Trump is both an incredibly ignorant person and incredibly dishonest person. As a result, when he claims ignorance of an obvious fact it is difficult to tell whether he really is as ignorant as he claims or he’s just lying.

Such is the case with Trump’s claim that he didn’t know Iran might attack its neighbors and close the Strait of Hormuz in response to his joint attack with Israel. Trump insisted that none of the experts thought this possible when in effect just about every expert thought it was both possible and likely.

Given Trump’s ignorance and propensity to lie, it is not easy to know whether Trump actually went to war totally unaware of the most likely consequences, or instead went to war anyhow, deciding that he didn’t care about the damage it would cause. Whatever the real story, the consequences are enormous and sure to get worse as the Strait remains closed longer.

The most immediate and obvious consequence is the higher price for oil and natural gas. People in the United States see this at the gas station every time they fill their tank. Paying a dollar or so more for a gallon of gas is an annoyance for everyone. It is very bad news for low- and moderate-income households, especially those who need a car for work.

But this is just the beginning of the story. Diesel prices are up by close to $2.00 a gallon. Diesel fuel prices have risen by far more than regular gas because there is more limited refining capacity. This means when some refiners lose access to their supply of oil, their production cannot be easily replaced. Also, there is less ability for users to cut back their demand.

With gas, most people have some ability to cut back the number of trips they take, or to carpool or take public transportation. Most diesel fuel has commercial uses like trucking. There is not much ability to cut back unless fewer goods are transported.

The higher price for diesel fuel will be a big hit to independent truckers and trucking companies, who will end up with lower income as a result. And in most cases, they will look to pass on much of the higher fuel cost to their customers, who will eventually pass it on as higher prices to consumers.

There is a similar story with other commercial transportation. Many travelers are already seeing this in higher airplane prices and fewer flights.

But whatever the costs in the United States, they are far higher elsewhere. Jet fuel is in more limited supply in Europe, since they import a large share of what they use. East Asia is also being hard hit by higher gas and fuel prices, since countries like Japan and South Korea import most of their fossil fuels, and most of it comes from the Middle East.

But the worst story is in the developing world, especially Sub-Saharan Africa. Tens of millions of people in the countries of the region were already living at the edge. Higher prices for oil could mean many can no longer afford kerosene for cooking. And the cost of transporting food and other necessities could be too high for the countries to bear.

And fossil fuels are only part of the problem. Close to 30 percent of the world’s fertilizer supply passes through the Strait of Hormuz. As a result of the blockage, fertilizer prices have also soared since the start of the war. Already, 70 percent of farmers in the United States report cutting back fertilizer usage due to price increases. That number will increase if the closure persists and prices go still higher.

But as bad as the story is here, it is much worse in the developing world, where farmers will be much less capable of coping with higher fertilizer prices. Many may be forced to do without fertilizer altogether, causing crop yields to plummet. This could put millions of struggling farmers out of business.

And the result of lower crop yields in both developing countries and the United States will be higher food prices for the world. This will cause an increase in hunger and malnutrition for tens of millions of people.

The point here is that it is entirely possible, perhaps likely, that millions of people will die because of a totally foreseeable consequence of Donald Trump’s war that he claims he never even considered. I guess this is consistent with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s pursuit of “lethality.”

Capitalism only cares about profits, so it is not surprising that care work is undervalued in capitalist societies. Yet care work is one of the fastest-growing sectors of the US economy, while “adults spend, on average, about as much time in unpaid work as they do on paid work,” as renowned socialist and feminist economist Nancy Folbre points out in the interview that follows. Subsequently, she makes a makes an argument for structural reforms in the care economy and highlights strategies for organizing care workers. Folbre is professor emerita of economics and director of the Program on Gender and Care Work at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of several books, including, most recently, Making Care Work: Why Our Economy Should Put People First.

C. J. Polychroniou: Your new book, Making Care Work, has an anti-capitalist subtitle: Why Our Economy Should Put People First. Could you explain the connections you see between capitalism and the undervaluation of the work of caring for ourselves and others?

Nancy Folbre: In many societies, capitalist institutions such as market exchange and wage employment were shaped by preexisting patriarchal institutions, including laws barring women from property ownership, access to higher education and well-paying jobs. The dynamics varied across countries and were shaped by patterns of imperial power, but patriarchal institutions served the purpose of keeping the cost of producing and maintaining the labor force relatively low by creating a “reserve army” of wives and mothers who also worked to the advantage of men. The economists and national income accountants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries reinforced women’s subordination by insisting that their unpaid work was a moral obligation rather than a productive contribution that deserved economic recognition.

Echoes of this view are apparent today, in a perverse campaign to slash public care programs and impugn the very concept of public service. The market-centric mania that has taken hold pretends to be “pro-family” but seems aimed primarily at sending women back to the home to help cut social spending. A crass, self-serving elite wants us to define economic success by the growth of stock market indices and cryptocurrency. They couldn't care less about our health or the long-run sustainability of our national prosperity.

C. J. Polychroniou: How should we define care work and is there a way to measure its true value? What does “undervaluation” really mean?

Nancy Folbre: I define care work as the production, development and maintenance of human capabilities. This can take the form of self-care, of active care for others that involves personal interactions that generally involve some concern for the well-being of the care recipient, indirect care devoted to the care of the environment for direct care, and “on-call” care that involves being present and available to someone who might need active care.

Care for dependents such as children, people with disabilities, and the frail elderly is a particularly important aspect of care work, but as Bruce Springsteen puts it, “everybody’s got a hungry heart.” Most of us derive considerable satisfaction from caring for others as well as being cared for.

There’s no way to put a precise number on the value of unpaid care work. All we can do is provide lower-bound estimates by asking questions like, “What would it cost to hire someone to replace this activity?” For instance, a parent staying home to keep on eye on a sleeping child knows that they could, in principle, hire a babysitter to take their place. We can also ask, “If this person wasn’t engaged in care work, how much could they be earning on the job?” Willingness to sacrifice income is an indicator of the personal satisfaction a caregiver derives.

As I explain in Making Care Work, data from time-use surveys shows that in the US today, adults spend, on average, about as much time in unpaid work as they do on paid work. Partly this reflects the activities of students and retirees, who are less likely than others to be employed, but it also testifies to the hours that people devote to activities such as cooking, cleaning, shopping, yard work, household management, childcare and elder care.

Surveys are not as effective at capturing the responsibilities of on-call care, which often restrict paid employment. However, because we have data on how much time people spend on various activities, and we also know what people are paid for different jobs, we can estimate the total value of unpaid work and even compare it to the value of all the goods and services bought and sold in the US — what’s called (misleadingly) the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The US Bureau of Economic Analysis makes this calculation, and their estimate of the value of unpaid work is about 25% of GDP.

But this is an underestimate—and an “undervaluation” for several reasons. First, it doesn’t count the on-call time that many parents provide for children under 13, and which often limits the time they can devote to paid work outside the home. Second, it sets a value on all unpaid work equal to a housekeeper’s wage, which reflects the low bargaining power of a paid labor force consisting largely of immigrants and people of color. Third, and most importantly, it doesn’t include any consideration at all of the social benefits generated by work that develops individual and social capabilities, which includes the value of increased mental and physical health, enhanced skills, and stronger families and communities.

C. J. Polychroniou: As you point out, care work encompasses both paid as well as unpaid labor, and it is also one of the fastest-growing sectors of the US economy. Doesn’t the fact that capitalist economies undervalue care work have ramifications for paid care workers? If so, what are those ramifications?

Nancy Folbre: Have you ever wondered why investment bankers make more than college professors? They produce something that is easy to measure in dollar terms because…it is mostly dollars. What I produce is far less tangible—human capabilities that may or may not pay off for my students in the labor market—and even if they do pay off, I’m not getting a share.

Capitalist logic tends to reward workers who make measurable contributions to profit. This pattern is evident even in one of the most highly-paid occupations in the US — physicians. Plastic surgeons, many of whom who cater to affluent customers who pay out of pocket (rather than through insurance) for cosmetic alternations, are at the top of the physician’s pay scale. Their final “product” is generally easy to see. Public health physicians, who try to combat epidemics, contagious disease, and environmental threats, serve people who never even see them and often don’t even realize who has saved their lives. They earn, on average, 40% as much as plastic surgeons.

Many employees in care occupations, such as childcare and elder care workers, social workers, teachers, and nurses, as well as professionals and managers in care service industries (health, education and social services) are paid significantly less than their counterparts with similar educational credentials in other jobs, a pattern that has come to be termed a “care penalty.”

Numerous other factors, such as race/ethnicity, immigrant status, and gender affect relative wages, but the care penalty crosses all these boundaries. One big reason is that paid care work generates social benefits that employers can’t directly measure or capture. Who knows what effects a good childcare worker or teacher will have on a child’s future? Who knows whether a nurse has made a decision that saved someone’s life? Who knows whether a good elder care worker has kept someone alive and happy for additional years?

The undervaluation of paid care services hurts “consumers” as well as care workers, because it often leads to shortages—such as difficulty finding a primary health care provider--or high turnover, a serious problem in the childcare and elder care work force.

C. J. Polychroniou: What strategies do you consider vital for organizing care workers and improving pay and working conditions in the care economy?

Nancy Folbre: Unionization is a key strategy. National and regional nurses’ unions such as National Nurses United have raised wages and improved working conditions, in addition to successfully pushing for mandatory staffing ratios, which improve patient safety. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has raised wages for nursing home and home care workers above federal/state minimums, expanded access to benefits, and formalized employment relationships for home care workers. Teachers’ unions (including the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) have improved teachers’ pay in Republican-dominated “Red” states as well as others, and lobbied hard for increased commitments to public education.

Another key strategy is legislative setting of industry-level wage standards (as well as a higher national minimum wage). New York State’s Home Care Worker Wage Parity Law requires a minimum total compensation level (wages + benefits) for Medicaid-funded home care workers. Advocates in many states are pushing for wage boards that can, as the Oregon Center for Public Policy puts it, do the “fact-finding and analysis needed to recommend workable solutions to the issues that harm the industry and people depending on long-term care services.”

These are very complementary strategies, and they can both be enhanced by evidence showing how higher wages for care providers reduce turn-over, improve service quality and pay off in the long run by improving social well-being.

C. J. Polychroniou: Is universal basic income (UBI) a necessary strategy for resolving the problem of unpaid care work?

Nancy Folbre: Yes, but most UBI proposals fail to account for the needs of caregiving families, -- a better-designed approach brings children and other dependents into the story.

Andrew Yang’s “Freedom Dividend,” proposes $1,000 a month to all adults 18 and older. Elon Musk’s call for a “Universal High Income,” leaves all details unspecified. Many of the small-scale pilot research experiments on UBI have structured payments to low-income individual per adult recipient. This obviously ignores the extra needs of families that caring for those who can’t care for themselves.

At the other extreme, the success of the expanded Child Tax Credit in 2021 in reducing child poverty has prompted some policy-makers to call for what is essentially a UBI for children—a universal child allowance that could go to their parents but would not benefit non-parents or those caring for a disabled or dependent adult. I see a need to reconcile these two approaches and think harder about the form that a UBI should take. This is an issue I’ve just begun to work on.

I will just add that a UBI for children, while a big improvement over current US policies, would not in itself resolve the care crisis facing parents. It would need to be combined with access to free universal high-quality childcare services and paid family and medical leave from work. I am currently collaborating with colleagues to develop a better picture of such a “care package.”

C. J. Polychroniou: Care work is disproportionately carried out by working-class women, but it is also heavily racialized. Wouldn’t this ultimately mean that a transformative politics of care must necessarily address the very structural oppressions that shape it?

Nancy Folbre: Yes, a transformative politics of care needs to provide a very clear analysis of structural oppressions and ways of eliminating them. Contrary to liberal feminist approaches that focus almost entirely on gender, socialist feminists seek cross-race, cross-class, international coalitions—because care needs are genuinely universal. In practice, “structural" reform requires policies such as campaign finance reform, higher taxes on income from capital, workplace democracy, targeted investment in communities of color, and immigration reform.

I don’t have magic potion that can speed such reform along, but my book tries to provide an antidote to the toxins that have infected political debate in the US — the loss of confidence in democratic governance, the every-man-for-himself cynicism, and the sneering dismissal of public commitment to the common good. I think many people are willing to challenge traditional measures of economic success in order to prioritize policies that put people first.

The attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday night shouldn’t surprise us. Not only does America have the world’s most active small-arms industry that essentially controls the GOP (the reporters got a taste of what American — and only American — schoolkids experience every few months from their “realistic” active shooter drills), but we also host the world’s largest and most profitable hate-amplification industry.

Algorithms that amplify hate and division in order to “increase engagement” have made Mark Zuckerberg into one of the richest people on the planet, complete with a super-yacht and a doomsday bunker estate in Hawaii; Elon Musk’s X has turned into a sewer of Nazi-style rhetoric while Musk himself has posted, according to The Washington Post, nakedly white supremacist slogans and statements over 850 times just in the past seven months.

The Republican Party writ large has also benefitted from all this, since it was reinvented mid-20th century by Nixon’s racist Southern Strategy and Reagan’s embrace of “states’ rights” as the party of Christian white male supremacy. (The last four Black Republicans in the US House of Representatives are ending their political careers this year.)

Because every rightwing movement in history has been founded on hate and/or xenophobia, the openly neo-Confederate MAGA movement was simply the logical end-point of this turn the Party took a half-century ago. History shows that when the right wants to seize power, it reaches for the oldest weapon in politics: teach people to fear and then hate their neighbors, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.

Finally, the billionaire class and the massive, monopolistic corporations that made them rich benefit from the hate industry because when working-class people are mobilized to hate each other based on race, religion, gender (and gender identity), nationality, or political affiliation they’re far less likely to organize together to demand union rights, benefits, healthcare, education, and/or better wages.

Some even argue that the current state of GOP corruption, billionaire greed, and societal hate in America proves that democracy has run its course. Oddly, most arguing that are the billionaires themselves, or the lickspittle “dark enlightenment philosophers” they celebrate and fund.

Billionaire Peter Theil famously wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” and the CEO of his company Palantir recently released an arguably neo-fascist 22-point manifesto claiming that America must resist “the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism” and — without a trace of irony about today’s billionaire subculture that’s working to capture our government and crush worker’s movements and unions — that “certain cultures and indeed subcultures” are “regressive and harmful.”

There’s actually a long history for this antidemocratic worldview.

Plato himself argued that democracy would always ultimately lead to tyranny because democratic rule could so easily be co-opted by authoritarians using the tools of democracy itself. Karl Popper rebutted this extensively in 1945, arguing that democracies must become “intolerant of intolerance,” essentially putting limits (like the German people have done for themselves) on “free speech” when that speech is being used to undermine and ultimately destroy a democracy.

The European option would run afoul of our First Amendment, so America must come up with a different way to deal with the hate-industrial complex. There are a few options.

While corporations will argue that they are “persons” protected by the First Amendment (an argument I rebut extensively in my new book Who Killed the American Dream: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told) and will say that their algorithms that favor outrage, hate, and division are merely corporate “free speech,” it should still be possible to regulate these bits of computer code.

I’m not proposing that people lose their right to speak online. The real issue is whether giant social media corporations should have the unlimited right to use their top-secret algorithms to pour gasoline on hate, racism, antisemitism, homophobia, misogyny, and political violence just because outrage keeps people clicking and that drives engagement/ad-views and thus profits.

That’s not free speech in any meaningful human sense: it’s just a democracy-destroying business model.

Thus, one obvious reform is to separate hosting speech from amplifying it. If somebody wants to post something vile but lawful, that’s allowed under the First Amendment. But when a corporation’s software algorithm identifies that vile content as profit-promoting and shoves it into millions of feeds, that’s no longer passive hosting: it’s active promotion. And active promotion can be regulated.

Another fix is to require transparency. Make these companies openly disclose what their algorithms reward. Do they boost rage reactions, conspiracy content, fear, tribal conflict, and endless doom-scrolling just because it increases ad revenue for their billionaire owners? Let independent researchers audit the systems so the public can see whether hate is being engineered for profit behind the curtain and use public shame to discourage it.

And finally, give social media users real choice. Break up the social media monopolies. Require a simple chronological feed, for example, and an easy opt-out from manipulation-based recommendations, along with a legal duty of care when platforms knowingly drive people toward extremism or violence.

You still get free speech; what corporations lose is the right to use the invisible part of their machines to poison our minds, our children’s minds, and our democracy for money.

None of this deals with the problem of rightwing billionaires acquiring massive media platforms and then requiring their employees to also spin the news in ways that are anti-democracy and pro-billionaire.

But reversing Reagan’s 1983 decision to largely abandon our anti-trust laws and his 1987 decision to abandon the Fairness Doctrine could go a long way toward mitigating the damage Australian-billionaire-owned Fox “News” and others have done to America.

Combine these steps with rational gun control and a re-commitment to teaching civics and critical thinking (as several European countries have done and we did before Reagan gutted federal education spending) and there’s a good chance America can rise again from the ashes of the hate and violence that today’s conservative movement and billionaire subculture have imposed on us.

The choice before us is stark. We can continue letting rightwing billionaires, monopolists, gun merchants, and hate-profiteers pit Americans against each other while they strip wealth and power from working people, or we can remember the oldest lesson of democracy: when ordinary people refuse to be divided, no oligarch or billionaire can stand against them.

In a memorandum to President Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara wrote that “the current strategic posture” of the United States “is to destroy both the Soviet Union and Communist China as viable societies even after a well-planned and executed surprise attack on our forces.”

In a 1967 speech in San Francisco that he called “Mutual Deterrence,” the formal introduction to the public of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), McNamara said “we must be able to absorb the total weight of nuclear attack on our country — on our retaliatory forces, on our command and control apparatus, on our industrial capacity, on our cities, and on our population — and still be capable of damaging the aggressor to the point that his society would be simply no longer viable in twentieth-century terms.” McNamara described this as “our assured-destruction capability.”

What this means is that the Trump administration wasn’t the first to threaten the civilizational destruction of a country. That threat has been embedded in the conceptual framework of the MAD US nuclear posture since at least 1967, which includes the perverse menace to absorb “the total weight of nuclear attack” on our own country. No president since then, or defense secretary or national security adviser, or majority party of Congress, has thought to get ourselves and the rest of the world out of the MAD policy.

In the 1960s, there was little to no knowledge of nuclear winter as a nuclear-war induced catastrophic climate effect. However, a 1963 classified nuclear war-game study by President Kennedy’s National Security Council, which described “the combined effects on survivors of radiation, blast, fires, floods, substandard diet and sanitary conditions, and lack of medical services and care” of a nuclear exchange between the United States and Soviet Union should have sufficiently informed McNamara of at least the direct effects of absorbing the full weight of a Soviet nuclear attack. The same war-games study also estimated US fatalities from 63 million to 134 million and Soviet fatalities from 136 million to 143 million. The US MAD nuclear posture was developed in the immediate aftermath of this report.

The thinking among MAD policy planners at the time, and today, is that rational actors on both the US and Soviet side would not launch a nuclear first-strike knowing that it would be suicidal for the country that launched first.

This is one of several MAD fallacies. For example, last year, three academics in New Zealand authored a study titled, “The Frequently Impaired Health of Leaders of Nuclear Weapons States.” They reported personality disorders, substance use disorders, multi-infarct dementia, depression, and anxiety among a sizeable percentage of leaders. The authors concluded: “These findings indicate that physical and mental health conditions among leaders of these nuclear weapon states have been common.” They advised: “Given the importance of the decision-making around nuclear weapons by political leaders, further research on this group should be prioritized.”

Twenty years after McNamara established Mutual Assured Destruction as US nuclear policy, Carl Sagan’s pioneering study, “Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions,” published in the journal Science in 1983, opened the door to extensive scientific study of the climate-related effects of nuclear war.

Using more sophisticated climate models as applied to nuclear winter, prominent climate scientists reported in Nature Food in 2022 that “more than 2 billion people could die from nuclear war between India and Pakistan, and more than 5 billion could die from a war between the United States and Russia, underlining the importance of global cooperation in preventing nuclear war.”

Alan Robock, a coauthor of the study and a leading climate scientist from Rutgers University, had previously described nuclear winter as follows: “Nuclear winter is the term for a theory describing the climatic effects of nuclear war. Smoke from the fires started by nuclear weapons, especially the black, sooty smoke from cities and industrial facilities, would be heated by the Sun, lofted into the upper atmosphere, and spread globally, lasting for years. The resulting cool, dark, dry conditions at Earth’s surface would prevent crop growth for at least one growing season, resulting in mass starvation over most of the world… More people could die in the noncombatant countries than in those where the bombs were dropped, because of these indirect effects… A nuclear war between India and Pakistan could produce so much smoke that it would produce global environmental change unprecedented in human history… The only way to be sure to prevent the climatic effects of nuclear war is to rid the world of nuclear weapons.”

Writing in 2021 in “Ending Nuclear Weapons Before They End US,” Australian physician Tilman Ruff, co-founder of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), warned: “Evidence of the consequences of nuclear war, particularly global climatic and nutritional effects of the abrupt ice age conditions from even a relatively small regional nuclear war, indicates that these are more severe than previously sought. None of the nine nuclear-armed states is disarming… Abrogation of existing nuclear arms control agreements, policies of first nuclear use and war fighting, growing armed conflicts worldwide, and increasing use of information and cyberwarfare, exacerbate dangers of nuclear war.”

An added stress today is the fact that “nuclear armed countries are considering the integration of artificial intelligence into existing nuclear command, control, and communications structures as a way to increase speed and efficiency,” thus adding to the “already unacceptable level of risk,” as ICAN reports. The ICAN-identified risks include reduced decision-making time and rapid escalation, perceived increases in vulnerability that incentivizes nuclear weapon use, cyber risks, and data poisoning.

President Trump, who inherited the MAD-based strategic nuclear posture from previous administrations, would do well to focus on preventing nuclear war/nuclear winter now by negotiating a permanent cessation of military action in and against Iran, a conflict that embodies any number of escalatory scenarios to nuclear war. Trump could then be the first US president to convene a summit of all nine nuclear-armed states—the United States, Russia, China, the U.K., France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea—to begin the process of abolishing nuclear weapons, including by joining the 2017 UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapon. Trump could propose the idea to China’s President Xi during their upcoming bilateral summit next month in Beijing.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

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

Today we discuss:

• Cole T. Allen, 31, is accused of trying to assassinate President Trump and other officials at the White House Correspondents Dinner. A CalTech graduate and a teacher with a close-knit family, Allen allegedly issued a manifesto that indicates a highly intelligent articulate would-be assassin with specific political grievances about Trump’s genocide in Gaza, murders of Venezuelan fishermen, etc. Is America breeding a new kind of presidential assassin?

• The U.K.’s King Charles III and Queen Camilla’s state visit to the U.S. comes at a time of heightened domestic and geopolitical tension.

• The centrist leader of Israel’s opposition, Yair Lapid, and a right-wing former prime minister, Naftali Bennett, will combine forces in elections later this year. The merger is an apparent bid to reconstitute a partnership that temporarily unseated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu five years ago.

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Right at this moment, we are witnessing an unprecedented shift of resources from domestic investments in the United States to the military-industrial complex (aka the war machine). The only comparable period in our history was the buildup to World War II, when the United States confronted a powerful adversary in Nazi Germany with designs to control not just Europe, but the world. The current buildup is breathtaking in scope and will certainly prove devastating in its impact — not just on this country’s foreign and domestic policies but also on the economic prospects of average Americans.

When, in 2023, my colleague Ben Freeman and I first conceived of our book, The Trillion Dollar War Machine, we viewed it in part as a cautionary tale about just how high the Pentagon budget might rise in the years to come (absent pushback from Congress and the taxpaying public). By the time our book came out in November 2025, however, the Pentagon budget had already topped the $1 trillion mark and, only recently, President Trump has proposed to instantly add another $500 billion to that already staggering figure and to do so in a single year’s time. And imagine this: such a proposed increase alone is higher than the total military budget of any other nation on Earth. Mind you, the current high levels of spending have already underwritten a provocative, unnecessary intervention in Venezuela and a region-wide war in the Middle East, and the larger costs of all this in human lives and damage to the global economy are guaranteed to shape the lives of the rest of us globally for years to come.

