The hardest lesson I have learned over my career working on climate policy is to never underestimate the power and craftiness of the fossil fuel lobby. The evidence of their success: global fossil fuel consumption and emissions were higher in 2023 than at any time in history. That, in a nutshell, is how we are losing the fight against climate change.

This is why I grew alarmed when U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.), the fossil fuel industry’s strongest champion in Congress, rushed a new energy deal through his committee late last month before it could be properly scrutinized. Manchin will give up his energy gavel when he retires this year. This is his last hurrah, and it’s a doozy.

The Energy Permitting Reform Act combines significant reforms in electricity transmission—potentially unlocking big gains in renewable energy—with coal, oil, and gas boons that would be big wins for the fossil fuel lobby.

The permitting laws surrounding oil, gas, and coal leases and permits may be an arcane abstraction to most analysts, but they are the keys to the energy kingdom to fossil fuel industries intent on expanding production for decades to come.

Now energy analysts are in the hot seat as they are asked to validate whether this energy bargain is a good deal for the planet.

Déjà Vu

The lessons from a similar energy deal in 2015 should give anyone pause before joining the Manchin parade. The 2015 budget deal paired renewable energy tax credits with a provision to lift the decades-old ban on exporting U.S. crude oil. Energy analysts rushed to validate the bargain. Those clean energy provisions would “dwarf the impact on carbon emissions of allowing oil exports,” wrote Michael Levi in an analysis widely quoted at the time.

To quell fears about the oil provisions, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) sent a letter, writing: “While lifting the oil export ban remains atrocious policy, the wind and solar tax credits in the omnibus will eliminate around 10 times more carbon pollution than the exports of oil will add.”

Her appeal worked. The bill passed. Contrary to the assurances of energy experts, the oil export floodgates opened. Crude exports surged from zero to 4 million barrels a day today. This growth in exports was 20 times higher than the worst-case scenario forecasted in 2015 by Levi, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), and others.

As I said at the start, the oil lobby is smart. They knew that fracking technology was going to transform oil and gas production, but they needed new markets.

The Foxes Are Snickering at the Hen House Door

The 2015 experience should caution everyone to step back and look more closely at what the fossil fuel lobby helped Manchin write behind closed doors. The permitting laws surrounding oil, gas, and coal leases and permits may be an arcane abstraction to most analysts, but they are the keys to the energy kingdom to fossil fuel industries intent on expanding production for decades to come.

There is ample cause for concern. Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), Manchin’s co-author, gloats that the bill “guarantee[s] future access to oil and natural gas resources on federal lands and waters” in ways that not even former U.S. President Donald Trump could do under current law. Further, he says that “it will permanently end President Joe Biden’s reckless ban on new liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial board agrees, urging Trump to “steal a march on Kamala Harris by endorsing” Manchin’s energy bill.

The Danger of Locking in Fossil Fuel Infrastructure

Changing the law in order to expedite new fossil fuel infrastructure can directly threaten global climate goals. The IPCC, the world’s leading authority on climate science, warned in their 2022 report that “cancellation of plans for new fossil fuel infrastructures” is needed to avoid “significant carbon lock-ins, stranded assets, and other additional costs” and potentially putting the Paris climate goals “out of reach” (p. 267).

Similarly, the International Energy Agency, the world’s leading tracker of global energy trends, concluded in their 2023 World Energy Outlook that “investment in oil and gas today is almost double the level required in the [net zero emissions scenario] in 2030, signaling a clear risk of protracted fossil fuel use that would put the 1.5°C goal out of reach” (p. 19).

Supersized Demands from Fossil Fuel Allies

Every energy bill ever passed by Congress has some degree of “hold your nose” compromise. Even the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the most important piece of climate legislation ever enacted, gave some ground, tying oil and gas leases together with offshore wind leases in a Beltway version of a shotgun wedding.

But the fossil fuel lobby has now supersized their hostage demands with the single-minded goal of guarding against an incoming Harris administration by mandating a steady stream of fossil fuel leases and permits.

In a separate analysis (update available here), I calculated the energy and greenhouse gas impacts of the LNG portion of the Manchin bill. The five LNG liquefaction plants expedited by the bill are designed to produce up to 77 trillion cubic feet of natural gas through 2050 (10.6 Bcf/day).

This long-lived fossil fuel infrastructure is far more likely to dampen investment in renewable energy, electrification, and energy conservation than displace other fossil fuels.

Liquefying gas, which must be cooled to 260°F below zero, requires significant energy. According to EIA, 14% of the gas used to produce LNG is consumed during liquefaction. That means that up to 13 trillion additional cubic feet of natural gas through 2050 (1.7 Bcf/day) will be consumed to produce the LNG from these five projects.

The total volume of natural gas consumed and processed by these LNG projects (94 trillion cubic feet through 2050) is enough to meet almost all of the gas needs for homes across America (99 trillion cubic feet) over the same timeframe. It is also equivalent to 62% of the total amount of gas (152 trillion cubic feet) EIA forecasts will be used by the electric power sector from 2030-2050.

The lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions of all LNG produced by these five plants would be 616 million metric tons annually (13 gigatons through 2050), equivalent to 165 coal-fired power plants.

Using government estimates of the economic damage caused by greenhouse gas emissions, we can put a dollar estimate to these emissions: $1.7 trillion (cumulatively through 2050).

Keep in mind this only accounts for the LNG section of the Manchin bill and does not include the impacts of the bill’s oil, coal, and gas leasing mandates.

A Misused Measuring Stick

Assumptions used in greenhouse gas analysis can have profound effects on policymaking. It’s impossible to achieve numerical science targets without good measurements.

One set of assumptions in particular can make or break assessments of fossil fuel infrastructure. Energy substitution analysis looks at what happens to energy markets when new energy sources are added or removed, which in turn shapes how greenhouse gas emissions are calculated.

This is where some energy analyses get sloppy, relying on outdated, simplified assumptions to minimize the climate impact of fossil fuel infrastructure. The federal government is particularly bad at this. It can be awkward to approve projects after finding they superchage global warming. My analysis of seven major environmental impact statements across five federal agencies found that the agencies erased 98% of the greenhouse gas emissions from oil and gas projects, on average, obscuring $1 trillion in climate damages.

The pertinent question when assessing the substitution effects of energy infrastructure is whether the energy helps or hurts in achieving deep decarbonization pathways. This question is kept firmly in sight when analysts assess clean energy supply policies but can fade into the background when people argue that fossil fuel supplies don’t matter because the emissions aren’t any worse than current pollution sources.

Someone can claim a punch to your right arm won’t hurt more than a punch to your left arm, but the reality is that the punch still hurts. You can claim that LNG doesn’t increase emissions because it’s substituting for other fossil fuels, but the reality is that the planet is still getting cooked.

The theoretical argument that U.S. LNG coming online in five years will replace coal in China is especially unrealistic in light of global and regional trends toward renewable electricity. According to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA): “Evidence from China, the world’s largest coal consumer, shows that LNG is unlikely to materially displace coal-fired power generation.”

Keep in mind that these LNG plants won’t come online until about 2030, and the billions of dollars invested are dependent on decades of LNG production thereafter. This long-lived fossil fuel infrastructure is far more likely to dampen investment in renewable energy, electrification, and energy conservation than displace other fossil fuels.

The oil and gas industry has a particularly long and successful history of creating and defending markets to absorb supply. Consider, for example, the oil lobby’s successful efforts to keep fuel economy standards, and how they have pushed fossil fuel-based plastics across the world. Now that America is shifting off gas, they have turned their sights to shifting those emissions overseas.

Common Ground

There are many factors that go into assessing the impacts of Manchin’s energy bill, with valid grounds for different approaches and results. I suggest the following principles as potential common ground and a worthwhile test for any analysis:

1. Be transparent — Include the full (i.e., gross) lifecycle emissions from all fossil fuels that are brought to market by the bill as a reference point so users can understand the impact of substitution assumptions.
2. Be consistent — Assumptions used to assess the emissions profile of policies that bring fossil fuels to markets should be analogous with the assumptions used to assess the benefits of clean energy policies. If permitting policy to expedite clean energy infrastructure can lead to big emission reductions, then it also stands to reason that permitting policy to expedite fossil fuel infrastructure can also lead to big emission increases.
3. Use the precautionary principle — Assume that fossil fuel lobbyists knew what they were doing when they wrote the detailed fossil fuel provisions of the bill. Talk to the lawyers who take these companies to court and understand the stakes when language mandates the use of particular studies and processes. At a minimum, provide a worst-case scenario that truly reflects the breadth of what the authors say their bill will do.
4. Get methane right — Too many emissions models rely on methane data that is known to be wrong. Numerous studies (for example, here, here and here), based on more than 1 million measurements, show real-world methane emission leaks from U.S. natural gas production are 3-4 times higher than the industry-reported data used by the government and modelers. Peer-reviewed studies show that, with proper methane accounting, natural gas has a climate impact as bad as coal.

  On this episode of The Final Countdown hosts Ted Rall and Steve Gill discuss the latest political developments around the globe, including Kamala Harris’s polling numbers.    The show begins with former City Council Candidate and foreign and domestic policy expert Armen Kurdian sharing his perspective on Kamala Harris’s and Donald Trump’s performance in the polls.    Then, former Barack Obama campaign director, army veteran, and podcast host Robin Biro joins the show to weigh in on the latest out of the 2024 presidential elections, delving deep into Kamala Harris’s policies and also President Biden’s first interview since dropping out.    The second hour starts with international relations and security analyst Mark Sleboda sharing his analysis of Ukraine’s incursion into the Kursk region.    The show closes with author, journalist, and activist Robert Fantina joining to discuss the latest out of Gaza.        The post The Final Countdown – 8/12/14 – Kamala Harris Leads in Polls as Biden Gives First Interview Post Dropout  first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

By Ralph Nader August 12, 2024 In 2000, I received a call from Lewis Lapham, the storied editor of the venerable, Harper’s Magazine (launched in 1850) requesting an in-person interview during my Green Party presidential campaign. Accustomed to reporters clinging to the single question about “being a spoiler” and my usual rebuttals (“focus on the…

Democrats are approaching their 2024 convention aware of the many critical issues at stake in this election. There is deep concern with what a second Trump administration would mean for women’s rights, civil rights, environmental protections, immigration policy, civil discourse, and the very foundation of our democratic order. All of these issues and more are discussed at length in the 2024 Democratic Party Platform and will be addressed by an assortment of speakers at the convention.

What will not be discussed are: the genocide that has been unfolding in Gaza, the continued erosion of Palestinian rights in all the Occupied Territories, and the role the United States continues to play in supporting Israel’s unconscionable violations of international law and U.S. human rights legislation. These are topics that should be addressed, but because they won’t, the Arab American Institute (AAI), together with Rev. Jesse Jackson’s RainbowPUSH organization and a number of other prominent progressive groups, are hosting three days of programs during the afternoon hours of Monday through Wednesday before the convention’s official proceedings begin. The topics that will be explored during these AAI events are:

• “The Role of Dark Money in Politics.” We’ll discuss how pro-Israel groups spent in excess of $35 million dollars this year to smear and defeat two progressive black members of Congress who had advocated for Palestinian rights. This problem of dark money has been a growing concern over the past three election cycles. Twice, in Democratic Party meetings, we have tried to pass resolutions banning its use in primary contests. In both instances, party leaders refused to even allow a debate on the issue. Our concern is that left unchecked the problem posed by dark money will grow and before long not only pro-Israel, but also other special interest groups (like big pharma, banks, health insurance, etc.) will similarly attempt to take advantage of the loophole that allows unlimited amounts of money to flood our elections.
• “The Role of Congress in Sponsoring Legislation that Silences Free Speech.” Just as the U.S. policy debate over Israel/Palestine has intensified, pro-Israel groups have worked with some members of Congress and state legislators to silence voices and penalize actions that are critical of Israel. By expanding the definition of antisemitism to include most criticisms of Israel and by denying Americans the right to boycott or call for sanctions against any country for any reason, free speech is being constrained or outright denied. At this point over three dozen states have passed these laws and Congress is currently debating legislation that will not only conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism, but also require universities and other institutions receiving federal funds to establish enforcement mechanisms.
• “The Voices of Palestinians Who Should Be Heard.” After 40,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of Gaza laid waste, and famine on the horizon, Democrats need to hear and listen to Palestinians. If the convention won’t invite them, they will be at the AAI event so they can tell their story.
• “An Examination of What’s Not Included in The Democratic Party’s Platform.” Arab Americans and those concerned with justice in the Middle East have been waging battles to shape the political parties’ positions on Israel/Palestine. We’ll look at what’s changed and what hasn’t changed during the past four decades. Forty years ago, we couldn’t get the word “Palestinians” in the platform. Now it’s in the Democrats’ platform, but neither party will include the word occupation or any criticism of Israeli policies. That must change.
• “The Role the Gaza War Is Playing in Changing Public Opinion and Its Impact on the Future of the Democratic Party.” Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza has become central to the agenda of progressives in the Democratic Party. Polls show that majorities of Democrats are opposed to Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza, want a cease-fire and a conditioning of U.S. aid to Israel, and support justice and rights for Palestinians. These numbers are largely driven by young voters; progressive Jewish groups; and Black, Latino, and Asian, and Arab Americans, all of whom are important to Democratic victories.

