it would be used for the trial of terrorists accused of murdering nearly 3,000 people with twin attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.” In 2008, the 9/11 defendants were charged. And last April, 17 years later, the Pentagon opened a second courtroom at the cost of $4 million for other cases pending before the military tribunals. Intrepid New York Times Gitmo reporter Carol Rosenberg recently summed up the costs associated with those signs of a continuing belief that actual trial proceedings were indeed in the cards this way: “The war court proceedings have cost hundreds of millions of dollars in salaries, infrastructure, and transportation. Since 2019, the Office of Military Commissions has added two new courtroom chambers, new offices and temporary housing, more lawyers, more security personnel, and more contractors.”

On the surface, it would seem as if the commitment to holding various war-on-terror trials was perfectly real. The price tag was certainly hefty enough, as were the numerous pre-trial proceedings in the 9/11 case, as well as in other cases before the military commissions, each involving charges against those accused of committing acts of terrorism—the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole destroyer with one defendant; terror bombings in Bali, Indonesia, with three defendants; and the cases of several other individuals charged with crimes of terrorism.

Yet given the failure of significant forward movement in such cases for so long, it’s hard not to wonder just how serious the commitment to resolving them ever was and whether the construction of such expensive trial buildings was either a mirage, intended to hide the fact that the cases were destined to go nowhere, or self-deception on the part of presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. (Donald Trump halted the military commissions during his first term in office, leaving them in legal limbo.)

After all this time, only two cases have ever gone to trial, one of which, that of Salim Hamdan, was later overturned. In the other, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul was convicted on three counts, two of which were eventually overturned. (At present, Mr. Bahlul is serving a life sentence at Gitmo, having arrived on its opening day 23 years ago.)

Meanwhile, there have been a grand total of nine plea deals over all these years. Of those, one convicted detainee is serving out a sentence at Guantánamo that ends in 2032, two convictions have been overturned, and two remain on appeal—a paltry record at best, especially given the grimness of those acts of terror. For all of the time, effort, and money, not to mention emotional distress, the results have been appallingly minimal.

Biden and Gitmo

To his credit, President Joe Biden, who inherited a Guantánamo with only 40 detainees left out of a total population that once stood at 790, seemed determined to make progress both in the military commissions and in releasing some of the remaining “forever prisoners” (a term originally coined by Times reporter Rosenberg to describe those living in the legal limbo of indefinite detention, neither charged nor released). Biden provided Gitmo watchers (like me) with some hope that the prison, distinctly offshore of American justice, would actually close someday.

During Biden’s years in office, the population was reduced to 15 men—six forever prisoners and nine still part of the military commissions (two of whom are already convicted). Eleven of the Biden releases, consisting of Yemenis sent to Oman, occurred amid the battle over Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s plea deal, as if he were whispering to us that we needn’t worry, the road to closure was still available. Yet even that set of transfers suffered from the same sort of one-step-forward-two steps-back shuffle that’s been the essence of Gitmo’s history. The Oman arrangement had originally been planned for October 2023, only to be put on pause once the war in Gaza erupted. One of the men released had been cleared since 2010, only to await arrangements made two presidencies later.

The Biden administration unfortunately never released the last prisoners held without charge or brought the accused to trial. Even in these final moments of his presidency, when he was arguably free to do whatever he wanted, including closing the prison, he chose instead, by virtue of his administration putting the deal on hold, to halt forward progress, leaving us to wonder why.

So here we stand, with Donald Trump back in the White House, awaiting what this will mean for the future of the forever prison.

Once You Break It, You Can Never Really Fix It

Sometimes, when it comes to Gitmo, it almost seems as if forces beyond the capacity of mere mortals are at play. No matter what promises are made, no matter what hope-inspiring acts are taken, no matter what progress occurs, the prison seems to have a life of its own, aided and abetted by those who continue to mount obstacles to any significant steps forward.