To add insult to injury, the Pentagon announced that it would seek a $200 billion supplemental appropriation to pay for its war on Iran, which has spread across the Middle East. That $200 billion would have been in addition to the $1.5 billion proposed for the Pentagon’s future budget. According to an analysis by Pentagon budget expert Stephen Semler, the Iran war, which started on February 28th with Israeli and U.S. air strikes on that country, cost the United States more than $28 billion just in its first two weeks. And to put that in perspective, $28 billion is more than three times the Trump administration’s proposed annual budgets for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency (at a time when the climate crisis and the need to head off future pandemics are essential to the health and security of all Americans). Worse yet, it’s all for a completely senseless war that should never have been started.

As President Trump alternates between engaging in negotiations to end the war and threatening to wipe Iran off the map — or even just walking away to bomb another day — there are reports that the supplemental budget request to pay for the war on Iran will shrink from the proposed $200 billion to $98 billion. And that $98 billion will include other things in addition to war costs, including disaster relief and aviation modernization.

The Garrison State and the Reign of the War Profiteers

On the campaign trail in 2024, Donald Trump pledged to drive the “war profiteers” and “war mongers” from Washington, suggesting that they like wars because “missiles cost $2 million each,” while bragging that, in his first term in office, “I had no wars.”

And his rhetoric as the ultimate champion of peace has continued during his second term, even as he has indeed launched reckless wars guaranteed to fill the coffers of the “war profiteers” he railed against on the campaign trail. He has, however, also pledged to help the weapons industry quadruple production of the same sort of “$2 million bombs” he decried during the campaign, plus — even better for the arms makers — missile interceptors that cost up to $12 million each. Worse yet, the demands of the current war on Iran, coupled with support for Israel’s war on Gaza and Ukraine’s efforts to defend itself from Russia, have left the Pentagon and the giant weapons corporations complaining that, if the U.S. doesn’t radically increase its production of artillery shells, bombs, and missiles, the cupboard could soon be bare.

Of course, filling that cupboard again to the tune of staggering sums of money is exactly the wrong solution. The answer to the current munitions shortage is not to further supersize this country’s arms manufacturing base, but to refrain from supplying the weapons used by Israel to commit genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon, or to fuel unjustified wars like the current conflict with Iran. The best policy to prevent such stocks of military equipment from running low would, of course, be a more discriminating approach to military aid and a more restrained approach to U.S. foreign policy and war-making (writ large).

Washington should, in fact, put diplomacy first and only engage in military action if there is a genuine threat to the United States itself. We need a smarter policy toward military procurement and military strategy, not the garrison state with its “military-industrial complex” that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us against more than six decades ago.

In addition, of course, the Pentagon needs to shift its procurement strategy toward producing more reliable weapons at a more reasonable cost, while avoiding unnecessary complexity so that they can be made more rapidly and spend more time ready to be used and less time down for maintenance. Such a formula was a watchword of the bipartisan congressional military reform caucus of the 1980s, which at one point included more than 100 members of Congress and helped roll back the extremes of the military buildup launched by President Ronald Reagan.

The Diminishing Economic Returns of Pentagon Spending

In a detailed forthcoming study for the Transition Security Project and in her own writings, investigative journalist Taylor Barnes of Inkstick Media has charted the diminishing returns from Pentagon spending. Despite a soaring Pentagon budget, direct jobs in arms production are now one-third of what they were 30 years ago, down from three million then to 1.1 million now, according to the arms industry’s own trade association. Unionization rates in the arms production sector are also down sharply, with some big weapons firms like Northrop Grumman having unionization rates of less than 10%. In keeping with that trend, Lockheed Martin moved the production of its F-16 fighter — a staple of foreign arms exports — to the anti-union state of South Carolina.

Even worse, many states provide special tax breaks and other subsidies to attract or keep weapons factories — and that’s on top of the hundreds of billions the industry receives in federal tax dollars. In Utah, the state government staunchly refused to reveal how many jobs Northrop Grumman had promised in return for state subsidies, with one official claiming it would “compromise” the interests of the company to do so. Meanwhile, Northrop Grumman’s work on the Sentinel, the newest intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), has been a poster child for dysfunctional weapons development, with the estimated cost of the program as a whole growing by 81% in just a few years. Part of the problem was that Northrop Grumman somehow managed to ignore the fact that its new missile would be too large to fit in existing silos, creating the need for further costly new construction efforts.

The spending of scarce tax revenues goes to ICBMs that former Secretary of Defense William Perry once labeled “one of the most dangerous weapons we have.” After all, a president might literally have only minutes to decide whether to launch them on being warned of a potential enemy attack, greatly increasing the risk of an accidental nuclear war prompted by a false alarm. And there have been many false alarms and nuclear accidents in the nuclear age (even if not yet an actual nuclear attack loosed on the world), as meticulously documented in Eric Schlosser’s essential book Command and Control.

Then there’s the Golden Dome missile “defense” system, a fantasy of President Trump’s that, in reality, could never provide the promised “leakproof” protection against weaponry ranging from ICBMs and hypersonic missiles to low-flying drones. By now, more than 40 years after President Ronald Reagan promised a perfect defense against ICBMs in his 1983 “Star Wars” speech, it should be all too obvious that such a leakproof shield is physically impossible, since enemy ICBMs with nuclear warheads would come in at 15,000 — and no, that is not a misprint! — miles per hour and could be surrounded by large numbers of decoy balloons that would be indistinguishable from a warhead when floating in space. There could be hundreds of such incoming warheads in a full-scale nuclear attack. To even have a chance of intercepting all of them, a defensive system would have to devote as many as 1,600 interceptors to take down incoming missiles. An analysis by the conservative American Enterprise Institute estimates that a full-blown effort to build a comprehensive Golden Dome shield could cost $3.6 trillion just to construct.

In fact, the Golden Dome concept is so delusional that it barely merits a detailed critique, though many such analyses are available. A more reasonable way to deal with it would, of course, be ridicule.

Ben Cohen, cofounder of Ben & Jerry’s and the founder of the “Up in Arms” campaign to cut Pentagon spending, has taken just such an approach. On April Fool’s Day, he placed a “Golden Hole-in-Dome” statue on the National Mall that included a Donald Trump, fully clothed, being soaked by water leaking through a faux Golden Dome shield. The Daily Beast‘s headline on its piece about the event captured the spirit of that day: “Ben and Jerry’s Co-Founder Humiliates Trump Outside His House.”

Meanwhile, the dysfunctional weapons systems on the Pentagon’s shopping list only continue to grow. Take Lockheed Martin’s F-35 combat aircraft, which was supposed to do almost anything (and does nothing) well. The plane, which could cost $2 trillion for roughly 2,500 aircraft if the Pentagon’s original plans hold, had taken 23 years to develop and still can’t operate as advertised, spending almost half its time in its hangar for maintenance.

Similarly, as Dan Grazier of the Stimson Center has pointed out, the USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier, which had to dock in Cyprus recently after multiple mishaps including a clogged toilet system that spewed feces onto the flight deck, is a $13 billion nightmare, chock full of fancy, untested, and expensive technology that all too often fails to work as advertised. As he points out, a more viable, less expensive carrier could have been built if proven technologies had not been replaced with high-tech fantasies. Unfortunately, that’s generally not how Pentagon procurement works these days.

Palmer Luckey Will Not Come to the Rescue

Palmer Luckey, the 32 year-old former game designer who now runs Anduril, one of Silicon Valley’s top military tech firms, made news a few months ago when he told a CNBC interviewer that, if the Pentagon were to stop buying the wrong things, it could provide a robust defense for America at a cost of perhaps $500 billion, half of current levels and one-third of the level President Trump is now seeking. Presumably, the wrong things are piloted aircraft like the F-35 and mammoth ships like the Gerald Ford, and the right things are drones, uncrewed submarines, and complex AI-driven targeting and surveillance systems of the type that Anduril and Peter Thiel’s Palantir produce.

But count on this: replacing piloted combat aircraft with swarms of drones won’t automatically be cheaper, depending on how large the swarms are and how complex their designs may prove to be. Early on, the Ukrainian military decided that U.S.-supplied drones from Silicon Valley were too brittle and expensive, so it launched a do-it-yourself drone program that took cheap commercial drones from China and fitted them with bombs and cameras. U.S. arms companies are now trying to get back in the act by partnering with Ukrainian firms to build more sophisticated drones. Don’t be surprised, though, if their price soars and their reliability sinks.

Another reason AI-driven weapons may not be as cheap as advertised is that Luckey, Thiel, and their merry band of unhinged techno-optimists want to eliminate virtually any oversight of their activities, whether through independent testing of their new systems or measures to prevent price gouging by unscrupulous contractors. At present, the motto of the military tech sector is “trust me.” I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer to have someone minding the store, so that the tech billionaires don’t simply rob us blind.

Of course, what would it mean if Silicon Valley could deliver cheaper, more deadly advanced weaponry? After all, artificial intelligence systems were indeed used in recent times to accelerate targeting during Israel’s genocidal war on the people of Gaza, and they have been used in President Trump’s disastrous assault on Iran. And neither of those situations has yet had a happy ending. But that’s the point. The truth is we really don’t need ever more new weaponry that kills even faster. We need to stop the killing. And that means blunting the political influence of the warmongers and war profiteers that Donald Trump criticized on the campaign trail in 2024 and then so warmly embraced as president.

And to put all of this in grim perspective, he is now presiding over perhaps the most corrupt, incompetent, repressive regime in the history of this republic. And worse yet, some of his most dismal policies — like unstinting support for Israeli aggression — have, sadly enough, had bipartisan backing in Washington. In short, he has taken what were already some of the worst American policies and accelerated them, even as he destroys positive aspects of the government like the U.S. Agency for International Development’s provision of food, clean water, and public health services abroad or any further engagement in constructive international institutions.

Among other things, he is now narrowing America’s foreign policy options by dismantling civilian tools of statecraft, while doubling down on military approaches that haven’t “won” a war in this century (or the second half of the last one either). Meanwhile, the economic damage and humanitarian costs are spreading globally, including to his own supporters.

The challenge now is to build a movement that not only turns back Trump’s policies, but gets at the underlying economic, political, and cultural forces that have kept the United States in a permanent state of war for so long, while robbing us of opportunities to build a better, more peaceful, tolerant, and just future. Given the pace of destruction and chaos being visited upon us, it’s important to act now and continue to do so until we build enough power to rein in the war machine and begin creating actual structures of peace.

When an American pilot was shot down behind enemy lines during the US War against Iran, the military and conservative politicians crowed that we have a culture of “no man left behind” in such situations. If and when the same man suffers from PTSD and winds up homeless on the streets of America’s cities, as have so many veterans, however, there will be little to no help on offer.

The post Many Men Left Behind appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

On my radio show-podcast—the Ralph Nader Radio Hour—interviews of knowledgeable people have detailed the ravages by the cruel, serial law violator, Tyrant Trump, inflicted on millions of Americans. Still, the report from the V-Dem Institute at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg produced a jolting Common Dreams headline: 'Trump is Dismantling US Democracy at a Speed ‘Unprecedented in Modern History.’"

The report described the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term as achieving in one year what budding autocracies take a decade to accomplish, adding that “the speed of decline is comparable to some coups d’état.”

To wreck, weaken, and endanger our country, Trump disrupts the lives of millions of civil servants, contractors, small businesses, and their families. He fired or forced out hundreds of thousands of federal civil servants staffing programs that protect the health, safety, and economic well-being of tens of millions of Americans, relying on food supplements, Medicaid, government-backed loans, and innumerable other social safety nets.

Trump has especially targeted law enforcement programs directed at enforcing worker and consumer safety, financial protections, and environmental health against toxic corporations. He is taking federal cops off the corporate crime beat.

Multiply this story of undeserved misery and fragility hundreds of thousands of times.

Here are some specifics. Qualified foreign doctors have had their visas rejected. The US has a doctor shortage, especially in rural areas. These physicians were blocked by Trump from extending care in areas with no doctors.

Huge, arbitrary cuts for scientific research have closed or curtailed labs, left individual scientists pursuing crucial discoveries to save lives without the government grants funding vital promising projects. He has also accelerated a brain drain from the US to Europe and China, and reduced the number of scientists, engineers, and nurses coming to the US to work, where they are seriously needed.

Entire careers and livelihoods have been destroyed by this dictator using the White House to vastly enrich himself and his cronies.

Let’s be more specific. The New York Times published a front-page story about what is happening to employees of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), illegally closed down in the first week of Trump’s regime. This reckless action jeopardizes millions of impoverished lives abroad. The article opened with: “She was fired by email while on maternity leave, given 24 hours to clear out her desk, and left with three days of health insurance and no severance.” Her husband, also working with funding from USAID, lost his job. They are now relying on food stamps, Medicaid, and a supplemental nutrition program—long-standing programs being cravenly slashed by the Trumpsters, while giving huge tax escapes to the super rich and large corporations like Apple.