In addition to the three-day AAI event, there will be other events hosted by groups seeking to pressure the establishment to change direction on a variety of Issues of concern. But AAI’s is the only one that will challenge the party to confront “the elephant in the room”: our unquestioning support for Israel in its unrelenting genocidal war on Palestinians. It’s an issue that the majority of Democrats want the party to discuss and a policy they want the administration to change.

There’s an image that’s stayed with me for weeks: A sea of people holding up “Mass Deportation Now” signs at the Republican National Convention.

Since then, I’ve been plagued with nightmares of mass raids by the military and police across the country. I see millions of families being torn apart, including families with citizen children. And I see DACA recipients—like me—carried away from the only life we’ve ever known.

Mass deportation wasn’t just a rallying cry at the GOP convention. It’s a key plank of Project 2025, a radical document written by white nationalists listing conservative policy priorities for the next administration.

Imagine your friends, neighbors, colleagues, peers, and caretakers being dragged away from their homes.

And it would be a disaster—not just for immigrants, but for our whole country.

I moved to the United States when I was six. Until my teenage years, I didn’t know I was undocumented—I only knew I was from the Philippines. I grew up in Chicago with my twin brother. Our parents worked hard, volunteered at my elementary school, and ensured we always had food on the table. They raised us to do well and be good people.

But when my twin and I learned that we were undocumented, we realized that living our dreams was going to be complicated—on top of the lasting fear of being deported.

Everything changed right before I entered high school in 2012: The Obama administration announced the Deferred Actions for Childhood Arrivals policy, or DACA. The program was designed to protect young people like my twin and me who arrived in the U.S. at a young age with limited or no knowledge of our life before. We’re two of the 600,000 DACA recipients today.

DACA opened many doors for us. It’s allowed to drive, attend college, and have jobs. And we’re temporarily exempt from deportation, a status we have to renew every two years.

DACA helped me set my sights high on my studies and career. Although I couldn’t apply for federal aid, with DACA I became eligible for a program called QuestBridge that granted me a full-ride scholarship to college. Today I work in public policy in the nation’s capital, with dreams of furthering my career through graduate school.

But if hardliners eliminate DACA and carry out their mass deportations, those dreams could be swept away. And it would be ugly—mass deportation would be a logistical disaster, taking decades and costing billions.

Imagine your friends, neighbors, colleagues, peers, and caretakers being dragged away from their homes. For me, it would mean being forced back to the Philippines, a place I haven’t seen in two decades. My partner, my friends, my work—all I’ve ever known is here, in the country I call home.

This country would suffer, too.

An estimated 11 million undocumented people live here. We’re doctors, chefs, librarians, construction workers, lawyers, drivers, scientists, and business owners. We fill labor shortages and help keep inflation down. We contribute nearly $100 billion each year to federal, state, and local taxes.

Fear-mongering politicians want you to believe we’re criminals, or that we’re voting illegally. But again and again, studies find that immigrants commit many fewer crimes than U.S.-born Americans. And though some of us have been long-time residents of this country, we cannot vote in state or federal elections.

Despite all the divisive rhetoric, the American people agree with immigration advocates: Our country needs to offer immigrants a path to legalization and citizenship. According to a Gallup poll last year, 68% of Americans support this.

My dark dreams of mass deportations are, thankfully, just nightmares for now. And my dreams of a secure future for my family and all people in this country outweigh my fears. We must do everything possible to keep all families together.

Private equity giant Blackstone is invested in one of the largest and dirtiest coal plants in the United States, the General J Gavin Coal Plant in Ohio. Despite Blackstone’s commitments to reducing carbon emissions in new assets, various investments in renovating and constructing energy efficient buildings, and a $100 million investment in businesses that support the energy transition, the firm remains invested in this aging, polluting coal plant. As the Gavin Coal Plant celebrates its 50th birthday this year, it’s time for Blackstone to start planning the plant’s retirement.

Contradicting their corporate commitments to emissions reduction, Blackstone’s Gavin coal plant has emitted 106 million metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere since the firm acquired the plant in 2016. These emissions impact communities well beyond Cheshire, Ohio. Because of its location, the Gavin Coal Plant is upwind of several major areas across the Eastern Seaboard such as Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and Baltimore, meaning the health impacts stretch across the country as well in a widespread plume of toxins. Sierra Club modeling found Gavin to be the nation’s deadliest coal plant as of February 2023, causing an estimated 244 premature deaths each year from particulate emissions.

Not only is Gavin deadly, it’s old and expensive. As the plant turns 50 this year, Gavin is an outlier among other coal plants slated for closure. Since 2000, the average age of retirement for coal-fired generating units has been 50 years. And, as coal plants age, operations and maintenance costs increase while performance decreases. In 2020, 46% of global coal plants were running at a loss, and Carbon Tracker estimates this rising to 52% by 2030 . Yet, Blackstone has not announced a retirement date for this old, inefficient asset.

Blackstone is in danger of missing this brief opportunity to leverage this program to repurpose an old, dirty, and inefficient coal plant while delivering returns for investors.

Blackstone has the opportunity to cement itself as a leader in the green transition by continuing to invest in clean energy solutions and closing the General J Gavin Coal Plant in Ohio. There’s extra funding for that green transition through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA,) but the window of opportunity for that financing is closing. Blackstone should close the Gavin Coal Plant and repurpose the site for the renewable energy transition, and the IRA funding provides a unique financial opportunity for the firm to do just that.

Blackstone executives are well aware of the investment opportunities that exist in the clean energy transition. In fact, in Blackstone’s 2023 Q2 earnings call, President and Chief Operating Officer Jon Gray stated that the IRA would be helpful in spurring investments in the energy transition. Gray said:

The IRA in the U.S. has made a big difference. I mean, there was $250 billion of large-scale renewable projects announced in the last seven years. And there was an equal amount announced in the last year basically since the IRA passing. So, we would say very large scale opportunity and should result in a new area for us to grow and generate incremental fees and returns for investors.

By Blackstone’s own calculus, the IRA is a critical tool for spurring investments and generating returns for investors. Blackstone should get an application in for the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment Program by the end of the year to ensure the firm is in the running for favorable financing terms to retool, repurpose, or replace the Gavin Coal Plant.

As of March 2024, there were 203 active applications in the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office which oversees the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment Program. Over $262.2 billion in loans have been requested, and the program budget is only $250 billion. Blackstone is in danger of missing this brief opportunity to leverage this program to repurpose an old, dirty, and inefficient coal plant while delivering returns for investors. Blackstone must act now and retire the Gavin Coal Plant.

Joe Biden, who apparently has been mentally impaired for years and has been controlled behind the scenes, has been switched out for Kamala Harris, who never had to convince a single Democratic voter in order to secure the presidential nomination. What makes it hilarious is that the Democratic Party accuses Donald Trump of insufficient dedication to electoral democracy.

The post To Save Democracy, Switch Out Puppets first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Alabama, Tennessee, and Florida’s new anti-squatter laws all went into effect in the last two months, the latest exhibit of the real estate industry’s influence in American politics. In this year alone, at least 10 states have considered legislation that revokes tenancy rights, making squatting—when someone moves into a vacant building or onto uninhabited land—a criminal matter instead of civil one.

While the fear-mongering around squatting started as a right-wing talking point, now anti-squatter bills have passed in several states with bipartisan support. Earlier this year, in New York, where Democrats dominate politics, Gov. Kathy Hochul and several state legislators took a victory lap after passing a budget bill that declared that squatters don’t have the same rights as tenants, and to support property owners statewide.

Some would assume that these legislative actions were taken in response to a threat of a mass takeover of homes in cities across the country. But in reality, as many experts have rightly pointed out, squatting is extremely rare. A threat does exist, which is why we’re seeing a rise in this legislation. It’s just not to property owners. It’s to the power of the real estate lobby.

The manufactured crisis around squatters is meant to distract from the fact that over half of Americans struggle to pay their rent or mortgage every month.

As outlined in a new report by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project and others, the real estate lobby is a sprawling, interconnected group of representatives from the top corporate apartment owners and managers in the country, who—by having members sit on each other’s boards—can tap into an enormous shared pool of resources that they’re using to destabilize communities across the country.

The lobby is using this power to advance a flurry of anti-squatter bills to push back against tenant protections enacted in the early years of the Covid-19 pandemic. This was a time when millions of people in the United States were kept in their homes thanks to policies like rental assistance expansion and foreclosure and eviction moratoria. For many of us, it was the first time we witnessed our country recognize the public health and economic value of keeping people in their homes. These protections made clear that regardless of race, class, or housing tenure, housing stability is the foundation for thriving communities.

Now, real estate industry groups, the second biggest lobbying spender in the U.S., are using anti-squatter legislation in a desperate attempt to undercut that progress. Capitalizing on America’s heightened anxiety about the housing crisis, they are scaring people into believing that tenant protections come at the expense of homeowners. Lawmakers should not take the bait.

At best, these bills are reactionary responses to a problem that doesn’t exist. At worst, they represent the worst of election season fear-mongering: anti-immigrant sentiment, dog-whistle racism, and calls for law and order. Look no further than the Florida attorney general’s celebration of legislation declaring that immigrants were taking over homes across the state, based on a viral TikTok. In reality, most states already have laws that address squatters adequately—it’s tenant protections that remain significantly weaker relative to property rights.

Advancing anti-squatter legislation is a slippery slope to eroding eviction protections passed during the last few years, and that’s exactly what the real estate lobby wants: They themselves refer to squatter legislation as “eviction policy.” Clearly, they are hoping to put legislators on a path to repealing hard-fought regulations to protect tenants by inferring a false equating of squatters (who live in vacant properties without legal agreements) and tenants (who legally inhabit homes with leases).The bills put any resident with tenant or ownership interest at risk of immediate displacement, often by a law enforcement agency, without the normal requirement of notice, proof, and judicial review before someone is removed from their home.

But their efforts to undo these gains won’t be easy, because the tide has turned in support of tenant protections as a way to address our housing crisis. In poll after poll, people in the United States say they want to see governments take action to alleviate the cost of housing. This has quickly become a front-burner issue for Americans and a top priority for them in the presidential election, only second to inflation. A recent survey of voters in battleground states found that 82% of renters believe that, if addressed, the cost of rent and housing would make their personal situation better.

The manufactured crisis around squatters is meant to distract from the fact that over half of Americans struggle to pay their rent or mortgage every month. And that a tenant-led movement to change this reality is building political power, winning local elections, and influencing federal policy.