Of course, the biggest of the lessons learned should have been to honor the laws, both domestic and international, forbidding torture. Had the United States not authorized a program of what was euphemistically referred to by the administration of President George W. Bush as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including beatings, waterboarding, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, sensory bombardment, and all too much more, those trials could have been held in a timely fashion and in federal court on the mainland.

As President Barack Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, had wanted, the federal courts would have been capable of handling such cases without using “evidence” produced by torture. In fact, one Guantánamo detainee, Ahmed Ghailani, was indeed transferred to the United States for trial in federal court and, though he was acquitted on 284 of 285 charges, he was found guilty on one count and sentenced to life in federal prison. Still, the hundreds of acquittals in his case chased away the idea of trying the remaining Guantánamo defendants in federal court.

From all of this, there’s a basic lesson to be learned: Once you violate both fair treatment of prisoners and the basic principles of law, finding an unchallenged resolution to such cases is essentially inconceivable.

In other words, once you break it, you can never really fix it.

Today, that long, soul-crushing, legally abhorrent story stands, at a far greater cost than we might once have imagined, where it has always stood—as a mistake that never should have happened and that, once made, never found a leader able to muster the courage to end it.

Cince we’ve all been weathering the head-spinning assault on the Constitution by the new administration (and, at Third Act and elsewhere, trying to do something about it), I thought it might make sense to provide you with one interesting piece of good news.

It concerns this DeepSeek Chinese AI program that you’ve doubtless been reading about in recent days. I’m the last person to turn to for an analysis of its virtues (I remain fully dependent on my highly-developed Natural Cluelessness), but I am very clear that it complicates the main current task of the fossil fuel industry: glomming onto AI as the latest excuse for building out a bunch of gas-fired power plants.

That narrative—which has been building for a year or so—holds that we will need so much electricity for the data centers to keep this technology running that we’ll have to give up on dealing with climate change for now. It reached its zenith last week when the new administration announced something called Stargate, a $500 billion plan that, as U.S. President Donald Trump put it, would be “the largest AI infrastructure project in history.” This was the moment when he declared an “energy emergency” so that we could build more power plants (but not, of course, the solar or battery parks that Silicon Valley experts have testified would be the most efficient way to power these megacenters).

The increasingly gloomy idea that there was no possible way we could every deal with climate because AI would soak up every new electron that sun and wind could ever provide, may not be quite as true as it seemed to some a week ago.

I would venture to say, given Trump’s predilections, that he neither understands nor cares much about the AI part of all of this, but he completely groks it as a way to pay back Big Oil for the $445 million they invested in the last election. (Political donations come in millions with an M, and the paybacks come in billions with a B—of our money). As Bloomberg reported, the whole DeepSeek incident shows how dependent on this AI story the fossil fuel industry is as an excuse for expansion (just as a couple of years ago it was dependent on the Ukraine war story):

In one brutal blow, DeepSeek has revealed just how many energy-related businesses in the U.S. have been banking on an artificial intelligence boom—and the surge in power demand it was supposed to bring.

For the past year, their growth expectations and share prices were boosted by the belief that AI would require an unprecedented wave of data center construction, with some centers needing as much electricity as entire cities. Utilities and power plant operators benefited, too, but the effect went far wider than such obvious industries, touching an astonishing array of companies.

That became clear the moment China’s DeepSeek unveiled a chatbot that could rival the best American AI programs while using just a fraction of the electricity, perhaps as little as 10%. DeepSeek’s announcement hammered the shares of uranium producers and natural gas pipeline operators alike. Companies that supply power plant equipment and data center cooling systems suffered as well in Monday’s big selloff.

I don’t think we know enough yet to know if that claim—”rival the best American AI programs while using just a fraction of the electricity, perhaps as little as 10%”—is actually true. There are voices in the U.S. today beginning to claim that DeepSeek plundered American code to make its breakthroughs (which is truly funny, since American AI merrily plundered everything everyone has ever written, to make its breakthroughs). And there are others saying that DeepSeek, by making AI more affordable, will actually increase the amount that it is used.