Multiply this story of undeserved misery and fragility hundreds of thousands of times. Through Elon Musk’s criminal enterprise, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), whole agencies were being illegally shattered, and virtually shut down, e.g., the Department of Education, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the US Institute of Peace. Others were being strip-mined like the Department of Health and Human Services, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Agriculture.

Trump tore up civil service union contracts. The unions are suing Trump for this breach of contract. Such lawsuits drag on interminably and are hardly covered by the media. What the union leaders and members should be doing is peaceably encircling the White House for round-the-clock vigils and featuring large signs calling Trump out in vivid language. After all, the headquarters of the AFL-CIO is less than a block from the White House for easy logistics.

What are the pretexts coming out of Trump’s snarling mouth to justify such devastation of America? One is that he accuses these agencies of being “woke,” an ill-defined word for “leftists” that he has turned into another of his four-letter epithets for his ever-true believers.

A more frequent declaration issued without substantiation is that his decisions are based on “a grave threat to national security.” His lies don’t pass the laugh test.

This pretext is always applied to Trump’s blockage of offshore wind turbines, which he strangely has long called “ugly.” Trump recently exempted oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from measures to protect endangered species. Self-described warrior of God and Jesus Christ, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, stated that such exemptions would bolster national security by increasing domestic oil production.

Trumpian effrontery gets worse. He issued an executive order removing collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal employees employed by a dozen agencies on national security grounds. The 1978 law he falsely invoked applied to “intelligence officers,” not to cleaners, guards, clerks, etc., in federal buildings. Again, the expected lawsuits were filed. Amid judicial delays, Trump gets his way.

When pressed by reporters to explain these pretexts, Trump’s flaks come up with ridiculous assertions promptly rebutted by specialists in each area. (See The New York Times, April 19, 2026—“Trump Has a Go-To Justification for His Contentious Decisions: National Security.”)

Who elected Trump? The Democratic Party’s feeble, cowardly, and uninspiring performance in 2024—repressing through its corporate-conflicted consultants’ decisive input from its progressive wing and civic and labor leaders—was a big factor. (See the August 27, 2024, letter to Liz Shuler).

Who unleashed this runaway felonious politician violating daily innumerable federal laws, regulations, international treaties, and constitutional provisions, constituting serious impeachable offenses? (See H.Res.1155).

First, the congressional Republicans have abjectly surrendered their oath of office to constitutionally lead the congressional branch of government. In addition, the cowardly Democrats, who could have conducted scores of “shadow hearings” to inform the media and citizenry are largely MIA.

It is time for citizens to press their Senators and Representatives to stop this Trump rampage—before it is too late. The Congressional Switchboard number is 202-224-3121.

On April 17, CODEPINK and the local University of Michigan community gathered to hold a vigil in honor of UM researcher Dr. Danhao Wan on the one-month anniversary of his death. According to reports, Dr. Wang died after jumping from an upper floor of the G.G. Brown Building on North Campus, shortly after being targeted and questioned by federal authorities.

Over 30 members of the local community attended the vigil, bringing candles and flowers. They joined in a traditional Chinese bowing ceremony. During the vigil, CODEPINK and US Peace Council member Bob McMurray spoke to the crowd: “Tonight, I want us to remember there is a Mom and Dad mourning the loss of their son; there are people here in the university research community feeling his absence every day; and we, as the human family, have lost a brother.”

For weeks, Dr. Wang’s death went uncovered by the media. By the time it hit the news, the Chinese Consulate in Chicago had already confirmed the incident as a suicide and demanded an investigation of the “unwarranted interrogations and harassment of Chinese students and scholars.”

This is not the first time a Chinese scholar has been targeted at the University of Michigan; it is part of a broader pattern of political discrimination. In the last year, five Chinese scholars have been accused of various crimes, detained for months on end, and ultimately deported after the quiet dismissal of their cases due to a lack of evidence.

When individuals like Dr. Wang are targeted, it is not only their livelihoods that are threatened, but the very purpose and meaning they have built their lives around.

This discrimination is not new. In 2018, the Trump administration launched the China Initiative, a deeply flawed and racially biased program that targeted Chinese and Chinese Americans for “suspected espionage.” More often than not, federal authorities targeted individuals with no evidence of wrongdoing—simply for their identity. As a result, a new climate of suspicion and fear took root across academia. Though few convictions were made, many Chinese scholars suffered permanent professional and personal harm. They began to self-censor, withdraw from collaborations, or leave the United States entirely. For them, the US was no longer safe.

Although the China Initiative was formally ended under the Biden administration due to widespread criticism of its racial bias, its underlying logic has not disappeared. Instead, it has evolved into a broader atmosphere of suspicion directed at Chinese scholars, particularly in fields tied to advanced technology and science. At the University of Michigan, this pattern is especially visible.

Take the case of Dr. Chengxuan Han, a Chinese PhD student who was arrested for mailing roundworms commonly used in biological research. In most academic contexts, such an error would result in a minor administrative penalty. Instead, she was jailed for months and subjected to a full criminal prosecution. This outcome was wildly disproportionate to the alleged offense and one that effectively ended her academic trajectory.

Another scholar, Dr. Yunqing Jian, was accused of "agricultural terrorism” for breaking protocol and shipping materials to the US without the proper paperwork. Renowned biologists refuted this claim, saying it was impossible to use Fusarium graminearum, the fungus Dr. Jian studied, as a bioterrorist weapon. In the world of research deadlines and red tape, scholars say it's typical to try to streamline research by acquiring your own materials, even if that means skipping some paperwork. Dr. Jian has spent years researching how to mitigate the harm caused to crops by Fusarium graminearum, which is native to North America. While she did break protocol, it is absurd to accuse her of weaponizing the fungus, especially without any evidence.

Similarly, the cases of UM scholars Xu Bai, Fengfan Zhang, and Zhiyong Zhang demonstrate how ordinary research practices were reframed as criminal acts merely because of the identity of the scholars. Even though charges against them were dropped and the cases dismissed, the damage had already been done.

The three scholars had spent months in jail awaiting their trial. In a letter, Zhiyong Zhang spoke of his confusion over the situation:

I like the research atmosphere in the University. I like the people here. They are kind and polite. I am living a happy life here. However, unfortunately and apparently, some people don't like us. They want to connect us with politics. But what is politics? I didn't know what politics is when I was 13 years old, at which age I decided to study biology. Now I am also confused about what politics is. It's so abstract. We didn't hurt anyone, and we don't want to hurt anyone, either. We just want to do research and find something that can benefit humanity. That makes me feel my life is meaningful, although I can not make much money.

Zhang decided to study biology because his grandfather and father were both diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in their mid-30s: “I thought I could change to study neuroscience to cure the disease of my family and all the people who are suffering the pain from the disease… So this is what I am doing here.” At 32, he worries he will soon suffer the same fate.

Originally, the three scholars were informed by the University of Michigan that they had 30 days to pack and leave. Since they’d spent all their free time in the laboratory, they decided to use their last few weeks to visit the Grand Canyon. While there, the UM administration backtracked on their words, informing the scholars they had to leave immediately. At the airport, while attempting to return home, they were intercepted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and arrested.

This was no coincidence. The UM administration not only provided the wrong information, but they also had terminated their SEVIS status, which gave them permission to live and study in the US, making them vulnerable to federal authorities at passport control.

The repeated pattern points to a system in which Chinese researchers are treated as potential threats merely on the basis of their identity—which is all a part of the larger campaign to paint China as an enemy of the United States.

Dr. Danhao Wang’s life and work stand in stark contrast to this narrative. An assistant research scientist in the University of Michigan’s College of Engineering, Dr. Wang dedicated his career to advancing semiconductor technology. His research focused on gallium nitride, a material critical to modern electronics and essential for improving the speed, efficiency, and energy consumption of devices ranging from smartphones to renewable technology systems.

He made significant contributions to understanding how these materials behave at the atomic level, correcting long-standing assumptions and helping to unlock new possibilities for high-performance electronics. His work also explored how next-generation semiconductors could remain stable under extreme electrical conditions, paving the way for more efficient energy systems and emerging technologies.

We must put increased pressure on the University of Michigan and other universities to do more to protect their international students.

The repercussions of this research are vast. Semiconductors with such high performance potential could potentially make the data center industry obsolete by enabling a smaller device to do what normally takes an entire facility. For the US, gallium nitride semiconductors are the key to significantly improving its high-power weapons systems, and China’s current dominance over the material is considered a looming threat. This is all part of the US preparation for war against China, and the ongoing arms race around strategic resources and technology.

It’s reported that Dr. Wang was planning to return to China in May and already had a job set up. This raises even more questions over the circumstances of his death, and many Michigan locals have begun calling for an independent investigation.

Like most scientists, Dr. Wang’s research stemmed from deep intellectual commitment and passion. Years of specialized training, long hours in the lab, and a singular focus on discovery defined his life’s work. When individuals like Dr. Wang are targeted, it is not only their livelihoods that are threatened, but the very purpose and meaning they have built their lives around.

His death is a profound tragedy. And while the full circumstances remain unclear, it occurred within an environment where Chinese scholars have repeatedly been subjected to intense surveillance and unfair targeting.

The broader political climate cannot be ignored. Increasingly, US policy and rhetoric have framed China as a primary geopolitical adversary, particularly in areas like technology and national security. This framing has filtered down into academic spaces, where international collaboration between the US and China is now essentially criminalized.

The Chinese Consulate in Chicago has criticized the US for “overstretching the concept of national security” and has called for a full investigation and accountability. These demands should not be dismissed.

There must be transparency around the circumstances leading to Dr. Wang’s death. There must also be concrete safeguards to prevent discriminatory investigations targeting international scholars. This includes stronger legal protections, clearer institutional accountability, and accessible mental health support for those under investigation.

Universities, in particular, have a responsibility to protect their students and researchers. The University of Michigan is clearly doing the opposite. They are not protecting their students; they are instead actively targeting them by aiding these discriminatory investigations, putting all international students at risk.

We must put increased pressure on the University of Michigan and other universities to do more to protect their international students, to preserve the integrity of academic research, to protect international collaboration, and to ensure that scientific progress is not undermined by federal discrimination. If institutions fail to act, the cost will not only be measured in lost careers but in lost knowledge, lost innovation, and lost lives.

In the Trump 2.0 era, many Americans have begun to engage in a new “conscious consumerism”—avoiding the companies that have bent the knee to the president. Data firm Numerator found that 38% of US consumers have participated in some form of a boycott over the last year, and 48% said they would stop buying from a company that had differing political views. Some may have felt that outdoor retailer REI would be an ideal place to shop during this time, a home for like-minded, outdoorsy people who care about the environment.

As an REI worker, I’m still expected to evangelize about REI’s mission—the outdoors, sustainability, and community. But ever since we started unionizing at REI in 2022, it’s now become a facade. REI’s leadership has endorsed leaders who gutted public lands, greenwashed their use of AI, deployed a union-busting law firm, and rigged their governance structure to shut out different perspectives. REI, a favorite of outdoor-loving liberals, has gone Trump.

The first public sign came when REI endorsed the Trump administration directly. The executives of the “co-op,” without any direct feedback from the members whose values and opinions they claim to base their decisions on, signed a letter of support for then-nominee for Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who ended up being confirmed in a vote of 79-18. In the year since his confirmation, Burgum has spent much of his time opening federal lands up to oil and gas drilling and trying to make the “Gulf of America” name stick. While REI’s new CEO has issued an apology since, the damage is already being done.

But throughout our union effort, from organizing to now bargaining, we’ve seen up close how the co-op has aligned itself with President Donald Trump. REI has met our unionization campaign by hiring a law firm with deep ties to pro-business, anti-worker cases, Morgan Lewis. This firm has been contracted to bust unions in everything from Amazon to professional baseball.

As REI has continued to stonewall us at the bargaining table, it’s opened itself up to a new opportunity for “conscious consumerism.” We have authorized a boycott should the company fail to agree on a contract with its 11 unionized stores.

Its reputation has earned the respect of the Trump administration, as the president installed Crystal Carey, a former partner at Morgan Lewis, as the general counsel for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). In that role, Carey is responsible for setting the agenda for the NLRB as it weighs decisions on union elections, unfair labor practices, and more—including major cases regarding our union campaign. Morgan Lewis also handled the president’s taxes for many years. That’s who REI chose to hire—one of Trump’s favorite law firms.