Considering this, one can see why the real estate lobby, which amassed over $2.5 billion in revenue during the height of the pandemic, is grasping at straws to stay relevant to legislators. While it’s trying to ramp up efforts to unravel tenant protections, the lobby itself—the National Association of Realtors (NAR)—is unraveling. From Department of Justice investigations and anti-trust lawsuits to sexual harassment allegations, and a musical chairs of presidents and CEOs in the last two years, members are not happy. In October 2023, Redfin announced it would require many of its brokers to cancel their NAR memberships and stop paying dues. Reports of NAR running out of liability insurance coverage and rumors of real estate moguls starting alternative associations show cracks in a foundation that will be difficult to repair. No amount of fresh paint, even if it is in the form of throwing tenants under the bus, can fix such dysfunction. But they’ll try as long as they can.

As America increasingly becomes a nation of renters, lawmakers can’t lose sight of the bigger picture: We have a housing crisis, not a squatter crisis. Millions of people calling on leaders to alleviate their suffering cannot afford to be sold out with this distraction. Lawmakers should pass policies that we know advance housing stability, instead of doing the bidding of those attacking it.

In many of his recent writings, Noam Chomsky has warned that humanity has reached a very dangerous point because we are now living in a world of cascading crises. Indeed, when we look around us, we see a global web of crises. Economic inequality is destabilizing democracies and making a mockery of the vision of a decent society; armed conflicts continue to mark human existence; and nuclear weapons and global warming threaten humanity’s survival. Meanwhile, we must feel aghast over the fact that cynicism and irrationality continue to define the mindset of the powers that be. This is precisely the reason why Chomsky has always seen activism as our only hope.

What’s happening in Gaza is an abomination, one that the leaders of this world are watching coldly from a distance. The same can be said about climate collapse, which is as real as the daily slaughtering of scores of innocent women and children in Gaza by Israel’s military. Our global institutions are incapable of doing anything meaningful about these crises. Real power is in the hands of the most powerful nation-states and their leaders have opted to turn a blind eye to both disasters so as not to disrupt business as usual. Profits and geostrategic interests take priority over human lives and the environment. This is as clear as day, and it has always been so since at least the emergence of capitalism and the rise of the nation-state.

The current conflict in Ukraine began on February 24, 2022, and peace remains as elusive as ever. The U.S. wants peace in Ukraine as much as Netanyahu wants to see a ceasefire deal in Gaza. The continuation of the war in Gaza is vital to the continuation of Netanyahu's political career. In fact, Netanyahu will most likely celebrate by uncorking a bottle of champagne if an all-out war exploded in the Middle East. He knows he can’t possibly lose with the U.S. backing Israel. The cost of an all-out war in terms of human lives, either Israeli or Iranian or Arab lives, is simply irrelevant to him--or to Washington. Or what another war might do to the environment. The war in Gaza is also a war on the environment; in fact, it is “a widespread and deliberate act of ecocide,” according to a study by Forensic Architecture.

Profits and geostrategic interests take priority over human lives and the environment. This is as clear as day, and it has always been so since at least the emergence of capitalism and the rise of the nation-state.

As Chomsky has pointed out, “history is all too rich in records of horrendous wars, indescribable torture, massacres and every imaginable abuse of fundamental rights.” But the great man has gone to great lengths to stress that the climate crisis is “unique in human history” and, like nuclear weapons, can destroy organized human life as we know it. Yet, humanity spends annually trillions of dollars on weapons and the military but finds it economically unrealistic to devote the necessary funds to protect the earth.

So much for rationality.

Indeed, consider the global implications of the melting of the Antarctica sea ice. It may be winter in the Southern Hemisphere, but the Antarctica is experiencing a major heat wave that has made temperatures rise 50 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. This is the second major heat wave in Antarctica in the last two years. The entire planet has experienced more than 1.5 Celsius of warming in the 12-month period between July 2023 and June 2024, but Antarctica warms twice faster than the rest of the world, according to latest observations. If all the ice vanished, sea levels might rise by more than 150 feet.

It is no longer an issue of if but when major coastal cities will go under.

We already know that the super-rich and powerful don’t care about the rest of us, but it seems they also don’t care about the future of their own children and grandchildren. As Chomsky has underscored in some of the email exchanges that we’ve had, their self-gratification is even greater now that they know that the climate crisis is speeding toward catastrophe.

Indeed, as Copernicus Climate Change Service Director Carlo Buontempo recently said in connection with the new record set for the daily global mean temperature “we are now in truly uncharted territory…”

We already know that the super-rich and powerful don’t care about the rest of us, but it seems they also don’t care about the future of their own children and grandchildren.

And this brings us to the question of activism, which, as already pointed out, Chomsky sees as our only hope to save the planet. It’s our only way to stop carnages; our only way to stop the criminal negligence of climate collapse. We need the greatest possible degree of public mobilization for the purpose of exerting influence on policymakers. But without thoughtless methods like destroying works of art that turn the public against climate activism.

Moreover, Chomsky believes that we have the knowledge, money, and technology to transition from fossil fuels to alternative sources of energy that are clean, affordable and sustainable. This is why he feels that the Green New Deal is exactly the right idea and finds the Global Green New Deal initiative laid out by the progressive economist Robert Pollin particularly attractive.

As far as the link between capitalism and the climate crisis goes, suffice to say that Chomsky understands better than most the forces behind environmental degradation and climate collapse. The economic system of capitalism, especially during its neoliberal phase, drives climate breakdown. Global temperatures started increasing at an alarming rate after neoliberalism became the dominant economic force. Nonetheless, Chomsky is also fully aware of the fact that time is running out and we cannot wait for the end of capitalism before the planet can be saved. This is why he finds it so vital that we find ways to get the world off fossil fuels quickly and fairly. We must reach carbon neutrality no later than 2050. And do so in a just manner. For Chomsky, a just transition is imperative to building the political power that would bring about a shift from the fossil-fuel economy to a regenerative economy. Because, again, social activism is our only hope, according to what many have described as the “world’s conscience keeper for nearly half a century.”

And, no, hope is not an option. As Noam once said, “if you assume there is no hope, you guarantee there will be no hope.”

No matter who may be supporting them in public opinion polls, Donald Trump and JD Vance are not the saviors of the middle class, the working, class, or the poor. They are not the champions of Blacks, whites, Latinos, men, women or any other demographic group. Their policy proposals won’t even benefit better off but not rich Americans. They are the candidates of casino, real estate, fossil fuel, and tech billionaires. Many are affiliated with Trump 47 or one of the other pro-Trump Super PACs.

I am a union member and have been since I started working as a teenager in the 1960s and I support the Harris-Walz ticket. I think it is a moral transgression in this election to vote for any down ballot Republican candidate that appears on the same line as Trump and Vance. The Democrats must win the House and Senate and local elections to stop the billionaire financed anti-democracy MAGA movement.

Below, in alphabetical order, is a list and description of some of the Trump-Vance team’s key super-wealthy supporters. It is a billionaire’s club.

Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman is the chief executive and portfolio manager of Pershing Square Capital Management. Ackman demanded that Trump resign after the January 6 attack on the Capitol, but now endorses Trump. Ackman is a leading crusader against DEI policies and what he perceives of as a wave of antisemitism on college campuses. He played a leading role in forcing Harvard President Claudine Gray to resign, in getting New York City Mayor Eric Adams to use police to breakup protests at Columbia University against Israel’s action in Gaza and contributed to SuperPACs that defeated progressive candidates in Democratic Party primaries because they criticized Israel. Forbes estimates Ackman’s net worth at over $9 billion.

Casino magnates Miriam Adelson and her deceased husband, Sheldon Adelson, were Trump's biggest donors in 2020. They contributed $90 million to the pro-Trump SuperPAC Preserve America. Adelson is the wealthiest Israeli citizen and one of the fifty wealthiest people in the world. She pledged $100 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign in exchange for his promise that if he is elected President the United States would recognize Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank, torpedoing any possible of an independent Palestinian state.

Marc Lowell Andreessen is a Silicon Valley tech businessman, former software engineer, member of the Facebook Board of Directors, and worth $1.8 billion. In 2016 he endorsed Hillary Clinton for President because of Trump’s anti-immigrant stance, but he is now donating mega-bucks to SuperPACs supporting Trump, hoping to secure policies that favor his investments.

Scott Bessent is founder of the global investment firm Key Square Group with an investment portfolio of $8 billion. Previously Bessent was the Chief Investment Officer of Soros Fund Management, a much more liberal company. At some point, Bessent changed his stripes, and he is now a co-chair of Trump 47, a Republican Party fundraising group in Palm Beach, Florida. Bessent is considered a possible Secretary of the Treasury if Trump is elected.

Robert Thomas Bigelow owns Budget Suites of America and is founder of Bigelow Aerospace. He is a notorious conspiracy theorists providing financial support for investigating UFOs and paranormal phenomena including consciousness after death. Bigelow has originally a DeSantis supporter but switched to Trump when DeSantis dropped out of the race. Bigelow gave Trump a million dollars to help with his legal fees and promised to give $20 million to pro-Trump Super PACs. Bigelow’s net worth is $1.5 billion.

Robert H. Book is chairman of Book Capital Enterprises and Jet Support Services, and a Vice Chairman of Axxes Capital. His net worth is only half a billion dollars so he may not belong on this list. Book, a major philanthropist in support of Israel, was critical of Trump in 2017 for not forcibly condemning neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville, Virginia. However, in 2020 he gave over a million dollars to the Trump Victory Committee.

Timothy Dunn is the CEO of the fossil fuel company CrownQuest Operating. Dunn contributed to the Trump 2020 campaign and in 2023 he gave $5 million towards the 2024 campaign. He's an active donor in rightwing Texas politics, giving approxinately $10 million to the conservative Defend Texas Liberty PAC. He co-founded a Christian school where he is on the board of trustees and teaches Sunday school. Dunn opposes abortion, same-sex marriage. and adoptions by same sex couples. He is worth an estimated 2.2 billion.

José Fanjul is a Cuban American a sugar magnate with investments in Domino Sugar and real estate who gave over $800,000 to the Trump 47 Committee and hosted a Trump fundraiser. Fanjul’s company received an estimated $65 million in federal agricultural subsidies that he uses political influence to protect. The family’s business interests are valued at over $8 billion.

Kenneth Griffin is a hedge fund manager who gave $10 million to the House Republican Super PAC and $5 million to the Senate Republican Super PAC. Griffin initially backed Nikki Haley for the 2024 Republican nomination and called Trump a “three-time loser,” but is now prepared to endorse Trump. Griffin is worth about $35 billion.

Harold Hamm, executive chair of Continental Resources, is an oil and gas magnate heavily invested in fracking who is worth $18.5 billion. Hamm is part of the Koch brothers rightwing donor network. He contributed $320,000 to the 2020 Trump campaign and organized a major Trump fundraiser with the fossil fuel industry.

Diane Marie Hendricks and her deceased husband were major supporters of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. Her net worth is over $20 billion. From 2014 to 2016, she gave millions of dollars to a Republican Super PAC created by the Koch Brothers and in 2020 Hendricks contributed $1.1 million to Trump’s presidential campaign. She spoke at the 2024 Republican Party National Convention and is also a financial supporter of Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Hendricks’ investment in Trump paid off bigtime. She saved $36 million in income taxes from a provision in the 2017 Trump tax cut.

Benjamin Horowitz is a co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz along with Marc Lowell Andreessen and is personally worth $3.5 billion. He pledged to give money to the 2024 Trump campaign.

Robert “Woody” Johnson is co-owner of the New York Jets football team and an heir to the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical company. He is worth an estimated $10 billion. Johnson was a co-financial chair of the Republican Party during Trump’s 2016 campaign and was appointed ambassador to the United Kingdom when Trump was elected. During the 2024 campaign, Johnson has already given over a million dollars to Trump Super PACs.

Doug Leone is a partner at and former head of Sequoia Capital. Forbes magazine estimates he is worth $8.4 billion. In 2021, Leone said Trump lost his support because of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, but he is now back on the Trump bandwagon. He gave $2 million to the Right for America Trump Super PAC and $1 million to the America PAC.

Joe Lonsdale is a technology entrepreneur and investor and co-founder of Palantir worth about half a billion dollars. He donates to Trump through the Super PAC America Pac.