But it does seem as if something new is afoot—the search for efficiency, instead of just massive brute force—in constructing artificial intelligence. As the investment gurus Dylan Lewis and Tim Beyers at The Motley Fool put it:

One of the main things that has popped up a lot in the reporting on this is that the compute necessary for what is running on DeepSeek is a fraction of the compute for some of the other systems. Watching the way that the market is processing this, we are seeing Big Tech companies take a hit. We are seeing some of the chip companies take a hit. We're also seeing energy companies take a hit because there is this feeling that maybe as we get a little bit more technologically advanced as other players start coming into the space, some of the energy demands for this technology won't be as big as people have maybe originally thought.

and

There is no way we are going to be building out the amount of energy infrastructure required to service all this at the level we are talking about in the timeframe we were talking about. Then what happens? You have a constraint. Do you keep doing what you're doing and overwhelm the energy infrastructure, knowing full well you can't build it out at the level that you want to, in the timeframe you want to, or do you do what the industry always does, which is find areas of efficiency to scale in a better, more economical way? That's what always happens.

I’m not beginning to tell you how all this comes out. All I’m saying is, the increasingly gloomy idea that there was no possible way we could every deal with climate because AI would soak up every new electron that sun and wind could ever provide, may not be quite as true as it seemed to some a week ago. (It would be awfully nice if this kind of move toward computing efficiency catches on—here’s another story from this week, about new software fixes that seem capable of reducing power demand at these data centers by 30%.)

You could, I think, even draw a crude analogy between DeepSeek and solar power, in that it seems to be producing the same thing that OpenAI and Meta are producing for a fraction of the cost, the same way that photovoltaics produce power more cheaply than Exxon. And since it’s open source, it undercuts them in another way too: Anyone can get their hands on this and work with it. (“Anyone” meaning anyone who knows what they’re doing—not me, obviously). The advantage of hoarding chips, which has been Big Tech’s strategy, may turn out to be kind of like the advantage of hoarding “reserves” of hydrocarbons—less solid than might have been expected. To complete this imperfect analogy, AI, like the solar cell, may have been invented in the U.S., but it’s China who may figure out how to make the most of it.

It was only two (very long) weeks ago that former President Joe Biden, in his farewell address, warned us against the “tech-industrial complex.” Some youngsters, working around the constraints imposed by the U.S., seem to have struck a blow in that direction. It’s obviously far too much to hope that the U.S. and China might cooperate to develop this new technology in some rational way—the best we can hope for, I think, is that they won’t actually destroy the planet en route to whatever nirvana these new intelligences have in mind for us.

The next period in U.S. politics will be won on the battlefield of narratives. The recent presidential election was lost on that battlefield.

As Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is always pointing out, the American people support progressive positions on many issues: Medicare for all, funding education, taxing the rich, gun control. And yet those were not issues in the recent election. Winning elections will involve creating and disseminating narratives that speak to those who don’t always already vote for Democrats.

Our country is roughly divided into three groups. First are those who have fully bought into the MAGA narrative, often for reasons having to do with white nationalism and a politics of resentment. As white cultural hegemony is declining and people feel a loss of a sense of themselves as the center of our national identity, few in this population are likely to be moved by anything our side does.

We are living in a time of an epistemological crisis, where it is very difficult to keep a clear sense of what is actually going on in our world.

Then there is the third of the population who voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris. That is a wide-ranging group made up of people who truly believe in the neoliberal agenda of the mainstream corporate wing of the Democratic Party, people who believe in “the system” and wanted to save it from fascism, and those in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and on the left who voted pragmatically against U.S. President Donald Trump. That third votes reliably and always for Democrats.

Finally, there is the third who didn’t vote for president in the recent election, or who might have voted for either party, but who are not entrenched in their support. Many of them are against “the system” and don’t like either major party. Some see both parties as catering to the rich, to the global capitalist elite, or to the military-industrial complex. Many don’t vote because the whole election conversation doesn’t speak to them in ways they find compelling. That is the population that needs to be focused on if we are to defeat the right at the ballot box.

And winning them requires that we have narratives that speak to their interests and concerns. We need to engage with media in ways that don’t just flatter our own sense of righteousness, but rather that engage people in that moveable third.