Perhaps the most damning example of how REI is taking a page from the Trump playbook is how they’ve changed their governance structure. As a co-op, REI members elect the board of directors each year, seemingly a symbol of democratic governance and participation. Any co-op member can vote, and any member can run.

Last year, we decided to nominate two members to the board, Tefere Gebre and Shemona Moreno, longtime labor advocates, outdoor enthusiasts, and progressive leaders. Both were ideal candidates for REI’s board, but instead, their candidacies were rejected outright in favor of a slate of candidates handpicked by REI executives.

In response, we urged co-op members to vote down this slate. They responded overwhelmingly in support—members defeated the slate of candidates, and the board was left with multiple vacancies in response. An expression of will like this—again, from the very members whose values the co-op's executives claim impact their decisions—should have prompted REI to look inward and reflect.

Instead, REI took the Trump route. REI didn’t like the results, so they changed the rules. They moved up the board election to December, after holding it in April and May for years. This came in the middle of negotiations, which prevented us from speaking out against this anti-democratic move. Holding the election over the holidays meant participation would be low, and members couldn’t hear another perspective on any of the co-op’s preferred candidates. It’s a microcosm for how Trump is trying to change the rules of our democracy with the SAVE America Act and gerrymandering.

Of course, REI isn’t alone in cowering to the president. Another major retailer, Target, has also kept its head down during the second Trump administration. The company pulled back its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives and remained silent as Immigration and Customs Enforcement ran amok in the company’s home state of Minnesota. And Target has paid the price as it has faced boycotts from customers and protests outside its stores.

While many corporations have bowed their heads to the president, it wasn’t always this way. During the first Trump administration, we even had companies like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook speaking out against Trump’s immigration policies.

As REI has continued to stonewall us at the bargaining table, it’s opened itself up to a new opportunity for “conscious consumerism.” We have authorized a boycott should the company fail to agree on a contract with its 11 unionized stores. We do not take this decision lightly, but we know that REI members and customers have our backs in the fight for a fair contract and in the fight against Trump.

For anyone breathlessly wondering what artificial intelligence will achieve in the coming years, yesterday provided me with a remarkable answer.

Time travel.

Early in the morning, I received an email message from me in the year 2035, made possible by an AI agent that identified a suitable wormhole in the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy. So far it can only send bits and bytes, but organic material seems just a matter of time. (I expect to bump into myself at the store any day now.)

The gist of the message from my future self? The United States in 2035 is actually doing okay.

Rather than writing shrill jeremiads to decry the current state of affairs and finishing them with vague admonitions to “act now,” the left needs to cultivate a habit of curiosity about alternative methods of collective action, drawing inspiration from around the world.

Apparently authoritarianism, greed, and disinformation reached all-time highs by the summer of 2026. Relentless attacks on democracy and voting rights, a spate of climate-related disasters, and a rise in unemployment caused by AI led to broad despair. The United States’ 250th birthday on July 4 was marked not by celebration but by simmering tension and polling that suggested the highest levels of pessimism in the nation’s history.

And then something unexpected occurred. Things got better—and fast. In fact, by some measures, Americans in 2035 are doing better than they ever have before. How did it happen?

It started with successive feats of staggering collective action, taking the spirit of Minnesota’s activists and multiplying it nationally. Responding to a leaked Trump administration memo that revealed a clear plan to use Immigration and Customs Enforcement forces to suppress midterm voting, millions moved beyond demonstrations, staging a general strike just after Labor Day that was then echoed by business across the country. The resulting economic disruption drew widespread attention, as well as concern from Wall Street and large corporations, who persuaded the government to completely stand down.

Then, on Thanksgiving, a coalition of 200 civil society organizations and labor unions (cumulatively representing more than 40 million people) announced that they had created a massive “health security fund” to cover health expenses for those in the United States expected to lose coverage because of the Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Matched by high-net-worth individuals who agreed to donate their tax breaks from the bill to the fund, they pooled over $600 million and created an easy way for those facing medical emergencies to access it. The following spring they created a similar fund for those in areas rocked by climate catastrophes where insurance markets had collapsed.

This work drew enormous attention, and the group awakened to its power, realizing that the only chance it stood against unprecedented concentrations of power and wealth—and a sclerotic political system—was to keep combining in unprecedented ways. Calling itself the Movement of Movements (“MoM”), it became a perpetual engine for progress, joining forces behind a single charismatic action every quarter.

In one instance, the group orchestrated a major sell-off of AI-related stocks to protest the lack of safety standards for the new technology, resulting in the rapid introduction of new federal and state regulations. In another, it funded the construction of 25,000 affordable housing units in critical areas across the country and purchased over 600,000 acres of adjacent land, roughly the size of Rhode Island, for conservation. In another still, it enlisted its widely distributed membership to map threats to safe voting in real time, significantly reducing voter intimidation during the 2028 election. Next up, they will be carrying out a “coordinated unfollow” of the 200 most incendiary propagandists on social media (from both the political right and left) and buying out three major corporate polluters to shut down their plants (while providing compensation for all affected employees).

The organizations making up this coalition left behind their fragmented organizational agendas and competition for resources, first temporarily and then permanently. Their leaders—among them some of the most charismatic influencers in the social sector—expertly managed the territorialism and fights over credit that had undermined them in the past, creating something intentionally big and charismatic. A group of innovative young billionaires, many of them wealthy heirs, cast off the conventions (and self-aggrandizement) of their parents’ philanthropy to jointly underwrite the work, shoring up operational gaps for organizations joining the collaboration.

The group also benefited from a simple, overarching objective to guide its work—a return to decency, care, and well-being in American life. That translated into action in three areas, each embraced by more than 70% of Americans. The first is reducing autocracy and corruption in American government; by 2035, 99% of candidates running for office have signed a pledge to follow the rule of law, support fair elections, and recuse themselves from any policy questions that would directly enhance their family’s wealth. The second is catalyzing pro-social investment in science and technology, addressing the self-defeating disinvestment of the Trump administration by funding gaps in critical research that can save lives and stimulate the economy while introducing clear global safety standards for AI and similar advances. The third is making sure that everyone has access to free education, healthcare, and emergency recovery support—period.

The values and vibes of the movement have had as much resonance as its accomplishments. Always nonviolent and favoring in-person interaction, its leaders have summed up their operating principles in two sentences: "Ours is a movement rooted in two things: taking back power for the people and caring for our neighbors by sharing what we have so that no one suffers. There will be no violence, nastiness, or assertions without facts and we will respect all people." While this fairly generic statement drew criticism from some quarters, the way the group carried out its work and generated real results for disenfranchised groups—rather than merely nodding to them—converted most of those critics.

Above all, they made it fun. Jettisoning the rhetoric of despair, they got people in the country to once again believe that they had power, and they made exercising it collaborative and joyful. They realized that charismatic actions—increasingly sourced directly from the public—were important but perhaps less so than the habit of doing big things together, escaping from isolation and rampant mistrust. Older people made way for younger people, richer people made way for poorer people, whiter people made way for other people. They invested strenuously in joy and meaning and celebration, seizing the crisis to rebuild the solidarity and community that have deteriorated so much in recent decades. Their confidence and sense of security grew as their numbers did, and they created a permanent mindset shift in the American electorate, forming the basis for a permanent revival in Democratic politics and governing. Regularly joined and emulated by other groups (e.g., universities, supportive businesses, a surprising collection of progressive male athletes), their momentum now seems unstoppable.

I cannot wait for the next dispatch from the future.

* * *

Fanciful? Maybe.

But consider that every single one of the actions imagined above has already happened somewhere in the world, and often on a much larger scale. In the last decade alone, farmworkers in India achieved a 250-million person general strike, soccer fans in Europe joined together to put an immediate halt to a greedy scheme to defund all but the richest clubs on the continent, and donors pooled funds to relieve over $40 billion in medical debt for more than 27 million Americans. Fueled by incredible connectivity and growing worry, these efforts have shown that massive, sustained change is possible when action is sufficiently concentrated. They recognize the paramount importance of focus and cooperation in emergencies and gain confidence and safety through their numbers.

They have also introduced a remarkably innovative set of new tactics, jointly investing in financial markets (e.g., the “wallstreetbets” Reddit community), combining purchasing power (e.g., cooperative ownership and “buycotts”), withholding labor and attention (e.g., coordinated unfollowing and digital walkouts), and providing safety for those under political attack (e.g., protection funds for activists and whistleblowers) to foster great progress. The greatest examples of recent, massive collective action are captured here in a newly released report. While some of these approaches might be hard to reproduce—and all require hard work and organizing—none are out of reach.

They also build “on-ramps” for broader participation since traditional approaches like protests and petitions cannot alone meet the moment. Only a fraction of the public is comfortable taking to the streets—with a skew toward liberal elites—so these methods provide other options and give youth, in particular, new ways to engage. The best of these movements utilize hundreds of fresh techniques, which is especially important as suppression and surveillance from those in power become more sophisticated and pervasive.

Rather than writing shrill jeremiads to decry the current state of affairs and finishing them with vague admonitions to “act now,” the left needs to cultivate a habit of curiosity about alternative methods of collective action, drawing inspiration from around the world. This breaks us free of tired dogma about how change happens, building hope and agency and stimulating other new ideas. Activists from the Global South and former Eastern Bloc countries, consistently challenged by autocratic regimes, have particularly powerful insights to share.

Thorough analysis and intellectual fatalism won’t meet the moment. Simply put, President Donald Trump, his administration toadies, and a cabal of billionaires are hellbent on controlling the nation and, to the degree possible, the world. The only way to stop them is to come together—rapidly, morally, and joyfully—on a scale larger than anyone has seen before.

There is little doubt that most of the benefits of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act flow to the wealthy. But the White House has put considerable effort into promoting the idea that the law benefits working class people too, in particular those who earn tips.

To drive that point home, they staged an April 13 photo op with a DoorDash delivery to the White House. But the stunt was actually a good reminder of the gap between the White House’s rhetoric and reality.

First, it helps to understand that the "no tax on tips" policy applies to very few workers; less than 3% of workers are tipped. And its effects are even narrower than that. The policy is actually a deduction (topping out at $25,000) that can be claimed by tipped workers to lower their taxable income. But many tipped workers—about 1 in 3, or possibly close to 40%—do not earn enough to file taxes, so this deduction does them no good.

Now on to the White House event. When DoorDash driver Sharon Simmons "delivered" his McDonald’s order, President Trump commented that she “picked up an extra $11,000” because of the new policy. As Paul Waldman (and others) noted, this was mathematically dubious, given the $25,000 cap on the deduction. Indeed, Simmons would later explain that she earned $11,000 in tips, not that she saved that amount of money on her taxes. How much she saved on her taxes is unclear; by one high-end estimate, if she were paying a 24% tax rate she would have saved just $2,640.

If the goal of these kinds of policies are to provide some relief for workers—especially those earning a low wage—there are plenty of other options that would apply more broadly. Raising the minimum wage, for example, or eliminating the subminimum "tipped" wage would put more money in more workers’ pockets.

Speaking just after the White House photo op—and at a different "no tax on tips" event—Trump said the photo op was “a little tacky.” Given that Simmons is making DoorDash deliveries to pay for her husband’s cancer treatments, and the fact that his signature tax cut bill slashes food assistance and will cause millions to lose their health insurance coverage, "tacky" is an understatement.

I’m trying to return to the book I started writing a decade ago, and doing so has pulled my awareness of and relationship to the events of 2026 into the larger consciousness the book is struggling to address: What is power?

Can we broaden and expand this word? Can we merge it with collective awareness—you know, the idea of working together? Can we expand our awareness beyond the sense of dominance: power with, rather than power over? Yes, power with, in the “love thy enemy” sense, but without the cynicism and ignorance that usually accompany the word “love."

When we think of power, as I discuss in the book, the word itself commands that we carve the concept into something isolated and wieldable: a sword, a gun, a scepter. Power means power over. There is no basic concept of power—seemingly no word for power in the English language—that also means collaboration, collective participation: people working together, individually empowered at the same time that the larger whole is empowered.