Howard Lutnick is CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald and has a net worth of an estimated $1.5 billion. Lutnick has hosted New York metro area fundraisers for Trump in his home since 2019.

Omeed Malik, who formerly supported Ron DeSantis, changed track and pledged to raise over $3 million and donate at least $100,000 to the Trump campaign. Malik is president of 1789 Capital and CEO of Farvahar Partners. He has an estimated net worth of $6.15 billion.

Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus supported Trump for President in 2016 and 2020 and announced he would support Trump again even if he were convicted of crimes. He gave the Trump campaign $25 million in 2020. Marcus, who is worth almost $9 billion, originally supported DeSantis this round and then Haley, but he is now boosting Trump again. He said his donations to the 2024 Trump campaign would be “in line” with past contributions.

Vincent and Linda McMahon are professional wrestling promoters. The McMahons gave $5 million to the Donald J. Trump Foundation. Linda was appointed administrator of the federal Small Business Administration during the Trump administration and spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention. The McMahon’s have a combined net worth of $3.2 billion.

Timothy Mellon is a descendant of the founder of the Mellon Bank and railroad interests. The bank, under different names, today manages about $50 trillion in assets and the current generation of the family is worth about $15 billion. Mellon is a major Trump supporter. In April 2020, he gave $10 million to Trump’s America First Action Super PAC, and he has pledged $75 million to elect Trump in 2024. He also contributed $25 million to the independent candidacy of Robert Kennedy. Mellon is the definition of rightwing weirdo. He posted online comparing climate scientists to ISIS, is a COVID anti-vaxxer, donated to build a Southern wall, and issued statements that led to him being accused of racism.

Robert and Rebeka Mercer (his daughter and fellow conservative activist) Pappa Mercer was an artificial intelligence proponent and co-chair of the Renaissance Technologies hedge fund. Mercer has a string of companies based in the Caribbean that he uses to avoid paying American income taxes. Among his rightwing activities, he contributed to the Brexit campaign for Great Britain to leave the European Union, works with Koch brother’s groups, financially supported Breitbart News, donated to the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, labels civil rights acts as racist, and helped fund JD Vance’s Ohio Senate campaign. Daughter Rebekah is in charge of the Mercer Family Foundation. She home schooled her children, is on the Heritage Foundation Board of Trustee, was on the 2016 Trump transition team, and works closely with Steve Bannon who she introduced to Trump. Pappa Mercer is probably worth a little less than a billion dollars.

Elon Musk is going all in to elect Trump, providing money through his private pro-Trump Super PAC and free publicity on his social media site including an interview scheduled for posting on August 12. Musk reportedly pledged to contribute $45 million a month to his America PAC, which has already been accused of using data from a subterfuge voting registration drive to aid the Trump campaign. After Musk purchased Twitter, which he rebranded X, there was a surge of antisemitic and racist postings on the platform. Musk himself has also posted or retweeted hateful conspiracy theories, targeted Anthony Fauci, and made fun of people using gender pronouns. It is estimated that Musk is worth over $200 billion.

Chamath Palihapitiya, an early senior executive at Facebook, is a champion of digital currency and a competitive poker player. He co-hosted a San Francisco fund raiser for Trump with David Sacks that raised $12 million and promotes Trump on his podcast. Palihapitiya’s net worth is estimated at $1.2 billion.

Geoffrey Palmer is a Los Angeles-based real estate developer and competitive polo player worth $3.1 billion. His company contributed $5 million to Trump’s 2016 campaign, and he has hosted fundraisers for each of Trump’s campaigns. This round he gave $2 million to Trump's MAGA Inc. super PAC and $814,600 to the Trump 47 Committee. He was also a major financer of efforts to recall California Governor Gavin Newsom.

John Paulson, net worth $3.5 billion, made his money from the 2008 housing market collapse. He was an early supporter of Trump in 2016, has already raised $50 million for the Trump 2024 campaign, and is another potential Treasury Secretary.

Hedge fund broker Nelson Peltz stated that he regretted voting for Trump after the Capitol attack, but he is now hosting Trump fund raisers at his Palm Beach, Florida mansion, although he says he is not happy about it. Peltz is worth $1.6 billion.

Isaac Perlmutter is an Israeli American billionaire who has had stakes in several companies including Revco drug stores, Remington gun manufacturers, and Marvel Entertainment. He is a friend and unofficial advisor to Trump who helped oversee the Department of Veterans Affairs when Trump was President. Isaac and his wife Laura Perlmutter gave Trump almost $2 million in 2016, and Laura was part of Trump’s inauguration planning committee. In 2024, the Perlmutters have already contributed $10 million to Trump’s Right for America Super PAC. Isaac and Laura Perlmutter live near Mar-a-Lago in Florida and are worth over $4 billion.

Vivek Ramaswamy originally ran against Trump in Republican primaries but then endorsed him and was awarded with a spot at the Republican National Convention. Ramaswamy opposes affirmative action, abortion rights, and birthright citizenship. During his campaign he called the “climate change agenda a hoax” and for raising the voting age to 25. He has endorsed conspiracy theories that the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was a “inside job” and questioning the official story about the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center. He made his money in pharmaceuticals and is worth about a billion dollars.

Todd Ricketts is a co-owner of the Chicago Cubs, a TD Ameritrade board member, and a former Republican Party finance chair. Since 2016 he has been a Trump fundraiser and was chair of the Trump Victory Committee in 2020. The Ricketts family is worth over $4 billion.

Phil Ruffin, a casino magnate, is a longtime associate and business partner of Trump who was with Trump at the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow. Ruffin, worth $2.6 billion, contributed $2 million to Trump’s MAGA Inc. Super PAC and more than $800,000 to Trump 47.

Tech investor, podcast host, and venture capitalist David Sacks spoke opening night of the Republican National Convention. on Monday, co-hosted a fundraiser for Trump in San Francisco. Sacks, a former chief operating officer at PayPal, is now a big promoter of crypto currency along with JD Vance. Sacks supported Hillary Clinton in 2016, recently toyed with support for Robert Kennedy, but is now a prominent Trump fund raiser.

Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman, a longtime friend of Trump, was chairman of his Strategic Policy Forum when Trump was President. In that role he marshalled billionaires to support Trump tax cuts and economic policies. Schwarzman denounced the January 6 attack on the Capitol Building as an “insurrection” and an “affront to the democratic values we hold dear” and in 2022 he announced he would not support Trump for reelection however Schwarzman is now a Trump supporter and fundraiser again. He is worth $39 billion.

Paul Singer is a hedge fund manager with a net worth of over $6.1 billion. His specialty is buying the debt of poor countries and then forcing them to pay. Singer and the workforce at his company, Elliott Management are a top source of contributions to the National Republican Committee. Singer has contributed to the political efforts of the Koch brothers and gave one million dollars to the Trump 2017 inaugural committee. He originally supported Nicki Haley’s 2024 campaign but has now endorsed Trump.

Jeff Sprecher and his wife, former Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler are worth over $1 billion. Each contributed over $800,000 to a Trump Super PAC. Sprecher is the former chairman of the New York Stock Exchange.

So far Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, has not endorsed Trump again. He contributed a million dollars to the trump 2016 campaign but did not give money in 2020. Thiel, who is gay and part of a same-sex marriage, remains unhappy with Trump and the Republican Party’s focus on hot-button cultural issues. However, he was a major supporter of JD Vance’s Senate campaign and is expected to eventually support the Trump-Vance ticket because of his major investment in crypto currencies. Thiel, the person who introduced Trump to Vance, is worth $4.2 billion.

Richard Uihlein and Elizabeth Uihlein are founders of Uline and Richard is also an heir to Schlitz. They are anti-union, anti-tax, anti-regulation, and anti-gay and transgender rights. Their $10 million contribution to the Trump 2024 Make America Great Again Super PAC is currently the second largest Trump gift. The Uihleins are worth over $6 billion.

Kelcy Warren, the chairman and former CEO of a pipeline company with a net worth of over $6 billion gave over $800,000 to the Trump 47 Committee and $5 million to the MAGA Inc. super PAC.

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss each gave over $1 million to the Trump 47 Committee and $250,000 to the America PAC. The twins run the cryptocurrency exchange Gemini and are each worth $2.7 billion. When endorsing trump, Tyler Winklevoss called him “pro-Bitcoin, pro-crypto, and pro-business.”

Steve Wynn was vice-chairman of Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee. He is casino and real estate magnate worth $3.4 billion who is accused of sexual misconduct and acting as a foreign agent for China. Wynn gave over $800,000 to the Trump 47 Committee.

Jeffrey Yass is the co-founder trading and technology company Susquehanna International Group, a major investor in TikTok which is under attack because its parent company is owned by China, and Trump’s sham media company. He has a net worth of $27.6 billion. He is a self-proclaimed libertarian, on the executive advisory council of the Cato Institute, and an advocate for charter schools and vouchers. Yass is one of the largest Republican Party deep pockets and contributed to several candidates challenging the results of the 2020 Presidential election.

In her final moments, Getrude Stein is rumored to have asked, “What is the answer?” No reply came from those gathered around her. She followed up with the retort, “but what is the question?”

The maximalist impulse toward Ukraine is approaching its final act in a similarly unenviable state. It, too, is on its deathbed, and it faces what increasingly resembles a crisis of meaning, fueled not by insufficient resources or flagging political will but by an ill-defined theory of victory.

There could never be perfect unanimity in what was a U.S.-led coalition of around 50 nations, but it can be surmised that the initial goal was to enable Ukraine, through a combination of military aid, sanctions, and diplomatic pressure, to decisively degrade and potentially defeat the Russian military. It became clear around the latter half of 2023 — though it must be said that many observers sounded the alarm bells a good while earlier — that some of the presumptions behind this approach were untenable.

Yet, three years in, this approach remains the dominant paradigm for framing the war in the absence of any clearly articulated alternative strategy.

Despite previous experiences with Russian countermeasures against HIMARS and other Western-supplied systems, the belief persists that Ukraine can tilt the balance of forces in its favor if supplied with the right equipment. Last year, it was Leopard tanks and Patriot missile systems. Now, it’s F-16s. Then there is the larger and more important question of the goals for which these weapons should be used.

Recent assessments urging Ukraine to shift to a defense posture represent a welcome departure from the proposition, thoroughly invalidated by the experience of the failed 2023 counteroffensive, that Ukraine’s military wields the offensive power necessary to expel Russian forces from all of its internationally recognized territory. Such calls reflect the realities of a conflict that has reaffirmed Carl von Clausewitz’s time-tested contention that defense is the stronger form of war and, if heeded much earlier, may perhaps have registered as sound advice.

But this approach unfortunately does not go far enough in acknowledging the severity of factors — military, political, economic, and demographic — working against Ukraine on and off the battlefield. Manpower and firepower are the two currencies with which victory in Ukraine is to be bought — Ukraine’s military faces dire, growing deficits of both. The country is roiled by a demographic downward spiral that will require a generational, whole-of-society effort to redress even if the war was to end today.

Moreover, recent data shows the Ukrainian population’s ironclad unity behind its government’s war aims has all but dissipated, introducing new and unwelcome domestic pressures from which the Zelensky government considered itself immune. A plurality of Ukrainians now favor initiating peace talks with Russia, a measure that has been functionally banned by the Zelensky administration.

There is a sense in which these proposed defensive strategies are even more fraught than earlier maximalist plans — which peaked in popularity following successful Ukrainian advances in late 2022 — to win the war by dealing a crushing blow to the Russians through lightning offensive maneuvers. The “knockout punch” theory of Ukrainian victory, wrongheaded as it turned out to be, can at least be merited with recognizing and seeking to work within the constraints posed by time.

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Talk of a defensive strategy tries to buy Kyiv time it likely doesn’t have, tapping resources it and its Western partners can ill afford, to achieve an end that has yet to be adequately defined. It is, in form and function, an exercise in whistling past the graveyard.

The war cannot be placed in autopilot, as it were, simply by postponing offensive operations and investing in defense. The problem is not only a stark asymmetry in latent power between Russia and Ukraine, but also and especially the asymmetry of vital interests and escalatory potential between Russia and Ukraine’s Western partners.