Our opponents are very effective at using narrative and social media. Look at the TikTok war. Trump started it as a piece of anti-China rhetoric. Democrats and Republicans worked dutifully to come up with bipartisan legislation to ban the popular app. Then as the new administration was about to come into power the president said he would save TikTok. Users of the app got a menacing message saying it would go dark in the U.S. Then they got one saying that Trump had saved it. Now millions of people in the anti-system third of the electorate have Trump to thank for something tangible in their lives.

Similarly, I expect that as soon as the immigration raids continue, they will get a lot of publicity. People who care about immigrants will be horrified and heartbroken by that news. People on the other side will see the raids as a victory. And forgotten will be that immigration raids happened regularly under the Biden administration as a routine part of mainstream policy. But that won’t matter. The new administration will be seen as doing something bold to rid our country of people who have been vilified by the right and ignored by the liberal mainstream.

Immigration is one issue where progressives are deeply out of step with the mainstream. It is probably one of the biggest narrative failures of the recent election. Rather than reminding people that immigrants contribute positively to the country, that U.S. foreign policy and the climate crisis make people’s home countries unlivable, or even, on the anti-immigrant side, that former President Joe Biden had cracked down on immigration in his last year in office, Democrats rolled over and allowed the scapegoating narrative to take over.

And in mainstream and social media it was worse. The vicious and slanderous story told against legal immigrants who helped revitalize Springfield, Ohio was repeated over and over in the mainstream liberal media and on the comedy shows. In mocking its slander, liberals spread its vicious images and associations further. Some on our side tried but did not have any breakthrough narratives about the positive impact that Haitian immigrants have had on their community, and our country as a whole.

Even when we spread our outrage at the absurd statements of the current administration, we can inadvertently feed their power. The president’s absurd statements are compelling. We love to hate them. And that is why they exist. They feed the sense that the president can say and do whatever he wants and is unconstrained by any social structure, history, norms, or common sense. That image of him as transgressive actually enhances his power. And, the more we are outraged, the more those opposed to us take joy in the fact that someone has “owned the libs.” While absurd statements are candy for the outrage centers of our brains, they are distractions from the things that actually shift the balance of power and resources and impact people’s lives in this country.

We are living in a time of an epistemological crisis, where it is very difficult to keep a clear sense of what is actually going on in our world. Our shared sense of reality and ethics has been brutally undermined by the current tech-oligopoly dominated social media hellscape. When we focus on the absurdities and illusions rather than on real things that impact people’s lives, we are feeding the trolls.

The first few days of the administration being in power saw much attention to the president’s executive orders. I was surprised that in my feed there was very little on the overturning of Biden’s lowering of prescription drug benefits. I wanted to see devastating memes about the price of prescription drugs.

A Republican plan is circulating that would pay for the president’s tax cuts by cutting Medicare for 600,000 people. I want memes, satire, and news about that. We need to focus on helping people to see that the current administration is not on their side, to see the damage being done, and to see that there are alternative policies that actually would meet their needs and build livable communities.

If we are strategic and disciplined in how we communicate, we can help shift the common-sense notions people have of what is going on in our world and we can create counternarratives that help make the world make sense for our perspectives. We need to be smart about how we communicate on social media and in legacy media.

Here are Seven Rules for Narrative Discipline in the Time of Trump:

1. Don’t respond to the absurd things that people in power say;
2. Don’t give any more attention to the president as a person and personality than is necessary to make a point;
3. Amplify and spread news of the terrible things the administration does: policies that are changed, rules that are violated, money that is spent. Focus on ones that impact people’s everyday lives;
4. Amplify and spread news of our victories in the courts, on the streets, and in our communities;
5. Remember that the future belongs to those who speak to those who didn’t vote for Democrats, but who might;
6. Create and spread counternarratives that shine a positive light on the things you support; and
7. Above all, don’t feed the trolls.

We were squeezed together in the small, upstairs bedroom of a single-family home in D.C.’s Columbia Heights neighborhood. George, the homeowner and father of a nine-month-old, had brought us there to test for nitrogen dioxide emissions from his gas stove.