Even when we examine the dark side of power—as in, power corrupts—the examination seems to hover as a warning rather than open up to larger awareness. Consider, for instance, this 2017 article in The Atlantic by Jerry Useem, titled (fasten your seatbelts!) “Power Causes Brain Damage,” which discusses a concept he calls “hubris syndrome.” The essential point the article makes is that people who gain a significant amount of power over others lose the ability to empathize with—or mime, as the article puts it—people in general, the lesser mortals who must follow the boss’ orders. Why am I suddenly thinking of Donald Trump, the world’s “Power Jesus”?

Let’s break the automatic linguistic link right now between power and dominance. True power enlarges the whole; it doesn’t isolate.

This inability to express or feel empathy, it turns out, is serious. It isolates the powerful into their own stereotypes and egotistical certainties, which lessens their ability to make good, or even rational, decisions. (Right, Donald?). And hubris syndrome isn’t merely psychological; it’s also physiological.

Citing neuroscience research, Useem writes:

And when he put the heads of the powerful and the not-so-powerful under a transcranial-magnetic-stimulation machine, he found that power, in fact, impairs a specific neural process, ‘mirroring,’ that may be a cornerstone of empathy. Which gives a neurological basis to what (psychologist Dacher) Keltner has termed the ‘power paradox’: Once we have power, we lose some of the capacities we needed to gain it in the first place.

Useem quotes authors David Owen and Jonathan Davidson, who define hubris syndrome as “a disorder of the possession of power, particularly power which has been associated with overwhelming success, held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader.” Its 14 clinical features, he adds, include: “manifest contempt for others, loss of contact with reality, restless or reckless actions, and displays of incompetence.”

The idea is that we’re naturally connected and subconsciously “mimic” others: We laugh when others laugh, tense up when others grow tense. It’s not faking an emotion to fit in; it’s participating in, feeling, the collective emotion that fills the room. “It helps trigger the same feelings those others are experiencing and provides a window into where they are coming from,” Useem writes. But: Powerful people “stop simulating the experience of others,” leading to what the psychologist calls an “empathy deficit,” which saps the powerful of most, or maybe all, of their social skill, leaving them, even as they generate endless obeisance, socially isolated souls.

The conclusion to be drawn here is that what is commonly thought of as power—power over others, aka, dominance—isn’t power at all. It’s an illusion of power that weakens, and perhaps destroys, those who hold it. Consider the rise and fall of dictators, the toppling of empires, the comeuppance of kings and queens. Let them eat cake.

The article does an excellent job pointing all this out, but at a certain point it falls into a linguistic trap. Useem writes despairingly: “This is a depressing finding. Knowledge is supposed to be power. But what good is knowing that power deprives you of knowledge?”

My answer is this: Knowledge in all its basic innocence is, indeed, power, but rarely is this “power over” someone. Knowledge of how to walk, how to read... this is a child claiming her life. And the entire family is empowered. As the child learns how to function independently, Mom and Dad learn how to parent. Yes, knowledge—power—can be used to further the interests of our darkest impulses. We can use what we learn to blackmail, extort, cheat, bully, win, etc., etc. But let’s break the automatic linguistic link right now between power and dominance. True power enlarges the whole; it doesn’t isolate. As the child learns to function, the family grows.

Yes, the power of self-defense is sometimes necessary, at the individual and, yes, the national level. And power can enable us to win, whether a game or a fight. Hurray! But the point my unfinished book is trying to make is that such power exists in a larger context, just as we exist in a larger context—and this context is ever opening and expanding before us. The US relationship to the rest of the world is larger than Donald Trump’s, or any president’s, ego. It’s larger than our military.

Rather, every last one of us, from newborns to geezers, is a participant in creating who we are, and who we are becoming. Perhaps no one says it better than Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: “Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being."

We cannot separate fossil fuels from the ongoing US and Israeli war on Iran. The volatility surrounding the Strait of Hormuz has shaken the global economy, restricting the passage of oil from the largest producers in the Gulf region.

The economic costs of this illegal, unjust, and unpopular war are mounting alongside the heartbreaking human costs—including troops lost and thousands killed throughout Iran and Lebanon.

But there’s also a rapidly increasing environmental cost. The first two weeks of Operation Epic Fury alone emitted 5 million tons of carbon dioxide—equivalent to the 84 lowest-emitting countries combined.

The international community must end this war—and address the deeper climate crisis—before more damage is done. Luckily, a vehicle of hope opens up at the end of April in Santa Marta, Colombia, offering a prime chance for countries to move toward a more secure future and livable planet.

The First-Ever Conference to End Fossil Fuels

Governments are gathering in Santa Marta for the first-ever global diplomatic conference explicitly focused on transitioning away from fossil fuels. Co-hosted by Colombia and the Netherlands, the convening brings together dozens of countries, alongside civil society and Indigenous leaders, to do what decades of climate negotiations have failed to do: confront fossil fuels directly.

Unfortunately, international climate negotiations centered on the United Nations process have failed to move us meaningfully closer to a just transition by refusing to confront fossil fuels. Instead, they have relied on emission targets, offsets, and market mechanisms that allow extraction to continue.

Fossil fuels are the lifeline of the modern military-industrial complex. At the same time, militaries exist in part to secure access to fossil fuels.

The Santa Marta conference breaks from this framework. It creates space to ask a more fundamental question: What would it take to actually phase out fossil fuels—and who stands in the way?

The Santa Marta conference is a crucial initial step for stakeholders to commit to a global fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty. Groups will address the processes, timelines, and actions needed to get to a negotiated agreement for a fossil fuel phaseout, which will be further developed in a future gathering in the Pacific nation of Tuvalu.

The Military-Oil-Industrial Complex

But taking that step seriously requires confronting another issue that has been deliberately sidelined: militarism.

Fossil fuels are the lifeline of the modern military-industrial complex. At the same time, militaries exist in part to secure access to fossil fuels. The infrastructure of war, from weapons production to military bases, locks governments into long-term fossil fuel dependence while also acting as the enforcement arm of fossil fuel interests. Militaries protect oil supply chains, secure trade routes, and shape geopolitical outcomes around these fuels in favor of dominant powers.

Military control over oil and gas long shaped the architecture of global power. This dynamic is visible across the globe. US aggression toward Iran continues to escalate tensions around oil, and the US intervention in Venezuela is inseparable from the country’s position as a major oil producer. In Palestine as well, Israel’s US-backed occupation and control of offshore gas deposits, among other resources, is part of the broader system of colonization that cannot be separated from land, infrastructure, and energy.

As long as nations invest in their militaries at the expense of everything else, fossil fuel dependence won’t be broken. The $2.7 trillion in global military spending in 2024 siphons resources that are desperately needed to achieve a full fossil fuel phaseout and global just transition: healthcare, education, jobs, renewable energy, and direct spending to confront the climate crisis.

The United States is the worst culprit as the highest military spender in the world. The Pentagon is also the largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels in the world—it has a larger carbon footprint than most entire countries. Next year, President Donald Trump is demanding a shocking $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget. Even now, estimates suggest that the US is spending $1 billion to $2 billion per day on its assault on Iran, while the US contributed just $2 billion to the Green Climate Fund in the span of 10 years.

Santa Marta Must Address Militarism, Too

Militarism does more than protect the fossil fuel system. It actively undermines the possibility of a just transition. That’s why we, along with other groups part of the Santa Marta conference, are calling on countries and stakeholders to consider three demands:

1. Address critical gaps in military emissions reporting.
2. Reduce the dependence of militaries on fossil fuels.
3. Reverse runaway military spending to support a just transition.

Achieving this will require coordinated pressure at all levels—by governments, international bodies, Indigenous and Afro-descendant leaders, academics, organizers, and civil society—to get to a fossil fuel phaseout and a more secure world.

The conference in Santa Marta represents a break from decades of delay through the UNFCCC process. But it will only matter if it confronts the full system driving this crisis. Fossil fuels and militarism are part of the same architecture of power. If governments are serious about combating climate change, they must be willing to do more than set targets. They must be willing to challenge the political and economic structures that sustain extraction and war.

That means investing in the real work of a just transition: shifting economics, redistributing resources, and repairing harm that has been done to frontline communities. That means no new fossil fuel expansion. No false solutions that prolong dependence. And no continued investment in systems of violence that undermine the possibility of a just transition.

We can continue to fund war and extraction or we can choose to invest in our communities, in care, and in a future that is not built on sacrifice. Santa Marta opens the door. What comes next depends on whether we are willing to walk through it and to demand our governments to do the same.

Before stepping into the classroom, I spent 12 years as an investigator with the California State Bar, examining cases of attorney misconduct. I chose to teach because I saw a meaningful way to serve my community, and I understood there would be sacrifice. Still, it took 10 years before my salary caught up to what I earned in my final year as an investigator.

In California, becoming an educator is neither easy nor inexpensive. In fact, it is one of the most challenging states to obtain a teaching license. Despite this, teachers remain among the most underpaid professionals relative to their level of education. According to the US Census Bureau, teacher earnings have not only lagged behind comparable fields, but have experienced a steady annual decline.

The debate is not whether schools have enough money, it is about what we choose to spend it on. Today, many educators cannot afford to live where they teach. Teaching, while never lucrative, used to offer a stable path to a middle class life. Educators could buy a home, live in the communities where they worked, and maintain the financial stability expected of other professions with similar levels of education. Sadly, even the most modest of those expectations are rapidly disappearing. I only own a home because I purchased it prior to switching my career.

Most educators did not choose this career for the money, but there is a clear difference between modest compensation and exploitation. Nearly 1 in 5 teachers in Los Angeles are housing insecure. And nearly 60% of educators across the country take on second jobs outside of teaching to make ends meet. It is unacceptable that the people responsible for educating our children are struggling to hold their head above water.

These victories for Los Angeles educators are not perks. They are the foundation of a functioning school system, and a respected career.

Teachers are also expected to subsidize their classrooms out of their own pockets. These stories are often framed as heartwarming and altruistic, but they reflect systemic failure and a lack of meaningful investment in public education. Few other professions require employees to pay out of pocket while already being underpaid.

The consequences of this underinvestment are becoming impossible to ignore. As the cost of living rises, fewer educators can afford to remain in the classroom. A teacher shortage has already hit Southern California, and the impact is profound. Nationally, teaching shortages have led to larger class sizes, burnout, and financial strain on the education system.

Education is expected to operate in scarcity while other sectors experience enormous growth. The education technology market alone is projected to grow by $170.8 billion by 2029. In the Los Angeles Unified School District alone, more than $1.6 billion has been spent on edtech. Framing this as a funding problem misses the point; it is a question of priorities. We are told we can’t make investments in educators, while billions continue to flow toward technology and outside contracts instead of the classrooms they are meant to serve.

And yet, during recent labor negotiations in Los Angeles, we were told a familiar refrain: There is no money.

This was the backdrop of three educational unions, representing more than 70,000 workers, on the brink of striking across Los Angeles. At the center of the dispute for United Teachers Los Angeles was a straightforward demand: a salary structure that reflects economic reality. As negotiations stretched over 14 months, frustration grew not only among educators but across school communities, culminating in escalating public pressure, organizing efforts at school sites, and an overwhelming strike authorization vote that made clear teachers were prepared to act if necessary.

Only when the possibility of a strike became real did the district return to the table with urgency. We ultimately won the majority of our demands, including overhauling the outdated pay system that kept incoming educators at artificially low salaries, raising the starting salary from $68,966 to $77,000 for teachers, and securing an average salary increase of 13.86% across the board. This is evidence that the “no money” claim is negotiable, not factual.

Just as significantly, for the first time in California, educators in Los Angeles have secured four weeks of paid parental leave. This is a historic breakthrough that now sets a precedent for teachers across the state of California, as well as the entire country. Additionally, we won a major expansion of student support, including more than 450 additional social workers, to address the growing mental health crisis among our youth.

These victories for Los Angeles educators are not perks. They are the foundation of a functioning school system, and a respected career.

When teachers are paid a living wage, they stay. When they can afford to live in the communities they serve, schools are more stable. And when students have access to trained mental health professionals, they are better able to learn. Investment is what makes public schools strong. Without it, everything else collapses.

For too long, the narrative has been that we cannot afford to support teachers. We’ve just shown we cannot afford not to. The lesson from Los Angeles is simple: School funding is not fixed by scarcity, but by priorities. And when educators and school workers organize, those priorities can change—for the better.

I’m generally disgusted that here in the US we almost always frame war in terms of its economic impact. But in this case the price of oil illustrates how America is deceiving itself about the true cost of its decision to choose, yet again, to go to war.