Yet the debate over whether or not the trends working against Ukraine can be slowed elides a more fundamental question: slowed to what end? If the intention is to buy more time, what is the time for? Is it to prepare for another large-scale counteroffensive to knock Russia out of the war; to slowly defeat Russia in a war of attrition; or to raise costs on Russia such that the Kremlin agrees to negotiations on reasonably propitious terms for Ukraine and the West?

The first two are hardly more realistic than the cavalier assumptions that underpinned the ill-fated 2023 counteroffensive. The latter is dubious at best in light of the trends discussed above.

Recent coverage of the war has captured with harrowing clarity the challenges confronting Ukraine. But this widespread acknowledgement still appears to be obscured behind a wall of political and military assumptions that have not been updated since the latter half of 2022. Too much of the thinking on Ukraine is caught up in refining, adapting, and justifying a dwindling set of tactical measures rather than articulating a realistic end state that preserves Ukrainian sovereignty and advances U.S. interests.

More military aid to Ukraine and additional sanctions on Russia are all too often treated as goals in of themselves rather than as instruments used to shape outcomes on the strategic level.

The American experience has always been underwritten by a kind of decentralized techno-optimism enabling a uniquely entrepreneurial, solution-oriented culture which has made the U.S. a global innovation leader. But this technocratic spirit, though a great boon in all manner of commercial and scientific enterprises, can become a major liability in more obscurantist matters of statecraft, geopolitics, and military strategy.

America’s trademark technical prowess, personified by the brashly confident Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, failed to pierce the fog of war in Vietnam because it proceeded from strategically unsound assumptions about the conflict’s broader dynamics and refused to correct course at key junctures.

The variables at play in Ukraine are undoubtedly quite different, but the potential folly — wading knee deep into a protracted conflict without a realistic theory of victory — is much the same, and the stakes are similarly high.

I listened with profound sadness to the recent Supreme Court decision Grants Pass v. Johnson, which opens the door for people to be arrested simply for lacking shelter. This decision makes it legal for local governments to target, fine, and even incarcerate people who fall asleep in public areas, regardless of whether there’s safe, accessible shelter available.

Where’s the compassion? Where’s the justice?

I know what it’s like to be without a place to call home. In the years before the pandemic, my husband and I were working hard to buy a house for our children and the animals we rescued. I’d overcome an opioid addiction. We had a small business and were starting to achieve our dreams.

But when the pandemic hit, we lost our business, and our debts quickly mounted. We’d nearly completed the purchase of the house we’d been renting, but we lacked the money to transfer the deed. The owner of the deed decided to evict us.

We live in a small, rural West Virginia town where only two shelters are available—and none that would take our pets. So we lived in a tent with our children and animals for three months.

I’m deeply saddened that our leaders would criminalize people suffering poverty, as if we were living in a Charles Dickens novel.

Losing your home is incredibly destabilizing. Without a fixed address, you can lose benefit payments, official mail, jobs, and other critical opportunities. When I was evicted, I didn’t have time to switch over my license plate to my new vehicle, which caused me to lose my license. I still haven’t been able to regain my driving privileges.

We had to walk long distances for food and water, and we had no way to shower. My children had to change schools, and the emotional strain on them caused behavioral and mental health challenges that no child should have to experience.

We survived with help from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps. We got a tiny amount of cash assistance from the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program and health care through Medicaid.

We were eligible for housing assistance, but the wait was impossibly long due to the lack of available affordable housing. That’s not just a problem in West Virginia—the United States has a shortage of more than seven million affordable housing units for people with very low incomes.

Let me tell you this: No one wakes up one morning and chooses to be homeless. No one says to themselves, “How fun would it be for my kids and my family to live in a tent without food, water, school, or transportation?”

The owner of the deed to our house finally relented and reduced the deed fee so we could take possession of our house and move back home. But so much damage had been done to the kids already—and we lost most of our rescued animals.

Once housed, I finished my Masters in Public Administration. But with a felony conviction from my earlier days suffering through addiction, finding a job is challenging. My husband works but has medical challenges. We live paycheck to paycheck, hoping another disaster won’t put us out on the street.

Things need to change for families like mine. The Supreme Court’s cruel decision to penalize people who are suffering is a big step in the wrong direction. How is fining and arresting people who are too poor to pay going to help?

Here’s a better idea. We need to invest in affordable housing, ensure people are paid living wages, and support struggling families with a robust safety net.

I’m deeply saddened that our leaders would criminalize people suffering poverty, as if we were living in a Charles Dickens novel. Our laws must be better, and we must hold our officials accountable. We work hard at doing the right thing—they should, too.

Editor's note: The following is based on a social media post on Saturday, August 10, 2024 following news of the latest bombing of a school-turned-shelter in Gaza by Israeli military forces.

Dear International Criminal Court judges,

It is now beyond dispute: Israel has set out systematically to eliminate every aspect of Palestinian life in Gaza. It is not just the 186,000 lives that the Lancet estimates to have been lost. It is more than that.

You have already witnessed:

1. The most intensive bombing of any densely populated urban area in living memory

2. The most deliberately targeted starvation of a population in post-WW2 history

3. The greatest number of journalists killed in any war worldwide

4. The largest number of UN staff killed in 10 months.

And that's not all: Israel attacks schools, universities, libraries, archives, cultural centres, heritage sites, mosques and churches. It assassinates professors and slaughters teachers, along with their students—often their entire families too. When will you act?

— (@)

If you don't act now, what is the point of having the ICC?

If you don't act now, is there a smidgeon of an iota of a possibility that anyone will take the ICC seriously in the future?

On August 8, 63-year-old professional cellist, climate activist, and grandfather, John Mark Rozendaal, was arrested while playing the opening strains of Bach’s “Suites for Cello” outside of CitiBank’s world headquarters in Manhattan. Rozendaal is one of the leaders of the ongoing Summer of Heat civil disobedience campaign that has targeted CitiBank for financing new fossil fuel projects. Earlier this month, Citibank used false allegations to obtain a restraining order to prevent Rozendaal, along with author and campaign leader Alec Connon, from returning to Citibank headquarters or risk being charged with criminal contempt, a crime which carries a maximum seven-year jail sentence. Biologist Sandra Steingraber was invited to bear witness to his restraining order-defying performance and speak at a press event about the significance of his actions. However, that speech was never delivered. Just as Rozendaal began to play the first measures of the suite, police rushed in. Rozendaal and Connon were arrested, as were Steingraber and 13 others in attendance who had formed a circle around the musician as he played. This is the speech that was not delivered.

Good morning. My name is Sandra Steingraber. I’m a PhD biologist, and I like nothing more than to talk about data.

But today, we are here to witness an extraordinary act of courage, and I’m going to speak very personally.

I grew up in coal-country Illinois and was adopted out of a Methodist orphanage. I was a sensitive, introverted child who struggled with human attachment and a sense of belonging. By the time I was 14, I had fallen in love with two things: the Polish composer Frederic Chopin and photosynthesis.

Of all things central to our humanity that climate change threatens, music is on the list.

The idea that I could, with my own fingers, turn black notes on a page—assembled more than a century earlier—into something divinely beautiful was thrilling to me. When I played Chopin, I felt a connection to all the other pianists who had, for generations before me, memorized and practiced this same score for their own recitals.

Meanwhile, the opera of photosynthesis, which takes place inside the miniature Quonset huts called chloroplasts, connected me to the origins of life itself. The idea that green plants can draw in all our exhaled breath through the stomata of their leaves and, in the presence of sunlight, spin carbon dioxide together with water was awesome to me.

With the aid of cytochrome transport systems and leaping electrons, plants undertake an exquisitely beautiful act of biochemical self-creation. They make themselves. They exhale oxygen. And they feed us all.

The biological phenomenon of photosynthesis gave me a sense of ancestry.

By the time I went to college, I had discovered two things: 1) My ear for music was much better than my execution, which was not great; 2) I really loved trees.

So, I forsook the piano for plant ecology and, for my PhD research I learned the skills of dendrochronology, which allowed me to reconstruct the centuries-long history of a forest by studying the patterns of tree rings inside the heartwood of 200-year-old red pines.

The inside of a tree is a living scroll that tells the story—if you are trained to read the language of xylem and phloem—of the entire ecosystem. You can learn, for example, which years great forest fires swept through or which years had especially long winters. I became a historian of forests by studying the rings of the deep inside the trunks of individual trees.

I would have liked nothing better than to spend my life studying trees. But the acceleration of the climate crisis is now torching forests around the world. And drowning them with saltwater. And ravaging them with emergent diseases. And driving their pollinators into extinction. And otherwise stressing them to the point where they can no longer remove and sequester carbon dioxide from the air around them.

So, that’s why I became a civil disobedient with the Summer of Heat campaign. My responsibility as a plant biologist in this moment in human history is to do more than just teach photosynthesis and praise trees. All the oxygen we breathe is provided to us by plants, and they are in trouble. And governments aren’t acting. And banks like Citi keep on financing new fossil fuel projects that are ravaging ecosystems.

For me, the extraordinary concert we are about to witness is the place where botany and music come together.

Orchestral instruments like cellos and violins—as well as the bows drawn across their strings—are made from trees. And not just any trees but tree species that have what musicians call tonewood.

Pernambuco. Ebony. Certain species of maple and spruce.

These trees have cell walls with acoustical properties that vibrate in certain frequencies and, if they are all uniform in size and density, provide the richness of sound that we experience as musical. Different woods have different resonant qualities due to the ratio of cellulose and lignan. Typically, trees used to make classicial musical instruments are 200-400 years old with 20-inch trunks and tree rings that show slow and steady growth.

In a warming climate, however, annual growth rings have become less consistent in size, and the wood has become softer. Instrument-making trees are also increasingly targeted by emerging insect pests.

Trees with tonewood are now growing in more extreme weather conditions and enduring more frequent droughts. Those conditions alter their cellular architecture in ways that alter the tonal qualities of the wooden soundboards of the musical instruments made from their wood. As a result, orchestral music will sound different in the future. Of all things central to our humanity that climate change threatens, music is on the list.

Fifty years ago, playing a Chopin nocturne had the power to stop me from self-injuring. Listening to my friend John Mark Rozendaal defy Citi’s attempt to silence peaceful protest again the financing of climate ruin by performing Bach’s “Suites for Cello” will, I believe, have the power to call us all to stop injury to the planet.

It’s been just over 20 years since CBS News published the sobering photographs that proved the U.S. Army was carrying out unspeakable crimes against Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison.

Rape. Degradation. Homicide. Torture, both psychological and physical. Sexual humiliation.

The revelations of U.S. barbarity were greeted with horror around the world and played a major role in turning opinion against the Iraq War.

In recent days, it has become all too clear that something comparable to Abu Ghraib—and very possibly worse—has been taking place in Israeli prisons since October 7 when the war on Gaza broke out.

Looking terrified as he spoke, he told us of his disbelief that “peaceful people with no power can be starved, tortured, and killed” in the 21st century, with no protection, legal representation, or international outrage.

This week, appalling leaked video footage captured Israeli soldiers sexually assaulting a Palestinian detainee, just as a report from the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem highlighted the state’s policy of systematic prisoner abuse and torture since the start of the war.

The report, based on interviews with 55 Palestinians detained since the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, is distressing to read. It provides evidence of degrading treatment, arbitrary beatings, and sleep deprivation, as well as the “repeated use of sexual violence, in varying degrees of severity.”

Fadi Baker, 25, recollects that Israeli forces “put cigarettes out in my mouth and on my body. They put clamps on my testicles that were attached to something heavy. It went on like that for a full day. My testicles swelled up and my left ear bled.”

He said interrogators asked him about Hamas leaders and people he didn’t know and then beat him. “Then they put me back in the freezing room with the loud disco music, and again left me there, naked, for two days.”

B’Tselem headlined its report: “Welcome to hell.”