Nitrogen dioxide (NO2) is one of several pollutants created when gas is burned. A pulmonary irritant, NO2 is invisible, odorless, and linked to asthma and other health concerns. A recent study found that NO2 may affect child cognitive development, with higher exposure in infants associated with increased risk of behavioral problems later on. There is no indoor safety standard for NO2, but the Environmental Protection Agency has established an outdoor health protective standard of 100 parts per billion for one-hour exposure. George’s kitchen had registered an alarming 294 ppb.

George had asked us to test his nursery upstairs, well away from the gas stove. We placed the detector in the crib and waited. Then, a reading of 190 ppb flashed across the screen—nearly twice the EPA’s maximum exposure limit.

There is no reason a nine-month-old—or any of us—should be breathing health-harming nitrogen dioxide in our homes.

George’s house was one of nearly 700 D.C. and Maryland homes we tested as part of a community study to investigate hazardous emissions from gas. We chose to focus on gas stoves because they are located in the middle of families’ living areas and generally not vented outside. In apartments, single-family homes, condos, and row houses, we recorded NO2 levels 15 minutes and 30 minutes after turning on the stove, and took a third reading 15 minutes after turning the stove off.

Nearly two-thirds of the kitchens we tested registered NO2 levels exceeding 100 parts per billion. In D.C., 77% of kitchens register NO2 over 100 ppb, with an average high reading of 181 ppb.

The stories are endless. In an American University student apartment NO2 levels spiked to 862 ppb—over eight times the recommended limit—and only decreased after turning on a vent fan. In other homes, ventilation fans seemed to have no impact at all. We found significant NO2 in the upstairs bedrooms we tested. Some kitchens tested had elevated NO2 levels one or two hours after the gas stove was turned off.

Increasing ventilation can help reduce NO2 exposure from gas stoves. But to protect D.C. and Maryland residents from the health-harming impacts of NO2, policymakers must act to help households move to pollution-free, efficient electric appliances such as induction cooktops.

Induction cooking is becoming the preferred choice among chefs due to its efficiency, safety, and ease of use. Chef Jon Kung switched to induction cooking because his building lacked ventilation and gas stoves produced indoor air pollution. Award-winning chef Eric Ripert says he “fell in love” with induction within days.

Induction cooktops rely on electromagnetism to transfer heat to the pan, eliminating the combustion that creates NO2. About 90% of the energy goes toward cooking food, while gas stoves waste 70% of their energy heating the surrounding air. With no flame and little residual heat, induction stoves keep kitchens cool, reduce the risk of burns, and are easy to clean.

Officials in D.C. and Montgomery Country have already taken steps to incentivize electrification, including adopting healthy building standards that ensure new homes are built with electric equipment. Low-income D.C. residents can now apply for free home upgrades to install clean energy heating and cooking equipment thanks to the recent passage of the Healthy Homes Act.

These are steps in the right direction, but policymakers must do more to reduce reliance on fossil fuel infrastructure and to block gas companies from spending consumer money on new pipelines that raise costs for customers and lock in our reliance on gas.

With an influx of federal and state incentives, now is the best time to electrify. D.C. recently unveiled programs funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, which provide up to $800 for an induction cooktop and $2,000 for an electric panel upgrade to income-eligible residents. Federal tax breaks for clean, efficient heating equipment and cooking equipment are available to all residents regardless of income.

Our Beyond Gas study shows that burning fossil fuels in our homes is exposing us to pollutants that make us sicker. There is no reason a nine-month-old—or any of us—should be breathing health-harming nitrogen dioxide in our homes. Clean energy alternatives are available and far superior. Our leaders need to act now to help D.C. and Maryland residents make this change.

Perhaps, some day, politicians won’t waste the time they ought to be spending working to fix a problem on blaming one another for who was responsible. But that day is not today.

The post Apocalypse Looms. Who’s To Blame? first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post Apocalypse Looms. Who’s To Blame? appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.