There are two prices of oil right now, and between them is an unprecedented gap. One is the paper price, the Brent futures you hear about on TV, sitting around 100 dollars as I’m writing this. The other is the physical price, what a refinery actually pays for a real barrel on a real tanker. Dated Brent has hit 144 dollars. The spread is the widest it has ever been. Forty dollars. Before the war it was less than a dollar.

The paper price is the market telling us a calming story. The physical is describing reality. When those two come back together, and they always do, it’s paper that moves to meet physical reality. America is experiencing a similar gap. We are telling ourselves a story about our position in the world that is about forty dollars above what’s actually arriving at the dock.

The war is the clearest picture of what we’ve chosen. It’s not about Iran’s nuclear program. It’s a resource war aimed at China, routed through Iran, and the administration’s own advisors have said so on the record. Look at the pattern. Venezuela first. We seized their oil, kidnapped their leaders, routed half a billion dollars through a Qatari bank account. Then Iran. Airstrikes, a blockade, the Strait of Hormuz closed. Then Netanyahu’s pitch to pipeline Gulf oil overland to Europe and away from Asian buyers. Then pressure on Denmark over Greenland. Then Lebanon, where Israel is now openly planning to occupy eight to fifteen percent of the country with our weapons and our political cover, on top of everything we are still arming in Gaza. Then secondary sanctions threats against any bank anywhere that dares touch an Iranian barrel.

To war or not to war was our question, and we answered it wrong.

The theory is this. Break the world’s energy flows before China’s navy can project force. Keep oil priced in dollars. Strangle Chinese growth before they catch all the way up. It is coherent. That is the problem. The coherence is the indictment. We think we are going to get back to our status as a respected world power through bullying and through being wannabe gangsters, and the strategy is so openly cynical that even the foreign policy establishment is now celebrating it in public as Trump’s best hand against China.

This is not just a Trump problem.

The House has forced four war powers votes and they have all failed, partly because Democrats themselves keep defecting on their own resolutions. Four Democrats voted against the first one in March. And when Hakeem Jeffries and the Democratic leadership actually had a shot to force another vote in late March during a pro forma session, they kept it off the floor. They waited until mid-April, after the troops had been rallied, by which point the war was well underway and the vote was mostly symbolic.

That is a failure of leadership on something as basic as stripping war powers from a madman. Jeffries has not called any of the defecting Democrats out. Not publicly. Not privately as far as we can tell. No pressure, no cost, no consequence.

Remember when Democrats did a sit-in on the House floor over gun violence? Cameras on, refusing to leave, forcing the country to look. That is what resistance would look like. This ain’t that. Both parties see our path to prosperity and relevance through war. That is why the response has been letters and press conferences and votes they knew would fail. Neither party wants to actually close the barn door on executive war-making because both parties want to use it when their turn comes.

And this pattern is older than Iran. In 2011 we went into a sovereign country with drones and jets, killed the leader’s protective guards, and set up his murder by local opposition forces. Call it whatever you want. That’s what happened. What was Gaddafi working on at the time? A pan-African gold-backed currency meant to price African oil in something other than dollars. The project died with him. When the dollar gets challenged, we break the challenger. Both parties have done it. The rules-based order we like to lecture other countries about has a pretty big asterisk on it, and the asterisk reads “except when it touches the dollar.”

The strategy is already backfiring, and everyone who can count can see it. China’s clean tech exports hit 21.9 billion dollars in March of 2026 alone, up 70 percent year over year in a single month. The oil shock we engineered to hurt them solved their solar overproduction problem for them. Iranian oil has been priced in yuan since April of last year. Tankers paying tolls to cross Hormuz are reportedly paying in yuan too. Deutsche Bank is now openly naming this war as a potential catalyst for the erosion of the petrodollar.

Gallup’s global leadership approval poll from April 3 has China at 36 percent and the United States at 31. Widest gap in China’s favor in twenty years. U.S. net approval at negative 15, the worst in the history of the poll. That data was collected in 2025, before the January withdrawal from 66 international organizations, before the Iran war. The real number right now is almost certainly worse. Pew and the European Council on Foreign Relations say the same thing in different words. In most of Europe and Latin America more people now name the United States than China as the greatest threat to their country. ECFR put it cleanest. If there is a race for global popularity, America is currently losing to its Indo-Pacific rival. We are forcing the world to make choices, and we are not going to like the outcome.

We should be forcing ourselves to make choices instead. When we look at China, we are not looking at an enemy. We are looking at a reflection of our former selves, and we do not want to see it.

Sam Walton had a rule. Until you’re number one, you copy number one. He used to get arrested for crawling around competitors’ stores with a tape recorder, because the point of walking into a Kmart wasn’t to find what they were doing wrong. It was to walk out with an idea you didn’t have when you went in.

That’s what China is doing to us. And what they are copying is our playbook, the one that created the largest middle class in the history of the world. Hamiltonian industrial policy. State banks. State-directed investment in strategic industries. Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures from 1791. The American System. Lincoln’s land grant universities, the transcontinental railroad, the Homestead Act. The Arsenal of Democracy, where FDR forced competing firms to share their intellectual property because winning the war mattered more than winning the quarter. Apollo. DARPA. The NIH. The internet itself. Every single one was public capital, public purpose, public coordination, with private firms executing. We invented it. We ran it for 150 years. China picked it up off the floor where we dropped it in the 1980s, and is running it now.

Their space program is decades younger than ours and they have a space station, they are landing reusable rockets, they are scaling rapidly, and they are sharing their information. They are not competing for every single thing. They are working in unison to do better. The systems they are using are our own. We are being beaten by ourselves.

And we didn’t just invent the playbook. We invented the tempo. The Arsenal of Democracy built a wartime industrial economy from scratch in about four years. Ford was rolling a B-24 off the line at Willow Run every hour by 1944. Apollo went from Kennedy’s speech to a boot on the Moon in eight years. Rural electrification, the interstate system, the Manhattan Project. None of it took generations. China gets the tempo part too. They built the largest high-speed rail network in the world in about fifteen years from zero. EVs from nobody to global dominance in a decade. Solar in under a decade. Shipbuilding, drones, batteries, the whole deck, faster than we ever went, using our methods, while we tell ourselves a twenty or thirty year timeline is realistic.

When I was a kid we couldn’t compete with China because their labor was too cheap and they didn’t care about pollution. Then we were overregulated and our workers wanted too much. Then it was currency manipulation. Now it’s that they are too far ahead on robotics and we will never catch up. The excuse changes every decade. The underlying move never does. We explain why we can’t, instead of doing the thing.

This is the part that matters most, because it is bigger than this administration. The entire American establishment, both parties, both sets of think tanks, the Pentagon, the corporate class, the press, has quietly agreed that American renewal is a generational project. Twenty years to reshore semiconductors. Ten years for permitting reform. Slow and steady. Patient. Serious. That timeline is a lie. Nothing we have ever actually built in this country got built on it. Generational change isn’t about being pragmatic, it’s about putting off the work. It lets everyone currently in power keep their arrangement running while the country erodes underneath them. It assumes our place on earth is god-given or immutable. It’s neither. And it’s crumbling quickly unless we do something about it.

Which brings me to the thing I actually want to say. This is a choice between destruction and construction. Between valuing death and valuing life. Between taking responsibility for our future and hoping it all works out.

The American people allowed this. Voted for some of it. Looked away from the rest.

Destruction is what we are doing right now. Destruction is the blockade. Destruction is hobbling the Chinese by working through proxies, cutting off oil, kidnapping Venezuelan leadership, pressuring Denmark over Greenland. Destruction is arming a genocide. Break other people’s things because we have forgotten how to build our own.

Construction is the other path. Construction is Hamilton’s playbook, at speed. Reindustrialize. Repatriate the supply chains we offshored. Pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, steel, rare earths, shipbuilding. Repatriate health care from extractive finance back to something that serves the people paying for it. Rebuild public research. Rebuild the grid. Build rail. Build housing. Do it fast, because fast is the only tempo that has ever actually worked for this country.

Construction is also how you become useful to the world again. China is going to electrify the global south whether we like it or not. We can help build the world into a future like the Jetsons or we can try and bomb it into a future like the Flintstones. If we choose the Flintstones the world may turn their collective backs on us. A rules-based order means following rules, including the ones against wars of aggression and the ones against arming genocides. A democracy means practicing it. You get your respect back by being the thing you claim to be, not by bullying the people who have noticed you aren’t.

And this is where the responsibility piece lands, because I mean the word we. The American people allowed this. Voted for some of it. Looked away from the rest. Trusted that the serious people would handle it while the serious people were handling themselves. There is no version of this that gets fixed by waiting. Not for the other party, not for the next election, not for someone else to show up. We is the job description. It has to be, because hoping it all works out is how we got here.

The world is already choosing. Gallup, Pew, ECFR, they are telling us in every language they have that they have seen enough. The question is whether we will choose too. To war or not to war was our question, and we answered it wrong. The next question is what we build instead. And that one is still open.

Ever think a drone could chase you down the street or fire a bullet through your living room window because you pissed off Trump, Miller, or their ICE thugs? If the answer is “that’s science fiction,” please read on: that reality may be only a few months away, and every single part of the spying and death-dealing infrastructure needed to make it happen has been quietly assembled by the Trump regime over the last fourteen months.

This Tuesday, while America was obsessively watching the latest bizarre twists in Trump’s Iran debacle, Whiskey Pete’s Pentagon rolled out a $1.5 trillion budget request that contained a line item almost nobody’s talking about: a 24,000 percent increase, from $225 million last year to $54.6 billion this year, for an outfit called the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group.

That’s the largest year-over-year jump for any program in the entire defense budget, and it’s earmarked to build out AI-driven autonomous human-killing systems inside the Special Operations Command headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida.

USSOCOM “[P]rovides elite, combat-ready forces... Their responsibilities include counterterrorism, unconventional warfare, direct action, special reconnaissance, foreign internal defense, and psychological operations.”

The very next day, U.S. Southern Command announced its own Autonomous Warfare Command focused on the Caribbean and Central America, where Trump and Hegseth have already been criminally blowing up small boats without warrants, trials, or congressional authorization in defiance of both US and international law.

Read those two announcements side by side and you’ve discovered the operating manual for what comes next. To understand why that concerns every American who ever thought about protesting against Trump’s GOP and their ICE Frankenstein’s Monster in person or on social media — and not just the Venezuelan fishermen drifting dead off Curaçao — we’ll first have to travel back three months to a tree-lined street in south Minneapolis, and the morning Renee Nicole Good dropped off her six-year-old son at school.

She was 37 years old, a published poet who’d earned her English degree from Old Dominion, the mother of three, and wife of Becca Good. A few blocks from the school, she came across an ICE operation in her own neighborhood, complete with unmarked vehicles, masked agents, and the shrill whistles that Minneapolis neighbors had been blowing for six weeks every time the masked thugs showed up.

Renee stopped her SUV sideways in the street and pulled out her phone; a few minutes later, ICE goon Jonathan Ross fired three shots through her windshield and window, killing her about a mile from where George Floyd had died five years earlier. Her wife, who’d been standing behind the vehicle questioning the agents, was filmed by bystanders running down the snowy street and staggering back, crying and covered in her wife’s blood.

I’m starting with Renee because she’s the human face of where this country already is under the police state Trump and Miller are assembling, not where we’re headed. By the time she was shot, ICE agents had opened fire on nine people in five states and Washington, D.C., since September. None have been criminally charged.

Just a few days after her killing, federal agents in Minneapolis were reportedly telling bystanders and legal observers “that’s why that lesbian bitch is dead,” and in Portland, Maine, an ICE thug was caught on video telling a woman who’d been filming him, “we have a nice little database, and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.”

That’s the culture Trump, Miller, and the GOP have built using human agents with automatic weapons, masks, and fake license plates, while smashing car windows, kicking in front doors, beating and killing with impunity, and now “detaining” some 70,000 people without the due process the Constitution requires.

What Republicans are now preparing to do is hand that deadly, violent, invasive culture a targeting algorithm and a fleet of autonomous death-drones.

To understand what’s coming unless Congress steps in to stop it now, you must first know about what’s already been built in Gaza that’s the template for the Trump regime. An Israeli intelligence whistleblower told the Israeli magazine +972 in April 2024 about an AI system called Lavender that ranked the entire population of Gaza by “probability of militant affiliation.”