Normalizing Rape

While Israeli authorities have denied such accounts, the analysis comes just days after nine soldiers were arrested in relation to the rape of a Palestinian prisoner at the notorious Sde Teiman detention facility. The victim reportedly suffered a severe injury to his anus, a ruptured bowel, lung damage, and broken ribs.

In addition, last month the United Nations Human Rights office published a report that found shocking abuses in Israeli military facilities and prisons, where at least 53 Palestinians have died since October 7.

How have Western politicians remained silent on these horrors? Where is the mass public outrage?

This collective omerta from politicians and the media about Israel’s monstrous conduct is hard to comprehend, given that we are talking about systematic war crimes committed on a horrifying scale by a country already under investigation at the International Court of Justice for potential genocide.

It seems Israeli leaders have been successful in their campaign to normalize rape and other abuses against Palestinian prisoners. After the arrest of the nine soldiers at Sde Teiman, far-right protesters who stormed the facility were joined by several Knesset members. Justice Minister Yariv Levin said he was “shocked to see harsh pictures of soldiers being arrested,” adding that it was “impossible to accept.”

National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir went even further: “I recommend the defence minister, the [Israeli army] chief and the military authorities to… learn from the prison service—light treatment of terrorists is over. Soldiers need to have our full support.”

Energy Minister Eli Cohen also came out in strong support of the “reservists who do holy work and guard the despicable Hamas terrorists,” adding, “We should all embrace them and salute them, certainly not interrogate them and humiliate them.”

The real goal of the arrests might simply have been to present the illusion that Israel is taking action internally against such horrors, in a bid to avoid international war crimes trials at The Hague. According to a recent report from Ynet, senior Israeli legal officials said: “It’s better that we investigate. Internal investigations save international external investigations.”

In a Haaretz article late last month, law professor Orit Kamir referenced legislation that was passed a year ago to allow for increased punishment in cases of Palestinians who sexually assault Jewish women. One year on, portions of the Israeli establishment “are no longer satisfied with doubling punishment… The state law amendment a year ago was only the trailer, when they were still hesitant and restrained,” she wrote.

“Now the sting is out of the bag, and they renounce the rule of law of the country altogether, and demand to apply the ancient law of revenge: an eye for an eye and rape for rape. Those who were arrested by the [Israeli army] as a suspect in connection with the 7 October atrocities were, according to their opinion, to be raped in custody by Jewish Israeli soldiers.”

Such abuses are becoming mainstream. There is ample evidence. Where is the broad global condemnation?

Western Complicity

The accounts cited by B’Tselem are consistent with many other reports that have filtered out from Israeli prisons over the last 10 months.

Four weeks ago, we interviewed Muazzaz Abayat in his hospital bed in Bethlehem after his release from jail, following nine months of administrative detention. Abayat, who had lost more than half his body weight in jail, told us that throughout his imprisonment, he was beaten, abused, tortured, starved, and deprived of water.

He said that his case was not exceptional—every other Palestinian prisoner faces the same treatment. His unimaginable suffering was sculpted in his face. Abayat compared the Negev prison where he had been held to the notorious U.S. facilities at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

These are the signs of a very sick society indeed—one that has passed through an invisible barrier into savagery. There are no red lines, no respect for international law, and no accountability.

He was never charged with any crime. Looking terrified as he spoke, he told us of his disbelief that “peaceful people with no power can be starved, tortured, and killed” in the 21st century, with no protection, legal representation, or international outrage.

There is still no international outcry. Incredibly, there has not even been comment. Despite the tsunami of evidence in recent days, there has been nothing from Western leaders. Nothing from U.S. President Joe Biden or his vice president, Kamala Harris. Silence from Keir Starmer, the British prime minister who threw his weight behind Israel’s policy of collective punishment in Gaza.

Nor have we heard from the former prime minister, Rishi Sunak, who had previously pledged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “unequivocal” support. The British media—with the honorable exception of The Guardian, which gave full coverage to the B’Tselem report—has been largely silent.

This collective omerta from politicians and the media about Israel’s monstrous conduct is hard to comprehend, given that we are talking about systematic war crimes committed on a horrifying scale by a country already under investigation at the International Court of Justice for potential genocide.

Their silence amounts to complicity. As for Israel, the majority of the political and media classes do not appear to think there is much wrong in the torture and abuse of prisoners, with some ministers actively defending the abusers.

During a recent televised debate, one of the panellists suggested it should be legal to use rape as a form of torture. In any other country, such vile comments would be major news.

These are the signs of a very sick society indeed—one that has passed through an invisible barrier into savagery. There are no red lines, no respect for international law, and no accountability. The silence of the West shows that we, too, have entered the same nightmare universe as Ben Gvir and Netanyahu.

A few weeks ago, I drove to Baltimore to see my favorite boyhood baseball team for the first time since it changed its name to the Guardians, and I noticed something jarring about their uniforms. No, I’m not talking about see-through pants. I’m talking about the patch on their sleeves bearing the logo of a company whose business is antithetical to the meaning of the team’s new moniker.

Guardians, by definition, protect and preserve. The company that paid for that patch, Marathon Petroleum, does the exact opposite, posing a major threat to public health and the environment. The country’s largest oil refiner with more than 7,000 Marathon and Arco gas stations nationwide, it ranks among the country’s top 50 air and water polluters as well as the top 20 carbon polluters, according to a 2023 report by the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI). Since 2014, the Findlay, Ohio-based company and its subsidiaries have been fined more than $900 million for federal environmental violations. Guardians they are not.

The fact that the Guardians now wear Marathon’s logo may not be news to Clevelanders, but it was to me. My current hometown team, the Washington Nationals, has not rushed to cash in on the sleeve logo craze that began last year after a 2022 labor contract allowed teams to add advertising patches to their uniforms, so I hadn’t been paying attention. Besides the Nike swoosh that has adorned the front of all MLB team jerseys since 2020, 17 MLB teams are now wearing jersey patches from corporations ranging from grocery chains and electronics firms to insurance businesses and energy companies.

Marathon Petroleum partnered with the Guardians because it wants baseball fans to think it’s a good corporate citizen. It is most definitely not.

To be sure, the Guardians are not the only team that has inked an oil patch deal. The Houston Astros (Oxy Energy), Kansas City Royals (QuikTrip), and Texas Rangers (Energy Transfer) also now display oil industry logos on their sleeves. Unlike Marathon Petroleum, however, only Oxy Energy—formerly Occidental Petroleum—and Energy Transfer are among the PERI’s top 50 air, water, and carbon polluters, and only in one category each. Based on 2021 data, Oxy Energy was the 35th biggest air polluter and Energy Transfer was the 34th biggest carbon polluter.

Marathon Petroleum, meanwhile, ranks as the nation’s 48th biggest toxic air pollution emitter, worse than Chevron, the second-largest U.S. oil company; the 25th biggest water polluter, worse than Chevron and Phillips 66; and the 18th biggest carbon polluter, worse than BP, Chevron, and Koch Industries. Despite its pitiful performance, the company maintains on its website that it is “committed to minimizing [its] environmental impact.”

Beyond its abysmal environmental record, Marathon Petroleum has played a key role in efforts to undermine federal climate-related regulations. In 2018, the company spearheaded a covert campaign to roll back U.S. fuel economy standards, disingenuously arguing that the country produces so much oil that it no longer has to worry about conserving it. If the campaign had been successful, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions would have increased by as much as 931 million metric tons by 2035, more than the annual emissions of many midsize countries.

Marathon Petroleum’s logo also enjoys prime placement in the Guardians’ ballpark, which I first noticed when I caught an Orioles-Guardians game in Cleveland on cable earlier this month. A large Marathon logo sits below the baseline between home and first, a half-dozen logos are stacked on a padded column in front of the team’s dugout, and Marathon ads have been rotating through on computer-generated TV-visible signage behind home plate since the company became a Guardians’ corporate sponsor in 2021.

Corporations advertise with sports teams for two main reasons: to build trust and increase exposure. According to a 2021 Nielsen “Trust in Advertising” study, 81% of consumers completely or somewhat trust brands that sponsor sporting events, second only to the trust they have for friends and family. Jersey patches especially attract attention. Nielsen estimates that the average value of the live broadcast exposure a patch sponsor will receive over a full regular baseball season will exceed $12.4 million.

Marathon Petroleum partnered with the Guardians because it wants baseball fans to think it’s a good corporate citizen. It is most definitely not. The Guardians should find a more suitable sponsor when the company’s contract runs out at the end of the 2026 season—one that protects and preserves, not one that endangers public health and the future of the planet.

In 2013, Justine Sacco, an executive at a New York public relations firm, sent a tweet in which she joked about AIDS among Black Africans. “Going to Africa,” her tweet said, “Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” The tweet, which went viral, was denounced as racist and, despite an abject apology, Sacco was fired from her job.

Amy Cooper earned a similar fate. In May, 2020, Cooper was roaming in New York’s Central Park when a male birdwatcher confronted her about her unleashed dog. Cooper then called the police. “There is a man, African American,” she reported, “and he is recording me and threatening me and my dog... please send the cops immediately!” For this racist ploy, Cooper was publicly condemned. She, too, ended up losing her job.

On July 8, 2024, the WRAL (Raleigh, North Carolina) news website ran the headline, “Millions of Tax Dollars Going to a Company Accused of Racism. WRAL Investigates Why the State Still Hasn’t Taken Action.” The headline implies that what’s allegedly going on is wrong and should be investigated, presumably to stop state support for a racist enterprise.

These examples of anti-racist reaction suggest that as a society we’ve reached a point where public expressions of racism, as well as public support for racism, are unacceptable. One offensive joke can get you fired. Yet we now see an egregious double standard being applied in the U.S. when it comes to tolerance of and support for racism.

Imagine a revised version of that WRAL headline: “Billions of Tax Dollars Going to a Country Accused of Racism. Mainstream Media Coordinate Efforts to Investigate Why the Federal Government Still Hasn’t Taken Action.” Don’t hold your breath waiting for it.

The reality is that billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars are going to a country not only accused of racism, but which, as many see it, was founded on racist premises, still practices apartheid, and whose leaders have for decades made unabashedly racist public statements. That country is, of course, Israel.

Israel’s anti-Palestinian racism is a glaring example of the dehumanization that racism entails and the murderous brutality racism enables.

Since October 7, 2023, blatantly racist statements by Israeli leaders have been widely reported. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu likened Palestinians to Amalekites, an ancient tribe in Old Testament lore whom Yahweh told the Israelites to destroy—men, women, children, infants, and cattle. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant referred to Israel’s assault on Gaza as a fight against “human animals.” Other Israeli officials called for erasing Gaza from the face of the Earth, claiming that no Palestinian civilians are innocent.

Cued by their political leaders, Israeli soldiers have released racist videos on social media celebrating their dominance of Palestinians and the destruction of Palestinian homes.

From the top echelons of government to army field units, Israeli racism has been on clear display to the world. These expressions of virulent racism mattered to the International Court of Justice, which took them as evidence of genocidal intent, but they did not seem to matter to U.S. political leaders, except perhaps as instances of bad optics.

Partisans of Israel sought to explain away these expressions of anti-Palestinian racism as uncharacteristic outbursts, products of the rage many Israelis felt in the aftermath of the October 7 attack by Hamas. There is no doubt some truth in this claim; anger conduces to saying hateful things. But the history of anti-Palestinian racism in Israel did not begin in 2023. In fact, it precedes Israel’s founding.

Theodor Herzl, one of the principal architects of political Zionism in the late 19th century, saw the native Arabs of Palestine as “primitive and backward,” according to Israeli historian Avi Shlaim. Herzl expected Palestinian Arabs to be grateful for the prosperity that a Jewish influx would bring to Palestine. Consistent with the ideological fantasies of earlier generations of European colonizers, Herzl imagined that Jews would merit credit for assuming the white man’s burden of civilizing the natives.

Other early Zionists differed in the degree to which they anticipated Arab resistance to the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine. But all accepted the principle that it ultimately didn’t matter what the Indigenous people wanted. By use of military force backed by outside imperial powers (Britain; later the U.S.), and through diplomatic sidelining of Palestinian Arabs, Zionists aimed to create the ethnocratic state of Israel, regardless of the conflicting nationalist aspirations of Palestinians.