Lavender then automatically generated a “kill list” of roughly thirty-seven thousand people living in Gaza, based on things like intercepted cell phone metadata and social media activity. It fed that list to human officers who spent an average of twenty seconds rubber-stamping each name before the Israeli Air Force bombed each target’s home, killing those “militants” and their families.

The system had a reported error rate of about ten percent, which, in a population of two million Gazans, translates to thousands of civilians killed because the AI computer was mistaken or drew the wrong conclusions from their social media, phone, or travel activity.

Even more brutal, a companion Israeli system called “Where’s Daddy?” tracked those flagged men so they could be bombed when they were home with their wives and kids, because, as one officer told the reporters, it was “much easier” to bomb a family’s home than to try to target a military or business site.

And what about the families of these “militants”? Israeli command approved up to twenty civilian deaths — men, women, children — per low-ranking “militant” killed, and more than a hundred dead when bombing to take out a “senior commander.”

This is how automated killing at industrial scale actually works in real time, how it works right now as you’re reading these words, and it is not science fiction.

Now look at what’s being assembled here, piece by piece, based on the Lavender Israeli model and lessons learned from their experience.

ICE has signed contracts worth more than $60 million with Peter Thiel’s Palantir to build something called ImmigrationOS and a targeting app called ELITE, which stands for Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement.

ELITE pulls data from the IRS, the Social Security Administration, DMV records, Medicaid files, utility bills, license-plate readers, and commercial data brokers (which typically include social media posts and often even emails when they come from “free” email providers), then populates a map with dossiers and assigns a “confidence score” to each person’s current address. If you update your address to get medical care, for example, that updates your score. Or post something on social media.

Stephen Miller, the architect of this dystopian enforcement regime, reportedly holds a six-figure financial stake in Palantir, which, as far as I can tell, nobody in Congress has yet demanded answers about.

Meanwhile, ICE has been buying and using Skydio drones for protest monitoring, Customs and Border Protection has been flying MQ-9 Predator drones (the same platform that killed people in Yemen and Pakistan) over anti-ICE demonstrations in Los Angeles, and the FAA quietly issued a nationwide notice in January creating 3,000-foot no-fly zones around every DHS and ICE vehicle, so that citizens and journalists can’t film federal immigration operations from the air.

That last piece is the the most alarming tell of all: you don’t close the sky above an enforcement agency unless you’re planning to do things there you don’t want photographed.

And it’s not just the feds flying this stuff. Four days ago, The Intercept reported that the Los Angeles Police Department used its “Drone as First Responder” fleet, a program it first sold to the public as an “emergency public-safety tool,” to surveil the January 31 “ICE Out” rally in downtown LA, and then last month’s “No Kings” demonstration.

The drones are Skydio X10s, which the manufacturer advertises are capable of spotting a person from more than a mile away (8,000 feet), facially identifying an individual from a half-mile, and reading a license plate from 800 feet. Two officers can run eight of these drones at the same time, each automatically tailing “people of interest.”

This is how mission creep happens. A tool sold for saving lives ends up spying on us at a peaceful protest, logging our faces, our license plates, and the people we marched with. And once that data is collected, it flows — as all law enforcement data in America now flows — into the same Palantir-built federal databases that ELITE and ImmigrationOS are drawing data from right now.

Then there’s the Pentagon. That $54.6 billion Defense Autonomous Warfare Group request I mentioned is buried inside a $1.5 trillion budget big enough to hide almost anything. Southern Command’s new Autonomous Warfare Command is already using drones to blow up small boats in the Caribbean that the Trump regime claims are trafficking narcotics, without anything resembling due process or congressional authorization.

Ken Klippenstein reported this week that the same budget zeroes out funding for “civilian harm mitigation” — avoiding unnecessary civilian deaths — inside Pentagon operations. In other words, we’re building, out in the open, the infrastructure that produced Lavender and kills people in an automated fashion, and we’re doing it with no public debate and no discernible push-back from anybody in Congress.

We’ve been here before, albeit on a much smaller scale and overseas. Between 1967 and 1972, the CIA ran a program in South Vietnam called Phoenix that generated intelligence-scored capture-or-kill lists of suspected Viet Cong and eventually killed somewhere between twenty-six- and forty-thousand people, many of them innocent Vietnamese civilians mistakenly flagged by informants and unreliable data.

If Congress doesn’t act now, before this architecture is operational, it won’t get another chance. The time to ban autonomous lethal systems for domestic law enforcement is before the first Predator blows somebody up on a Minneapolis street, not after.

Phoenix was rubber-stamped up the chain of command and produced the same “responsibility gap” that Lavender’s defenders hide behind now in Israel, where nobody in particular is accountable because the list came from “the system.”

The lesson of Phoenix is that we must build friction, oversight, and human accountability into the machinery of state violence. But now we’re about to remove all of that, and Trump wants to use the system against people he’s already labeled “domestic terrorists” for filming an arrest, posting online, dissing Christianity or “traditional American views on morality,” or attending a protest.

With Renee Good, the decision to kill her was made by a human being who was operating inside a system that had already decided her neighborhood, her opposition to ICE, and her observer status made her a legitimate target. What happens when that decision is made in twenty seconds by a machine down in Florida, and executed by a hovering armed drone as the FAA has cleared the civilian sky so nobody is watching?

If Congress doesn’t act now, before this architecture is operational, it won’t get another chance. The time to ban autonomous lethal systems for domestic law enforcement is before the first Predator blows somebody up on a Minneapolis street, not after.

The time to demand transparency on Palantir’s confidence scores is before ELITE is fully deployed, not after.

And the time to call your senators and your House member at 202-224-3121 is this week, to tell them you want hearings on the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, a moratorium on armed drones for ICE and CBP to use inside the United States, an audit of ImmigrationOS, and an investigation into Stephen Miller’s financial interests in the contractor building the machine.

If you aren’t yet registered to vote in 2026, do that today. And if you want to help local and state officials push back against federal overreach, openstates.org will connect you to your legislators.

Renee Good deserved to go home to her son that morning. The next Renee Good deserves a country that decided, in time, not to let a cold, soulless machine make that call.

It can feel like a lifetime ago, but I grew up in an era of hope for combating the climate crisis. It was an era filled with energy to fight against fossil fuels—and leaders who seemed like they might finally listen to us. An era in which a livable future for all of us seemed almost feasible.

I’ve been organizing climate strikes since I was 12.

I began by protesting outside Brooklyn Borough Hall, not far from my house in Brooklyn, New York. Then I started attending meetings with Fridays For Future NYC, the New York City chapter of Greta Thunberg’s organization. I quickly became enraptured with the energy of the youth climate movement. Through it, I met some of my best friends, as we organized six strikes together in middle and high school.

In my senior year of high school, I was a core organizer for the March To End Fossil Fuels, a 70,000 person march in September 2023, that brought together a diverse cast of organizers—from the Center for Biological Diversity to the NAACP. I felt lucky to be a part of such a massive effort.

The United States may not be there, but Canada, Australia, and Brazil, among other countries, will be.

Actually phasing out fossil fuels, a topic older organizers told me had once been fringe, was now in the front and center of New York City streets and on the front page of The New York Times. By the end of 2023, I was Fridays For Future’s North American Delegate to COP28 in Dubai, an international climate conference that zeroed in on fossil fuels. It was all anyone was talking about, from grassroots organizers to the US negotiators.

Other fossil fuel phaseout activists and I were actually able to meet multiple times with the lead negotiators for the US, Trigg Talley and Sue Biniaz. The negotiators seemed receptive to adopting fossil fuel phaseout language in the COP28 Global Stocktake Text. We didn’t achieve that, but the phrase “transition away from fossil fuels” did appear in the final text. It was the first time the words “fossil fuels” had ever been included in the final text in the history of COPs.

When we got home from COP28, we were able to meet with John Podesta, who was then President Joe Biden’s top climate advisor. We urged him against allowing the construction of the CP2 liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal. Biden announced a pause on pending decisions for new LNG export projects, including CP2, on January 26, 2024. Finally, it felt like we were winning.

Looking at the news today, that era feels so far away.

Trump administration officials recently gathered in my hometown of Brooklyn to announce their plan to swiftly construct a $1 billion natural gas pipeline in New Jersey and New York Harbor. Construction on CP2 began this past June, and the Trump administration has pulled out of the Paris Agreement. While I still attended COP30 this past year in Belem, Brazil, the US federal government did not send a single negotiator, much less a delegation.

It is easy to lose hope for combating the climate crisis in times like these. But while the US government has relinquished its leadership, others are stepping forward.

In late April, Colombia and the Netherlands are convening the first-ever Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in Santa Marta, Colombia. This will be the biggest step away from fossil fuels we’ve seen since the March to End Fossil Fuels.

The United States may not be there, but Canada, Australia, and Brazil, among other countries, will be. This is a crucial first step toward formal Fossil Fuel Treaty negotiations, and it is just the beginning of Fossil Fuel phaseout policy becoming the center of attention again.

We need a fast, fair, fossil fuel phaseout—and I have hope for it now, because of Santa Marta.

In the short run, Democrats' victory in gerrymandering Virginia to create four new blue Congressional districts is a good thing. It will restore balance to the critical 2026 House elections to offset Republicans' Texas gerrymandering which created four new red districts.

President Donald Trump was technically right when the night before the Virginia vote he told a conference of supporters, “I don’t know if you know what gerrymandering is but it’s not good.” Of course what Trump really meant is that gerrymandering is bad when it disenfranchises Republicans but good when it disenfranchises Democrats.

Here's what we do know: partisan gerrymandering is an affront to democracy by letting politicians pick their voters instead of voters picking their politicians. Given Republicans' successful gerrymandering, the Virginia gerrymander was the least bad immediate option. As House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a sharp reversal of recent establishment Democrats' attitude, "When they go low, we strike back."

But looking forward, partisan gerrymandering should be illegal. As Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent to Chief Justice John Roberts' 2019 majority ruling that partisan gerrymandering is non-judiciable, “partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people. If left unchecked, gerrymanders like the ones here may irreparably damage our system of government.”

You can blame John Roberts for debasing and dishonoring our democracy and irreparably damaging our system of government.

In his 5-4 majority decision in Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019, Roberts ruled that challenges to partisan gerrymandering are "political questions" that courts may not interfere with. Roberts may have disingenuously claimed in his confirmation hearings that he is nothing but an umpire calling balls and strikes, but in reality he changes the strike zone to favor Republicans.

Partisan gerrymandering blatantly violates the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. Partisan gerrymandering treats voters of the then minority party in a state unequally to voters of the then majority party and gives the then majority party an unequal advantage in securing their future electoral control regardless of the will of the voters. Voters from different parties do not have an equal chance to affect the outcome of elections. As Justice Kagan wrote in her dissent to Rucho a voter's constitutional equal protections rights“can be denied by a debasement or dilution of the weight of a citizen’s vote just as effectively as by wholly prohibiting the free exercise of the franchise.”

It's obvious to a majority of ordinary Americans that partisan gerrymandering undermines fundamental democratic principles. An August 2025 Reuters poll found that 55% of respondents, including 71% of Democrats and 46% of Republicans, thought that the partisan gerrymandering taking place in Texas and California are "bad for democracy." Regular Americans understand the dangers of partisan gerrymandering better than John Roberts in his lengthy "legal" opinion that courts can't do anything to prevent it.

Since Rucho was decided in 2019, advances in computer algorithms have enabled the majority party in a state to construct voting districts to virtually guarantee with surgical precision their own electoral victory.

If Roberts and his Republican cohorts on the Court were honest, they would consider revisiting and overturning Rucho and giving lower courts the power to devise standards for deciding if a partisan gerrymander is too much. But given the partisanship of the Republican Justices, that's unlikely to happen.

If, despite the disadvantages of partisan gerrymandering, Democrats regain control of Congress, they should enact legislation term limiting SCOTUS justices (after which they may keep their lifetime judicial tenure by taking senior status) and increasing the number of Justices from 9 to at least 12. This can be done by legislation and does not need to overcome the nearly impossible bar of a Constitutional Amendment. To protect democracy, Court reform should be a key part of Democrats' political platform.

By Ralph Nader April 24, 2026 On my radio show/podcast—the Ralph Nader Radio Hour—interviews of knowledgeable people have detailed the ravages by the cruel, serial law violator, Tyrant Trump, inflicted on millions of Americans. Still, the report from the V-Dem Institute at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg produced a jolting Common Dreams headline: Trump is Dismantling…