All this preceded WWII, the Holocaust, and the formal creation of Israel. The forcible displacement of 750,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes and land—what we today would call “ethnic cleansing”—in the 1948 Nakba was largely a matter of putting into practice an idea rooted in political Zionism from the start: The lives, wishes, and well-being of the native Arab population would not be allowed to deter the creation of a Jewish state.

In one sense, little has changed since 1948. Successive Israeli governments have used different levels of violence to quash Palestinian resistance to colonial oppression, but all have adhered to the principle that Israel should be a Jewish state, run by Jews for Jews, with as few Palestinians as possible from the river to the sea. Nor has any Israeli government relinquished the idea that Palestinian desires for freedom and self-determination must be subjugated if necessary for Israel to exist as a Jewish state.

Today, the heir to this racist philosophy is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Over 30 years ago, in his book A Place Among the Nations: Israel and the World, Netanyahu slandered Arabs across the board, writing, “Violence is ubiquitous in the political life of all the Arab countries. It is the primary method of dealing with opponents, both foreign and domestic, both Arab and non-Arab.” Netanyahu goes on to call terrorism “the quintessential Middle East export,” saying that “its techniques everywhere are those of the Arab regimes and organizations that invented it.” Projection much?

To be clear, what makes Zionism racist are its implicit assumptions that the desires of Jews to live in freedom, safety, and dignity take precedence over Palestinian desires for the same things; that it is acceptable for a militarily powerful Jewish state to impose its will on a stateless and vulnerable Palestinian group; and that the goal of maintaining a Jewish state trumps the basic human rights of Palestinians.

Anti-Palestinian racism helps to legitimate these ideas and is further reinforced when it is invoked, as by Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders, to justify violence and the daily humiliation of apartheid. These are not radical observations. In much of the world, outside the sphere of U.S. influence, Israel’s anti-Palestinian racism is plain as day, and what I’m saying here would be uncontroversial.

So when other expressions of racism are unacceptable in the U.S. today, why does anti-Arab Israeli racism get a pass? Why isn’t Israel shunned as a pariah nation, as South Africa once was, for denying the human rights of Palestinians and for the immorality of its ethno-supremacist practices?

One answer is that realpolitik rarely bends to morality. As former Secretary of State and Army General Alexander Haig once put it, Israel is like an unsinkable American aircraft carrier in the Middle East, projecting power in a region of great economic importance to the U.S. ruling class. Relative to the larger geopolitical stakes at play in the region, the fate of a stateless Arab minority is not that important, except as a potential source of instability. If this source of instability were somehow made to go away, many U.S. political leaders would be perfectly happy, regardless of the racism embedded in the solution.

Another reason many Americans are willing to tolerate Israeli racism is that the two nations are seen as sharing a similar origin story, one that makes racist crimes forgivable.

Just as European colonists once sought freedom from popes and kings by forging a new nation in North America, Jews sought freedom from pogroms and antisemitism by creating a Jewish state in the Middle East. Yes, some Indigenous people got hurt in the process, and that’s a shame. But this suffering pales when weighed against the benefits America and Israel have brought the world. What’s more, after the Holocaust, Jews have an undeniable claim to seek their own version of Manifest Destiny. So the story goes.

Those who accept this settler-colonial mythos—underscored by biblical fables, post-Holocaust guilt, and devaluing of a racialized Other—may have trouble seeing what Israel has done and is doing to the Palestinians as wrong. It will be admitted that maintaining an ethnocratic Jewish state is ugly, even bloody, at times; but the ends justify the means.

Nor should we forget that anti-Arab racism abounds in the U.S. as well as Israel. Americans are thoroughly propagandized to accept the stereotype of Arabs as terrorists, or as Islamic fanatics rooted in a regressive medieval culture. The racist Israeli view of Arabs thus fails to shock in the U.S., fails to shock as it should, because the same view is normalized here. Our “special relationship” with Israel is built in part on this shared infection with the virus of colonial racism.

Israel’s anti-Palestinian racism is a glaring example of the dehumanization that racism entails and the murderous brutality racism enables. This is what the world has seen play out in Gaza these last 10 months. There could be no better example, right now, of why Israeli racism should not get a pass in the U.S., nor anywhere, ever again.

The state takeover of Houston Independent School District, the eighth-largest public school system in the United States, is entering its second year.

State-appointed superintendent Mike Miles is celebrating the occasion by touting state test score results that show preliminary improvement in student achievement. Other leaders in education across the country are paying close attention to Miles’ tactics to see if they’re effective enough to implement in their own schools.

Since 1989, over 100 school districts across the U.S. have been subjected to state takeovers, in which the state seizes control of low-performing or financially struggling school districts, replacing their locally elected school boards. This is done with the goal of dramatically improving the district’s academic or financial performance. State takeovers are difficult to neatly describe because they vary from place to place depending on the policies that the state-appointed board and superintendent decide to implement. But they are overwhelmingly ineffective.

Instead of allowing the state to take over our schools, we need to turn to proven solutions like increasing per-pupil spending, which has been shown to address achievement gaps faced by low-income students.

A 2021 study done by researchers from Brown University and the University of Virginia analyzed over 100 state takeovers between 1989 and 2016. It found “no evidence that takeover generates academic benefits.” In fact, it can take years for schools to return to their previous levels of academic achievement after a takeover.

Beyond that, takeovers are emblematic of a worrying trend in education that extends beyond Houston and hurts low-income learners and students of color most.

The study also showed that state takeovers disproportionately target districts with higher concentrations of low-income and nonwhite students, regardless of academic achievement. But another study revealed that majority-Black districts rarely see financial improvement in the years following a takeover.

The Brown study also found that takeovers tend to happen in states with both a Republican governor and a Republican-controlled legislature. This should be really alarming given the fact that those same states are also passing legislation like requiring the 10 Commandments to be displayed in public school classrooms and restricting the discussion of race, sex, and gender in schools.

HISD is no different.

As of 2022, almost 80% of HISD students were considered economically disadvantaged, and the overwhelming majority were students of color. Education is supposed to be the great equalizer, but state takeovers exacerbate education inequality for low-income and minority students. Too often in conservative states, they disrupt existing communities and feed students subpar and radicalizing material.

In 2019, out of HISD’s almost 300 campuses, just one school’s repeated failure to meet state standards allowed the Texas Education Agency to take over the entire district. HISD had managed to fight off takeover for four years.

During that time, their academic accountability scores improved. In 2022, the district received a high B, performing better than several other districts in the state, and Phillis Wheatley High School, the 97-year old historically Black campus that had triggered the state takeover law, improved its score to a passing 78.

Last year, the Texas Education Agency took over anyway, appointing a nine-person board of managers and Mike Miles, formerly the very controversial superintendent of Dallas ISD, to transform the Houston public school system.

As a result of the takeover, the Texas Education Agency implemented a scripted curriculum in HISD schools. This past year, Miles had to reassign a group of teachers to review the provided curriculum, which was found to be riddled with errors and inappropriate content, including ChatGPT-sourced material. He also faced backlash after it was revealed that students were being shown videos questioning human-caused climate change from the conservative Prager University Foundation.

Now, the Texas Education Agency is offering all school districts in the state $60 per student to teach a new curriculum that contains extensive biblical references. For students in Texas schools, culture war politics are increasingly invading education, and districts taken over by the state have no choice but to teach its curriculum.

There are several other problems with the HISD takeover: 28 schools faced the most radical reforms this year, and an additional 57 were brought into the new system but didn’t experience some of the larger structural changes.

State requirements for certified teachers, deans, and assistant principals were waived to ease the hiring process, while veteran teachers had to reapply for their positions, with many not offered the chance to return.

A militaristic learning environment was enforced, with teachers forced to rush through timed and scripted lessons and students made to participate approximately once every four minutes. When students had to use the restroom, they had to carry a large traffic cone as a hall pass, which many felt was humiliating and dehumanizing.

Libraries were converted into “team centers” that housed both students who finished their lessons early and students with discipline problems made to watch their lessons virtually, while librarians were let go and, in several cases, shelves emptied.

All of these reforms have led to a budget deficit of almost $200 million for this year and a projected shortfall of over $500 million for next year that Miles is attempting to make up partially through the cutting of special education and wraparound specialists, who help students dealing with homelessness and hunger. Many have questioned the long-term financial feasibility of the takeover.

On August 8, the district’s state-appointed board of managers will decide whether or not to put its proposed $4.4 billion bond, which it says will be put toward renovating facilities and improving school safety, among other promised improvements. Opponents to the takeover, including the American Federation of Teachers, have spoken out against the bond, citing their lack of faith in Miles and embracing the rallying cry “No trust, no bond.”

Meanwhile, Miles seeks to implement a pay-for-performance model, where teacher pay—and continuing employment—will be tied to standardized test scores and evaluations. For now, he’s settled for raising teacher pay, but only for the 28 schools required to follow the new model, and only for those teachers whose grades and subjects are tested on state exams. Furthermore, teachers can only benefit for as long as they manage to stay employed at those schools.

This past year, teacher turnover was almost double its usual rate, as teachers and administrators both opted to resign in protest to the reforms and were not asked back throughout the year.

It is possible that some of Miles’ practices are worth considering, but a year of teacher, parent, and student responses only support the growing body of evidence that show that takeover is not the way to go about it. Protests and student walkouts against the takeover continued until the end of the school year, with community members complaining that their concerns have been repeatedly ignored or dismissed.

We can all acknowledge that educational inequality is a major issue, and change is necessary. But a takeover is not the answer. Too often, it is an instrument of conservative politicians wielded against local communities who find their voices shut out, and the most vulnerable students pay the price.

Instead of allowing the state to take over our schools, we need to turn to proven solutions like increasing per-pupil spending, which has been shown to address achievement gaps faced by low-income students. According to a 2018 Rutgers study, Texas needs to spend $12,000 more per student to bring its poorest students up to national average outcomes.

We owe it to all of our students to find effective and sustainable reforms that center their needs. Education should not be a power struggle. Instead, it should be a way to uplift and empower communities and to help give students the start that they need to succeed in life.

On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Ted Rall and Steve Gill discuss the latest news from around the globe, including rising tensions out of the Middle East.    The show begins with cartoonist for The Chicago Tribune Scott Stantis discussing the latest out of the presidential campaign, including Trump’s upcoming Montana rally, Kamala Harris’s response to protesters, and the two candidates agreeing to debate.    Then, human rights lawyer, activist, and author Dan Kovalik shares his perspective on the latest tensions out of the Middle East, including an anticipated attack on Israel.    The second hour starts with international relations and security analyst Mark Sleboda sharing his perspective on Ukraine’s attempted incursion into Russia.    The show closes with former CIA officer host of Political Misfits John Kiriakou joining the show to discuss the government hiding its report on CIA torture.         The post The Final Countdown – 8/9/24 – U.S., Qatar, Egypt Push for Ceasefire Summit  first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

On August 9, 2001, in Colombia, riot police and private security forces from the Cerrejón coal mine — one of the largest open-pit coal mines in the world — surrounded the remote community of Tabaco. They then dragged residents out of their homes and bulldozed what remained of that town’s structures. There was, after all, coal under the town and the mine’s owner, Exxon Mobil Corporation, wanted to access it. Since that date, the displaced residents of Tabaco have been fighting for compensation and (as guaranteed by both Colombian and international law) the reconstruction of their community. So far, no such luck.

Note that August 9th was then and is now the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, as the United Nations first declared in 1994. That was, in fact, the day when the newly formed U.N. Working Group on Indigenous Populations had its initial meeting in 1982.

Indigenous peoples have, of course, been under siege by colonizers for hundreds of years, even if their struggles for land and sovereignty only gained true international recognition in the late twentieth century, a time when, ironically enough, they were experiencing new assaults on their lands globally. Since World War II, the unprecedented growth of both the world’s population and global consumption levels have pushed resource use far beyond any limits once imagined. And that scramble for resources only accelerated starting in the 1990s, which meant further encroachment on Indigenous territories — and, of course, an onrushing climate catastrophe.

The resistance of Indigenous peoples to extractivism has made them crucial protagonists in today’s environmental and climate movements. But that’s only part of the story.

Since then, however, the growing visibility and power of Indigenous movements have created enormous potential for fundamentally changing our world in a positive fashion. While the struggle of the inhabitants of Tabaco has in many ways been emblematic of Indigenous struggles against extractivism, the story is more complicated. First, Tabaco itself is not, in fact, an Indigenous community but one largely descended from Africans brought to the New World as slaves. A narrow emphasis on Indigeneity can make it hard to take in non-Indigenous land and environmental struggles. Moreover, not all Indigenous people are rural and the stereotype flattens the realities of such movements. Finally, popular but misguided ideas about indigeneity underlie the claim to a Jewish “Indigenous” presence in Palestine, one that divorces Indigeneity from its historical context.

A deeper dive into colonialism and Indigenous peoples can help clarify the nature of such movements today and, curiously enough, some of the debates around the Israeli-Palestinian question as well.

Defining Indigenous Peoples

Indigenous peoples today live under the jurisdiction of nation states and those countries define them in varying ways. In the United States, you are Indigenous if you belong to a federally recognized tribe. Colombia formalized legal recognition of Indigeneity in its 1991 constitution and laws that outlined the specific requirements a group must fulfill to become an official “Indigenous community.” Like other Latin American countries, it also legally recognizes Afro-descended communities like Tabaco. In the case of Israel and Palestine, there is no legal “Indigenous” status at all, though the concept has become a weapon in a political debate about who has rights to historic Palestine.

Indigenous peoples in the Americas were first identified as “Indians” by European colonizers. Those so defined had no prior sense of common identity, which only developed through the historical experience of colonization. In the United States, pan-Indian organizations initially emerged in response to the creation of residential boarding schools to forcibly “assimilate” Native American children in what were functionally educational versions of prisons. Starting in the late nineteenth century, children from widely varying homelands speaking different languages were forced into the same regimented schools.

The more radical American Indian Movement emerged in the late twentieth century among Indians from different nations thrown together, thanks in part to the 1950s Voluntary Relocation Program that brought more than 100,000 Native Americans to cities like Chicago, Denver, and Los Angeles. Not surprisingly, collective Indigenous identities in the United States drew not on long-standing language, cultural, or ethnic affinities but on the common experience of conquest and dispossession.

Only in the 1980s did international law begin to recognize a common historical experience among Indigenous peoples globally. The U.N. Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Affairs offered what has become a foundational definition of Indigenous peoples, even though the United Nations never formally adopted it: “Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing on those territories.” This formulation was later expanded to acknowledge the Indigenous peoples of Africa and Asia whose experience of “subjugation, marginalization, dispossession, exclusion, or discrimination” generally came from the independent nation-states that governed their territory rather than directly from European colonization.

Two important innovations in international law, the ILO Convention 169 of 1989 and the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) of 2007, reflected the growing strength of global Indigenous activism and acknowledged the growing threat of extractivist assaults on Indigenous lands. ILO 169 created a legal requirement for “prior consultation” — that is, a requirement that governments offer Indigenous communities a voice in any development projects that might affect their lands. The UNDRIP strengthened that provision by giving communities the right to veto projects they opposed by mandating that governments obtain “free, prior, and informed consent” before embarking on any project affecting Indigenous lands.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that neither the United States nor Israel ratified ILO 169 and neither supported the UNDRIP. Colombia, on the other hand, ratified ILO 169, incorporating it into its 1991 Constitution and extending such protections beyond Indigenous peoples to Afro-Colombian communities like Tabaco. Yet, in reality, as Tabaco’s experience shows, such legal rights continue to be violated.

Even as Colombia and other Latin American countries strengthened Indigenous rights, reformulating their nation-states as proudly multilingual, multicultural, and plurinational, Israel’s 2018 nation-state law further entrenched Jewish ethnonationalism there.

Fossil Colonialism

Fossil fuel use creates massive levels of toxic waste, including (but not limited to) the greenhouse gas emissions now overheating our planet. Increasing fossil fuel use — the industrial revolution in each of its phases — also accelerated the use of other resources. Industry can keep producing more and better stuff, but only by extracting more resources and producing ever more waste. As a result, geographical expansion — whether labeled Manifest Destiny, colonialism, or globalization — has been inseparable from the increasing use of energy, while both were also intimately tied to a 500-year assault on Indigenous lands and ways of life that continues today.

Remarkably enough, despite centuries of colonial expansion, Indigenous peoples still control about a quarter of the planet’s land — mostly (you won’t be surprised to learn) areas ignored by industrial colonizers because they were too cold, too hot, too wet, too dry, too high, too low, or too apparently resource-poor to be deemed useful. However, this century’s relentless push for coal, oil, and natural gas, as well as the growing demand for “clean” energy resources like biofuels, copper, lithium, and rare earth elements, dams for hydropower, and land for solar and wind farms, has pushed the geographic reach of extractivism into new Indigenous territories. And the toxic waste from extraction and production, including greenhouse gas emissions, is at the heart of the present environmental catastrophes that affect us all, but disproportionately Indigenous, poor, and marginalized communities.

Tabaco’s history reflects the experiences and fates of so many self-liberated Afro-descended peoples who established their own communities, some in still-autonomous Indigenous territories, throughout Latin America over the past centuries. Like Indigenous communities, they were rural-, land-, and subsistence-based. And like Indigenous communities, their communities predated the nation-states that later engulfed them. Today, like Tabaco, they find themselves under threat from a modern fossil-fuelized version of colonialism.

Are Indigenous People Natural Environmentalists?

The resistance of Indigenous peoples to extractivism has made them crucial protagonists in today’s environmental and climate movements. But that’s only part of the story.

Colonial ideologies long romanticized Indigenous peoples as living in harmony with the land and nature — the “noble savage” who inhabited an idealized past. This view had a dark side, too: Europeans also labeled them lazy, indolent, standing in the way of progress, and in desperate and eternal need of European tutelage.

Such colonial constructions offered useful rationalizations for destroying even imperial, technologically advanced Indigenous polities like the Aztec and Inca empires that controlled and transformed nature every bit as profoundly as did contemporaneous European societies. Conquest of what they called “the new world” turned European fantasies into reality, as Indigenous hierarchies were flattened and Indigenous peoples dispossessed, enslaved, marginalized, or ruralized. What began in 1492 would only continue with the Indian removal of the 1830s in the United States, Argentina’s “conquest of the desert” in the late nineteenth century, and what some Indigenous scholars have termed the fourth (or fifth) conquest occurring today with neo-extractivism.

Fossil colonialism created a world in which socioeconomic and ethnic categories came to overlap — but not completely. Ramachandra Guha identified “ecosystems peoples,” whose economies and cultures were based on long-term symbiotic relationships with their lands (and they were not all Indigenous). Then, of course, there were the industrializing “omnivores” whose technological and geographical reach knew (and knows) no bounds. Whether European or not, such voracious omnivores were also colonizers and industrializers. Rural, land-based ecosystem peoples, whether Indigenous, Afro-descended, or neither, tend to possess environmental values that look quite different from what passes for environmentalism among so many industrialized omnivores. Theirs is about changing the global economic system, not giving corporations in the global north yet more incentives to extract more from the global south.

Today, Indigenous people are indeed frequently “land-based,” but they remain Indigenous even if they have been displaced, whether voluntarily or not, from their rural communities (or in the United States, their reservations). Most Indigenous people in the Americas now do not live in peasant or rural communities but in urban areas. Some Native American tribal governments and members have even embraced extractive industries like oil and coal on their reservations and they are still Indigenous, even if they don’t match the colonial stereotype.

It’s the historical continuity with people who inhabited a territory prior to those who founded today’s nation-states that makes people Indigenous. In Latin America, Afro-descended peoples share this “priority” not by their ancestors’ presence prior to 1492 but because of their marginalization by the nation-states founded in the 1800s.

Israel and Palestine: Who Is Indigenous?

When I first became involved with Palestinian rights activism during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the term “Indigenous” never arose. There were hints, however. Zionists argued that biblical history connected Jews to the land, and French historian Maxime Rodinson situated European Zionism in its historical context of European colonialism and colonial thought, presaging what later became settler colonial theory.

Today, the question of who is “Indigenous” comes up regularly as Palestinians emphasize their family and ancestral ties to the land from which they were displaced, while mainstream Jewish and Zionist organizations claim that Jews are “native and indigenous” to Palestine. They also insist that Israeli Jews cannot be considered colonizers because, unlike other European ones, they “came to a homeland” and there was and is “no ‘motherland’” to which they can return. Israeli historian Benny Morris typically relied on the narrowest definition of colonialism (as “the policy and practice of an imperial power acquiring political control over another country”) to insist that European Zionists couldn’t be colonizers since they were not agents of a state exercising imperial power.

Such arguments fundamentally distort the scholarship of Indigeneity and settler colonialism. Indigenous people are those whose presence predates the nation-state formed on their territory: in this case, the Palestinians. The Israelis, while cherry-picking from the scholarship on Indigeneity, ignore the basic fact that the state is theirs.

European colonialism has had many faces. Scholars have distinguished “franchise” colonialism (as with much of the British imperial project in India and Africa), in which a small number of colonial bureaucrats cycle in and out of a colony to enforce systems of governance and extraction, from settler colonialism. A classic example of the latter is British North America, where the goal was to eliminate, rather than rule over, native populations, and replace them with a flood of European immigrants.

Of course, such categories are “ideal” types (however less than ideal they proved to be in reality). Most European colonial projects had both settler and franchise characteristics. In fact, one thing the “Jewish-Indigenous” argument about Israel omits is the British Mandate’s (1920-1948) role in fostering the Zionist project in Palestine. It also ignores the fact that most settler colonies were populated not by direct representatives of the colonial power but by unwanted populations of prisoners, religious or ethnic minorities, enslaved people (mostly Africans), indentured or contract laborers, or, in the case of Palestine, European and later Arab and other Jews.

Settler colonialism in North America began in the 1600s but continued long after the United States became an independent country. After that, it wasn’t an outside ruler but a national government that promoted the mass immigration of often impoverished and excluded Europeans to its shores.

Latin America’s history also offers overlapping examples of different types of colonial enterprises. In addition to the Spanish religious and royal officials sent to establish foreign rule, adventurers and non-Castilians made their way to the Americas in both official and unofficial capacities. The colonial governments mistrusted American-born “Creoles” of European origin as promoters of their own interests rather than that of the ruling imperial powers, even if they were also natural allies in controlling recalcitrant indigenous, African, and Afro-descended populations.

Creole elites played a major role in Latin America’s eventual split with Spain and in establishing independent countries there in the nineteenth century. Latin America’s new countries, like the newly independent United States, did not, of course, offer much independence for Indigenous and Afro-descended peoples. And like the United States, they promoted European immigration to whiten their populations, while continuing the project of conquering, missionizing, and otherwise eliminating Indigenous peoples and identities.

Today, amid the brutality in Gaza, it’s worth remembering that the creation of Israel in Palestine, its ongoing genocide in Gaza, and its current settlement and immigration policies, share many parallels with those earlier settler colonial projects. Israel’s extractivist projects (especially of water on the West Bank and gas off the coast of Gaza) also place it firmly among today’s fossil colonizers.

There are many reasons for Washington’s fervent support for Israel, but what Secretary of State Henry Kissinger described as the U.S. need for Israel as a reliable “cop on the beat” or, as Secretary of State Alexander Haig once put it, an unsinkable American “aircraft carrier” in the oil-rich Middle East, certainly plays a major role. So does the colonial view that Israel represents technological and ideological modernity in a retrograde Arab world.

On August 9th, we honor the world’s Indigenous peoples. Let’s move beyond stereotypes and recognize the ideas, movements, and rights of all peoples formerly and still subject to the violence of fossil colonialism. That includes those displaced from the Colombian town of Tabaco and those in the besieged territory of Gaza.